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Manage to Lead

How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity

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Learning to think together gives a leadership team a powerful capability. The next step is to apply it to the work of leading the organization.

Every leadership team member carries a picture of the organization.

That picture includes what the organization seeks to accomplish, where it is now, what needs to change, where it needs to be next, how it will get there, and how it will know it is making progress. It also includes each person’s understanding of their own role: what they are responsible for, how they will act, and how they will make decisions that move the organization forward.

Those pictures are likely to be similar. They are pictures of the same organization, after all. They are also likely to differ because each team member sees the organization from a different position, with different information, experience, responsibilities, and assumptions.

The differences matter because people act from the pictures they carry.

A leadership team that has learned to think together can put that capability to work. Team members can make their individual pictures visible, compare them, understand and appreciate different views, and develop a shared picture informed by the experience, perspective, and judgment of the entire team.

The Shared Thinking Cycle introduced in the previous essay provides the basic discipline: Draft → Compare → Consolidate. Applied repeatedly, it gives the team a way to develop shared understanding about virtually any consequential aspect of the organization.

The question might be large: What are we trying to accomplish? What business are we in? Where should we be three years from now?

It might be immediate: What needs to change next? What should we do about a particular customer, market, acquisition, hire, investment, or organization issue?

Or it might be operational: What outcome do we expect from this initiative? Who owns it? How will we know whether it is working? What does the leadership team need to review?

The subject changes. The discipline is the same. Each person thinks. The thinking becomes visible. Different views become available to the group. The team works through them and develops a shared understanding it is prepared to use.

That is where Manage to Lead fits.

Manage to Lead (MtL) is an integrated system of tools, habits, and practices that gives leadership teams a practical way to develop and maintain shared understanding across the work of leading an organization.

MtL is organized around foundational leadership questions: What are we trying to accomplish, and by when? What business are we in? Where are we now? What needs to change? What will we do? How will we know we are making progress? How will we stay on track and aligned as we execute?

The questions give the team’s thinking structure. The tools provide practical ways to work through the questions. The habits and practices make shared thinking a continuing part of how the team leads.

The IntelliVen MtL Leadership Workspace is an application that gives leadership teams a place to develop, store, share, and work together on their thinking.

A team member can develop a view. Other members can develop theirs. The team can compare what people see, identify common ground and meaningful differences, work through those differences, and develop a shared understanding. What the team comes to understand remains visible and available for decisions, actions, communication, and leadership review.

As the team works through different aspects of the organization, those understandings begin to connect.

What the team seeks to accomplish connects to the business it is in. What needs to change follows from its understanding of where the organization is now and where it needs to be. Initiatives advance those changes. Measures show whether the organization is making the intended progress. Leadership review enables the team to guide and support the work, make adjustments as needed, and keep the organization on track and aligned.

Together, these understandings form a coherent and continually evolving picture of the organization that the team can see, discuss, communicate, use, and maintain.

The Workspace enables the team’s thinking about different aspects of the organization to connect. It makes shared understanding practical to communicate, use, maintain, and update as the organization moves forward. It makes shared understanding practical to develop across the organization and sustain over time.

The IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA), part of the Leadership Workspace and loaded with Manage to Lead knowledge and logic, helps the team strengthen that thinking.

Upon request, IVOA can help strengthen an individual entry for clarity, specificity, and internal integrity. It can examine the integrity of thinking across different Manage to Lead tools. It can also surface common ground and differences among team members and help them develop greater cohesion across their views.

The leadership team develops the shared understanding, exercises judgment, and decides what to do. Team members learn to make their thinking explicit, understand and appreciate the thinking of others, test what they believe against what they know, work through differences, and develop shared understandings they are prepared to use.

They also learn to keep those understandings current. Conditions change. New information becomes available. Experience adds evidence. The team’s picture develops with what it learns.

Over time, making thinking visible and developing shared understanding becomes a normal way of working together. Team members become proactive about sharing their own thinking and drawing out the thinking of others. They become better at finding differences early, working through them productively, and maintaining shared understanding as the organization moves forward.

The Workspace is the place. Manage to Lead provides the tools, habits, and practices. IVOA helps strengthen the thinking. The team leads.

Try it on something that matters

Choose one consequential question your leadership team needs to answer.

Ask each team member to develop their own view before the group discusses it. Make the views visible. Compare them. Look for what you understand similarly and where your pictures differ. Explore the differences. Develop a shared understanding the team is prepared to use. Then decide what to do.

You can practice the discipline with a sheet of paper, a document, or a whiteboard.

Or bring a real question about your organization to the Leadership Workspace and see how Manage to Lead and IVOA help you make your thinking clearer, more explicit, and easier to work through with others.

Take the Leadership Workspace Tour →

Start with one question that matters. Make the thinking visible. Think together. See what you learn.

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Manage to Lead

Learning to Think Together

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Leadership teams develop shared understanding by learning to think through important questions together.

The progression is simple:

What I think.
What you think.
What we think.
What more we can discern.
What we say.

This progression describes a discipline that leadership teams can apply to virtually any consequential issue. Practiced repeatedly, the discipline becomes part of how a team thinks and works together.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Thinking

The preceding essays explored what makes this possible. Leadership conversations begin before people enter the room. Individual thinking becomes more useful when it is made visible. Structured representations help people organize their thinking and give teams a common form in which to work with it.

Once thinking is visible, it can be understood, questioned, developed, and shared. The next discipline is learning how to do that across a leadership team so individual thinking contributes to stronger shared thinking.

Draft: What I think

Drafting gives each person an opportunity to develop and express their own thinking before the team works on the question together.

A structured Draft asks everyone to consider the same elements of the same leadership question. Each person brings different knowledge, experience, perspective, and judgment. Putting that thinking into words makes it visible and often develops the thinking itself.

The Draft can also receive feedback while it is being developed. Assessment can help a leader see where an entry could be clearer, more specific, or more internally consistent. Questions and suggestions can prompt further thought and another iteration. 

The result is a stronger expression of what each person thinks and useful material for the team to work with together.

Compare: What you think

Compare brings individual drafts together and reveals similarities and differences.

Similarities show where understanding is already shared. Differences create opportunities to learn from the information, experience, interpretation, and perspectives distributed among team members.

A common structure also helps separate ideas from their sources. The team can concentrate on what each contribution adds to its understanding, giving ideas an opportunity to be considered on their merits rather than according to the role, status, personality, or presentation style of the contributor.

How leaders respond to revealed thinking matters. Seeking first to understand what someone means, then asking questions that help develop the thinking, creates an environment in which people become increasingly willing to share what they really think.

A facilitator can help establish and reinforce these ways of working until they become natural to the team. Repeated experience of having ideas understood, explored, and developed together strengthens both the thinking and the team’s capacity to work this way.

Comparison turns differences into material for inquiry. Leaders learn more about the question at hand and about how their colleagues see it.

Consolidate: What we think

Consolidate uses what the team has learned to develop its current best shared understanding.

One person’s observation may sharpen another’s idea. Several partial insights may combine into a more complete view. Exploring differences may reveal distinctions or possibilities that were absent from the individual drafts.

The resulting consolidated draft represents what the team has developed together. It becomes a shared reference point for further thought, conversation, decisions, and action.

DRAFT → COMPARE → CONSOLIDATE
What I think →
What you think → What we think

What More We Can Discern

Reaching shared understanding establishes what the team thinks together. Making that thinking visible gives the team something it can examine, test, and further develop.

Clarifying questions sharpen what the team means. Push-up questions invite further consideration of assumptions, evidence, implications, and possibilities. Advice and suggestions contribute additional experience and perspective. Each can help the team discern something worth incorporating into what we say.

Shared thinking can also benefit from perspectives beyond the leadership team. Customers, employees, investors, partners, advisors, and others see the organization from different vantage points. Sharing the team’s thinking with the right people and listening carefully to their responses provides another way to test and develop it.

The purpose throughout is the same: use what can be discerned to strengthen what we think.

Infer: What We Say  

Organizations express their understanding of themselves through websites, management presentations, plans, brochures, advertisements, reports, articles, and other communications. Together, these materials provide evidence of what we say.

Manage to Lead calls the function for making that thinking visible Infer. Infer uses existing materials to create a draft in the same structured form the leadership team used to develop its shared understanding.

The team can then compare what we think with what we say. What it discerns may sharpen the team’s understanding, improve how that understanding is expressed, or bring useful thinking from existing communications back into the team’s shared view.

What the team learns feeds another round of comparison and consolidation. Thinking and its expression develop together as the organization learns and evolves.

The Shared Thinking Cycle 

The progression forms a continuing cycle for developing and maintaining shared understanding. We call it the Shared Thinking Cycle. 

What I think → What you think → What we think → What more we can discern → What we say ↻

Draft, Compare, and Consolidate provide structure for moving from individual thinking to shared thinking. Questions, advice, outside perspectives, experience, and evidence provide opportunities to discern more. Infer makes thinking already expressed by the organization available to the same process.

What the team learns feeds another round of thinking, comparison, and consolidation. The subject can change while the discipline remains the same. Leaders can work this way when considering strategy, an acquisition, an important hire, a customer situation, an organization change, or virtually any issue that benefits from their collective thinking.

The discipline can be used with different degrees of rigor. Some matters call for a quick exchange of views and a decision. Others warrant individual drafts, careful comparison, further inquiry, and several rounds of consolidation. The greater the consequence of the decision and the importance of shared understanding, the more worthwhile it is to invest in developing the team’s thinking together.

Making the Discipline Easier to Learn

The Manage to Lead Leadership Workspace makes this way of working explicit and easy to practice. Across its leadership tools, the Workspace provides Draft, Compare, Consolidate, and Infer functions in a consistent form. Leaders can develop their thinking independently, discover similarities and differences, develop shared thinking, and incorporate what they learn through further cycles.

The Workspace also includes the IntelliVen Operations Advisor, or IVOA, which supports leaders throughout the process. As thinking is revealed in a Draft or developed through subsequent iterations, IVOA assesses its clarity, specificity, integrity, provides feedback and guidance, raises questions for consideration, and offers suggested upgrades.

IVOA accompanies the work throughout the cycle. Each leader can use it while developing an individual Draft, and the team can use it as shared thinking is compared, consolidated, tested, and refined. In each case, IVOA helps leaders improve what they have expressed before carrying their thinking forward.

The leadership team brings the knowledge, experience, judgment, conversation, and responsibility for what it ultimately concludes. The Workspace structures and facilitates the work. IVOA helps leaders continually improve the quality of the thinking they bring to it.

From Method to Leadership Capability

The structure is especially useful as a team learns the discipline. Repeated practice turns an explicit method into a familiar way of thinking and working together.

Leaders learn to make their own thinking visible and invite others to do the same. They look for similarities and differences, seek to understand what others mean, and use what they discern to develop stronger shared thinking.

They also learn to test what they think against evidence, experience, outside perspectives, and what the organization communicates. As they learn, they revisit and refine their shared understanding. The cycle becomes a habit of leadership.

With practice, the capability travels with the team. Leaders can use it during a meeting, around a whiteboard, in a planning session, or whenever an important question benefits from their collective thinking.

The artifacts created along the way capture shared understanding so it can guide decisions and action. The more enduring result is a leadership team increasingly capable of thinking, learning, and working together.

That prepares the team to apply the capability to the work of leading the organization.

The work begins with developing a shared definition of success:

What are we trying to accomplish, by when?

Continue the Manage to Lead series

Next: How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity →

Manage to Lead, People Matters

Talk to Anyone. Direct No One.

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Leaders need to know what is really going on in their organizations. That sounds obvious, but it gets exponentially harder as an organization grows.

A leader naturally learns a lot from direct reports. But relying exclusively on them means your understanding is constantly filtered. Even when direct reports are capable, trustworthy, and forthcoming, information changes as it travels. People select, summarize, interpret, and contextualize based on their own vantage points. None of this requires bad intent—it’s just human nature.

To develop a more complete, independent view, leaders benefit from direct interaction across multiple levels. This serves two vital purposes:

  • A view closer to the work. You learn what people are working on, what’s getting in their way, what customers are saying, and what opportunities they see.
  • A test of understanding. You discover whether strategic messaging is getting through. A CEO may leave a meeting confident that priorities are clear, but the critical question is: What did the next level hear? And the level after that? The answer is often surprisingly different.

Skip-Level Risks

Despite the benefits, unmanaged skip-level conversations have real risks:

  1. Direct report distrust: Managers wonder why the boss is going around them.

  2. The “CEO Whispers” effect: Casual suggestions get mistaken for mandatory instructions.

  3. Competing authority: Senior leaders inadvertently disrupt team priority lines.

For example, a CEO offhandedly asks a product designer during a skip-level chat, “Have you ever considered adding dark mode?” Three days later, the engineering director finds out the entire sprint priority was shifted to build dark mode because “the CEO asked for it.”

The reflex reaction from managers is often, “Don’t talk to my people!” But that solves one problem by creating others. Senior leaders don’t have to choose between respecting management accountability and knowing what is happening in their company.

The Operating Principle

The solution comes down to a clear distinction:

Communication moves freely across organization levels. Authority moves strictly through lines of accountability.

Senior leaders must have the freedom to ask questions, listen, test understanding, and build relationships everywhere. But they need the self-discipline not to turn those conversations into assignments, changes in priorities, performance direction, or commitments that belong to the person’s manager.

Make the rules explicit:

  • Tell managers: Skip-level conversations are a normal way for leaders to learn, communicate, and test understanding. They are not evidence that the manager is being bypassed.
  • Tell employees: Questions, observations, and executive curiosity are not instructions. When in doubt, clarify with your manager.
  • Discipline yourself: Do not assign work, change priorities, or create commitments around the accountable manager.
  • Close the loop: When a skip-level conversation surfaces something consequential, bring the responsible manager into the conversation.

A leader who learns only from direct reports risks having an incomplete picture of the organization. A leader who manages around direct reports weakens the managers they put in place. Strong leaders do neither.

Stay close enough to multiple levels to understand what is really happening and whether what leadership intends is actually getting through. And remain disciplined to protect the authority and accountability of the managers they have put in place.

How do you handle skip-level communication in your organization? Share your thoughts in the comments below or reach out to explore how IntelliVen helps executive leadership teams align communication without breaking accountability.

About Manage to Lead

How Manage to Lead Fits Together

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Manage to Lead is an integrated leadership operating system.

Its purpose is to help leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations achieve their potential to perform and grow. It provides an integrated leadership operating system through which leadership teams think, work, and lead together.

Whether the organization is an entire company, a business, a function, a unit, or an initiative, the leadership challenge is fundamentally the same. Leadership teams must develop a shared understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how they will work together to accomplish it.

The system is organized into three integrated parts. Each builds upon the previous one, and together they help leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations continually improve performance and accelerate growth.

Every element of Manage to Lead helps leadership teams answer one of a small number of essential leadership questions.

What are we trying to accomplish? Where are we now? What must change? How will we execute? How will we create the conditions for others to succeed?

Together, these elements provide one coherent way for leadership teams to answer those questions.

Leadership Team Disciplines

Leadership begins with how leadership teams think and work together.

Organizations perform best when leadership teams share a common understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how they will work together to accomplish it.

Leadership teams develop these capabilities through disciplined leadership conversations, making thinking visible, and developing shared ways of thinking and working.

The first series of essays explores these disciplines because they create the foundation from which all other leadership work proceeds.

Leadership Team Work

Once leadership teams develop shared understanding, they can apply it to the work of leading the organization.

The second series explores how leadership teams establish a shared definition of success, understand their organization’s current and future reality, determine what must change, govern execution, and continually strengthen organization performance.

Leadership Stewardship

Leadership teams create the greatest value by creating the conditions under which others throughout the organization can successfully lead. They provide governance, coaching, peer support, subject matter expertise, learning opportunities, and the right mix of leadership capabilities for the organization’s stage of development, strategic ambitions, and current challenges.

Those responsibilities strengthen leadership throughout the organization. The third series explores how leadership teams fulfill that stewardship responsibility.

One Integrated System

Although these three parts can be described separately, they function together.

Leadership Team Disciplines develop shared understanding. Leadership Team Work applies that shared understanding to improve organization performance. Leadership Stewardship extends those capabilities throughout the organization by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

Together they form one integrated leadership operating system that helps leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations perform at their best.

The essays that follow explore each part in turn.

About Manage to Lead

The Meaning of Manage to Lead

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People sometimes ask what I mean by Manage to Lead.

The answer is that the name was chosen intentionally as a triple entendre. It conveys three related but distinct ideas that have shaped my thinking about leadership for over fifty years.

The first meaning is that people manage in order to lead.

Leadership grows through disciplined management. Leaders learn to better manage themselves, then the work of leadership, and ultimately help leadership teams manage how they think and work together. In this sense, management is one of the disciplines through which leadership is developed.

The second meaning is that the work of leadership must be managed.

Leadership teams create value by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead businesses, functions, units, and initiatives throughout the organization. Those conditions include shared understanding, disciplined conversations, thoughtful governance, coaching, peer support, learning, and the collective capability required to accomplish important work. Creating and continually strengthening those conditions is itself the work of leadership, and it deserves to be managed with the same discipline organizations apply to every other critical function.

The third meaning is simply to “manage” to lead.

Like the expression, “They managed to complete the assignment,” it speaks to succeeding at something worthwhile that requires effort, discipline, and persistence.

Leadership is a capability that can be continually developed. Anyone can become a better leader by learning to better manage themselves, their leadership team, and the work of leadership. Manage to Lead exists to help people do exactly that.

That philosophy has guided my work since my graduate research at MIT Sloan in the mid-1970s. My thesis explored an early version of an idea that has shaped everything I have done since: organizations perform best when leaders are clear about what they seek to accomplish, why it matters, and how they engage others in accomplishing it.

Over the ensuing decades, those ideas were tested, refined, challenged, and expanded through leading organizations, advising leadership teams, conducting research, and developing what ultimately became Manage to Lead.

Today, I would state that proposition a little differently: Leadership teams create the greatest value by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

The first and most important of those conditions is a shared understanding of what the organization seeks to accomplish, where it is relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how people will work together to accomplish it. Organizations perform best when leadership teams share that understanding.

Everything in Manage to Lead exists to help leadership teams create those conditions.

The essays that follow begin with the disciplines through which leadership teams develop shared understanding and shared ways of thinking and working together. They then explore the work leadership teams manage together to improve organization performance before turning to the stewardship through which leadership teams create and sustain the conditions that enable others throughout the organization to succeed.