Tag Archives: manage to lead

Governance, Manage to Lead, Operations

MtL Alumni: Strategy Offsites Start Before You Go

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Great strategy discussions start before people walk into the room.

As planning season approaches, remember that the best discussions never begin when leadership gathers for an offsite. They begin weeks earlier.

Strong teams clarify and share their thinking before they meet. They compare perspectives, challenge assumptions, sharpen priorities, and work together toward a shared understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are now, and what is most important to do next.

Because you’ve participated in a Manage to Lead training program, you already know the methods that support this work.

  • You know how WHAT-WHO-WHY clarifies purpose and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
  • You know the importance of agreeing on a Mandate.
  • You know how an Enterprise Change Framework helps leaders align around where things are now, why they must change, where they want to be next, and what needs to happen to get there.

A Pleasant Surprise

We’ve recently had the opportunity to watch several teams apply these methods as part of their planning, operations, and governance processes.

What has been encouraging is not just the quality of the outputs:

  • It’s what happens to the conversations.
  • The most important change isn’t in the plans.
  • It’s in how leaders work together.

What surprised us most

We expected teams to produce better plans.

We did not expect people to become more interested in understanding what their colleagues were thinking.

That shift in behavior may be the most important outcome of all.

People became more interested in understanding what their colleagues were thinking. In short, teams improved both what they accomplished and how they worked together. That observation has reinforced something we’ve believed for a long time.

Structured Cohesion in a Distributed World

Manage to Lead is primarily about helping leaders work together effectively. Tools and technology support that work by providing structure and shared language.

Their greatest value, however, comes from helping leadership teams build habits that create clarity, alignment, accountability, and coherence in a distributed world.

In today’s highly distributed organizations, that capability is increasingly important. Teams operate across functions, time zones, competing priorities, and often in different ways. These are all okay and necessary, provided there is an ongoing commitment to bring individual thinking back to the team in a way others can understand, challenge, and build upon.

Success depends less on being in the same room and more on sharing the same understanding. We’ve started referring to this as structured cohesion: creating shared understanding and alignment such that people work independently while moving forward together. When structured cohesion exists, teams require less coordination because they share more understanding.

Introducing the MtL Leadership Workspace

To help leadership teams apply Manage to Lead methods more consistently, we recently introduced the MtL Leadership Workspace, powered by the IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA) GPT.

Built around the same methods and disciplines taught in Manage to Lead, the workspace provides guidance, feedback, and facilitation support as teams clarify priorities, align perspectives, prepare for reviews, refine initiatives, capture decisions, and stay connected to what matters most.

The workspace helps teams continue the conversation between offsites, review meetings, and workshops. It supports both real-time and asynchronous collaboration, helping leadership teams stay aligned even when they are highly dispersed.

The goal is straightforward: Make it easy for teams to work before they convene so they can have better conversations when they come together. At the same time, the workspace improves preparation, documentation, follow-through, and shared understanding of decisions and commitments.

As alumni, you already know the methods. The MtL Leadership Workspace simply provides another way to use them with your team.

Learning Doesn’t End with the Cohort

Past Manage to Lead participants are welcome to enroll in future cohorts at no charge.

Great leadership teams are always learning. Every cohort brings new experiences, new questions, and new insights that strengthen our collective understanding and help us continue to Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

As you prepare for your next planning session, strategy discussion, or major initiative, we invite you to explore the MtL Leadership Workspace.

The workspace can help your team clarify priorities, develop and refine WHAT-WHO-WHY, align around Mandate, build Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, prepare for planning discussions, capture insights, and strengthen accountability between meetings. It is particularly useful in supporting the continuous work of getting clear, aligning, and growing, together.

Getting started is simple. Select Workspace from the IntelliVen main menu:

  1. Create an account
  2. Name a workspace
  3. Invite team members
  4. Share your thinking using the Manage to Lead tools

The workspace provides guidance and facilitation support along the way, helping teams make progress wherever they are, in real time or asynchronously.

We want teams to be able to experiment and learn without barriers, so a generous amount of capacity is available at no cost. Organizations that need additional usage, advanced capabilities, or broader deployment can contact IntelliVen to discuss options.

Great strategy discussions start before people walk into the room. The MtL Leadership Workspace gives teams a place to do that work together. We look forward to seeing how you apply these practices to your next challenge and continue building the habits that help teams

Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

Suggested Additional Reading

Operations

Time Horizon Discipline

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Leaders often say:

  • “We don’t have enough time.”
  • “We’re far from our goals.”
  • “Everything feels urgent.”

Most of the time, the issue is not time.

It is a mismatch between the decision and the planning horizon.

Manage to Lead is built on clarity and disciplined change. Time horizon discipline is part of that clarity.

Different Decisions Require Different Clocks

Not every decision should run on the same timeline.

When leaders use one clock for everything, they either:

  • Overreact in the short term, or
  • Drift in the long term.

High-performing organizations operate with multiple time horizons.

Each clock answers a different question:

  • Where are we going?
  • How will we win over this bounded period?
  • What must change next?
  • Are we doing what we said we would do?

If those questions collapse into one timeframe, confusion follows.

If they contradict one another, stress follows.

If they are coherent and nested, focus follows.

The Mandate Horizon Is Contextual

The Mandate answers:

What are we trying to accomplish, by when?

There is no universal duration.

A Mandate horizon should be:

  • Long enough to require real capability building.
  • Short enough that the current leadership team owns the outcome.
  • Explicitly bounded so capital allocation decisions can be evaluated against it.

For many organizations, that is about three years.

For some, it is shorter.
For others, longer.

Three years is common because it is often long enough to require meaningful change and short enough to sustain accountability. But it is not doctrine.

The discipline is not in picking “three.”

The discipline is in making the horizon explicit and holding it steady long enough for strategy and investment decisions to compound.

Multiple Clocks Must Be Coherent 

One common architecture looks like this:

  • Mandate horizon → Defines destination
  • Strategy horizon → Defines directional choices
  • Initiative horizon → Defines staged change
  • Management horizon → Ensures execution discipline

For many organizations, that might roughly translate into:

  • Multi-year Mandate
  • Annual strategy framing
  • Quarterly initiatives
  • Monthly management cadence

But this is an example, not a rule.

  • Different organizations legitimately design different clock speeds.
  • What matters is not the exact durations.
  • What matters is coherence across them.

Match Capital Commitment with Time Horizon

The longer capital is tied up, the longer the planning lens must be.

Examples:

  • Hiring a senior executive → Mandate lens
  • Entering a new vertical → Mandate lens
  • Building a new sales discipline → Initiative lens
  • Running a marketing experiment → Management lens

Short-horizon thinking applied to long-horizon commitments produces fear and underinvestment.

Long-horizon thinking applied to short-cycle execution produces drift and lack of accountability.

Match the clock to the decision.

NOW and NEXT Must Be Far Enough Apart

In the Change Framework:

NOW → WHY → NEXT → WHAT MUST BE DONE → BARRIERS

NEXT must relieve the constraints of NOW.

If NEXT is too close:

  • You get incremental improvement.
  • The system remains fundamentally unchanged.

If NEXT is too far:

  • It becomes aspirational.
  • The team cannot see the path.

A disciplined principle:

Choose a future state far enough out that you can think beyond current constraints, but close enough that the current leadership team is accountable for reaching it.

That balance creates energy without fantasy.

Why Leaders Feel “Short on Time”

When leaders say they are short on time, often one of three things is happening:

  • The Mandate horizon is unclear.
  • Too many initiatives are competing at once.
  • The management clock is crowding out strategic thinking.

Clarity of horizon reduces emotional noise.

When the Mandate is explicit and bounded, urgency becomes focus rather than pressure.

Bottom Line

  • Time is not the problem.
  • Unbounded thinking is the problem.
  • Use multiple clocks.
  • Make each explicit.
  • Ensure they are coherent.

Let the longer horizon guide capital allocation.
Let staged initiatives translate direction into change.
Let disciplined review reinforce commitments rather than override them.

Get Clear. Align. Grow.

Executive Reviews, Get Help, Manage to Lead

Steering Committees: Engaging Stakeholders for Guidance, Commitment, and Growth

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Note: A complementary reading for MtL Module 8 Get Help

Leaders who “get help” know success comes not from going it alone but from surrounding themselves with structures that strengthen thinking, accountability, and action. In Manage to Lead, we emphasize the value of an Accountability Board, Advisory Board, Coach, and Peer Group.

There is another form of outside help that deserves equal attention, especially for initiatives that affect customers, partners, or community stakeholders: the Steering Committee.

What a Steering Committee Is

A steering committee brings together stakeholders who represent the organizations, communities, or customer segments that will be most directly affected by what your organization or initiative produces. Unlike an advisory board, which offers expertise, or a governing board, which ensures accountability, a steering committee co-creates success by helping shape priorities, decisions, and outcomes.

Why Steering Committees Matter

  • They give leaders direct access to the voices of those who will live with the results of decisions.
  • Members often have decision-making authority and access to resources within their own organizations, allowing them to influence adoption, funding, and partnership.
  • They help leaders anticipate resistance, discover alignment opportunities, and stay connected to real-world needs.
  • When members see that their guidance has been heard and acted upon, they become even more committed to the success of the effort—often becoming early adopters, users, and buyers of what is produced.

How Steering Committees Add Value

  • Guidance and Direction: Members provide grounded input, helping leaders avoid blind spots and adjust course before costly mistakes occur.
  • Legitimacy and Endorsement: Their involvement signals credibility to others in the ecosystem.
  • Acceleration: Members help open doors, clear obstacles, and facilitate decisions that move implementation faster.
  • Sustained Alignment: Regular engagement ensures the organization’s goals stay relevant to stakeholder priorities and that everyone is working from a shared picture of success.

How to Form and Manage One

  • Identify six to ten individuals who represent the key stakeholder groups your initiative depends on.
  • Be explicit that their role is to advise and connect, not to manage day-to-day execution.
  • Meet quarterly or at major decision points with focused materials and specific questions.
  • Listen deeply. Summarize and report back on how their input has influenced what you do next—this simple feedback loop builds extraordinary trust and advocacy.
  • Keep the tone collegial, practical, and forward-looking. Participation should feel rewarding and consequential.

How It Fits in the Leader’s Support Structure

Adding a steering committee complements the existing support framework:

  • Accountability Board: Keeps leadership focused on plans, performance, and resources.
  • Advisory Board: Provides wisdom from experienced operators.
  • Coach: Strengthens the leader’s use of self and interpersonal effectiveness.
  • Peer Group: Offers perspective, learning, and accountability from equals.
  • Steering Committee: Connects leadership directly to those who will benefit from, and champion, the organization’s results.

The Payoff

When stakeholders see their fingerprints in your output, they work harder to make it succeed. Their ownership translates into faster adoption, greater influence, and more sustainable results. A well-run steering committee transforms external stakeholders into allies, advocates, and extensions of your leadership team.

Call to Action
As you design your leadership support structure, ask:

“Who outside the organization has the most to gain from our success… and how can we bring them inside the tent?”

Form your steering committee early, engage them often, and show them how their voices shape your outcomes. You will multiply your leadership capacity and set your organization up for enduring success.

Keep Growing with Manage to Lead

Steering committees are one of many ways leaders can expand their impact by bringing others into the process of thinking, managing, and acting strategically. If this approach resonates with you, explore how the Manage to Lead (MtL) System helps organizations like yours:

• Get clear about purpose and priorities.
• Align leadership teams and stakeholders.
• Drive change that sustains performance and growth.

Visit intelliven.com to learn more about the Manage to Lead framework, download tools, or join an upcoming session to practice applying MtL methods to your organization’s real-world challenges.

Get Clear. Align. Grow.

Get Clear, Manage to Lead, People Matters

How to get a rogue team member back on board without drama or disruption

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Every leader eventually finds they have a toxic executive team member who behaves poorly, spreads discontent, or otherwise goes off track and holds the core leadership team, and the organization, hostage indefinitely. 

As the leader, it is up to you to do something, but you avoid confronting the offender perhaps because you are averse to conflict or perhaps s/he is a longtime friend, co-founder, or even a family member. Instead, you hope things will work themselves out, but they never do; things just get worse.

Do you give up, let the organization wallow forever, or act? Such a dilemma!

The IntelliVen Manage to Lead Immersion Program provides leaders with tools and methods to address undesirable team member behavior without disruption or drama.  Continue reading How to get a rogue team member back on board without drama or disruption →

Executive Transition, Job Search, People Matters

Transition Plan for CEOs

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What To Do Between Your Exit and Next Position

We wrote a post about how to make a graceful exit (especially when it’s involuntary) that explored what steps to take when leaving your position. This post is the follow-up that dives into how to identify, assess, and consolidate lessons learned to find the right next job. We’ll explore three key steps to a successful transition plan for CEOs.

Continue reading Transition Plan for CEOs →