The first in this series of Manage to Lead Essays, The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset, introduced shared understanding as a leadership team’s most important asset. The second, Leadership Conversations Start Before They Begin, explored how leadership conversations develop and strengthen it. This essay examines a core discipline of those conversations: making thinking visible.
Leadership teams can only examine, strengthen, and build upon thinking that has been made visible. Much of the thinking that shapes leadership decisions, however, never becomes available for others to examine.
Leaders are expected to make decisions, solve problems, and keep organizations moving forward. Most learn to communicate conclusions clearly and confidently. Far fewer learn to reveal the thinking behind those conclusions or draw out the thinking behind the conclusions of others.
People never enter a leadership conversation with just their conclusions. They carry the reasoning that produced them, along with the vantage point that shaped it: observations, experience, assumptions, judgment, and the alternatives they considered and discarded along the way.
Hidden thinking cannot be examined, challenged, refined, or combined with the thinking of others. Leadership teams strengthen thinking by revealing it, drawing it out, and exploring what lies behind conclusions before committing to them. Thinking that remains private remains individual. Thinking that becomes visible can become shared.
Making thinking visible is not easy.
Leaders may hesitate to reveal unfinished thinking because doing so exposes uncertainty. They risk being wrong, misunderstood, challenged, or discovering that an idea they have been carrying no longer stands up to examination.
Even when thinking is shared, others often respond too quickly. Rather than drawing it out through questions, they move immediately to advice, evaluation, or advocacy. Helping a leadership team think more deeply requires the discipline to understand before improving, and improve before concluding.
Once conclusions have been expressed, leaders naturally become attached to their own thinking. The conversation shifts from exploring ideas to defending positions. Opportunities for new observations, alternative explanations, or better reasoning become harder to recognize and even harder to accept.
Others remain silent because they assume their thinking is already understood, believe the conversation needs to move quickly, or wait for someone else to ask the questions that would draw it out.
Leadership Is a Team Responsibility
It is natural to think of leadership as the responsibility of a designated individual. Organizations perform better, though, when leadership is understood as the responsibility of the leadership team. Team members are not there to represent constituencies or protect the interests of the parts they lead. Together, they are responsible for developing the understanding from which the organization is led.
They know the quality of execution depends on the quality of the understanding the team develops together. They therefore insist on drawing out one another’s observations, assumptions, questions, and judgment to continually strengthen that understanding.
Realizing that potential takes more than good intentions. It takes leaning in, in the moment, saying what needs to be said while the leadership team is still together and still able to use it. It also takes leaning in through thoughtful inquiry, asking the questions that help others reveal and strengthen their thinking before conclusions are reached. Waiting until later, in the hallway or with just one or two colleagues, is not leaning in. It is stepping back.
Slowing Down Speeds the Organization Up
Making thinking visible requires leaders to slow the conversation down. That often feels inefficient because many believe leadership requires quick, decisive answers. Organizations often reinforce that belief by expecting leaders to provide answers rather than help the leadership team develop them together. Over time, responsibility for important decisions accumulates in the leader instead of being shared across the leadership team.
Time invested in making thinking visible and drawing it out is usually repaid many times over through stronger shared understanding and better execution. Organizations rarely pay a price for developing understanding. They pay for acting before the thinking behind the work is fully developed.
Organizations rarely struggle because leaders spend too much time learning together. They struggle because leaders move too quickly past one another’s thinking. Important misunderstandings remain hidden. Assumptions go untested. Different interpretations emerge during execution. Teams discover too late that they never shared the same understanding.
From Individual Thinking to Shared Understanding
Leaders explain not only what they think but what they have observed, how they interpret it, the assumptions they are making, the questions they are still exploring, and the reasoning that led them to their conclusions. Others respond by contributing their own thinking rather than merely agreeing or disagreeing.
The conversation becomes a process of collective learning. Questions become more valuable because they reveal assumptions. Differences become more valuable because they improve understanding. The team gradually develops an understanding that is richer than any individual perspective.
Much of the understanding a leadership team needs already exists within the team. It simply resides in different people. Making thinking visible enables leaders to combine those individual insights into a shared understanding that no one possesses alone.
Over time, making thinking visible becomes a leadership habit. Leaders prepare differently because they know they will be expected to explain their thinking rather than simply announce conclusions. They also work differently together.
Rather than immediately offering opinions or advice, the team first works to understand the thinking being shared. As thinking becomes visible, ideas become easier to examine on their merits because the team’s attention shifts from reacting to contributors to strengthening the contributed thinking.
Members first ask clarifying questions until everyone shares the same understanding. Next, they ask questions that push the thinking to the next level. Once the team’s thinking has been clarified and strengthened, they offer advice, recommendations, and concluding thoughts. Every member participates in each stage before the conversation moves to the next.
Organizations improve performance when leadership teams make individual thinking visible, strengthen it together, and act from the shared understanding they develop.
Manage to Lead Essays
Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organization performance.
Leadership teams develop shared understanding by making thinking visible in forms the team can examine, improve, and build upon together.
