Framework Revisited

Welcome back to a pivotal piece from our archives: a post I shared when I started this newsletter that remains a cornerstone of my leadership philosophy. Recognizing its enduring relevance and impact, I find it imperative to bring this message to the forefront once again. In this post, I delve into the intricacies of the Leadership Framework, a tool that has been instrumental in navigating the complexities of leadership and problem-solving. Despite the passage of time, the principles outlined here continue to be as significant and transformative as ever. Whether you're encountering this framework for the first time or revisiting it, its insights are vital for anyone striving to excel in leadership and organizational management.

Even the best leaders can get overwhelmed when they’re facing difficult problems. If the problem wasn't hard, it would have been solved a long time ago. But as I’ve said before, the status quo is a powerful thing. Change is hard. So, people look at the situation, and they become overwhelmed by the difficulty, by the complexity, by the moving pieces. When people become overwhelmed by complexity, they tend to forget important things.

I’ve experienced this throughout my career, so I developed a tool many years ago when I was becoming overwhelmed by complexity when leading teams and organizations and trying to solve complex problems. I would find myself forgetting key elements.

So, I built a straightforward, robust tool: the Leadership Framework. It helps us to be clear-eyed about everything we have to manage, think about, execute on, and ask our team members about. This isn’t about time frames yet. This isn’t about communicating your vision yet. This isn’t about overcoming resistance yet.

I call it the Leadership Framework because it has four sides. And I use it for everything I do.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll explain the framework's four sides – strategy, process and structure, metrics, and culture – here in my LinkedIn newsletter. We’ll go through them in that order for a reason – because you need to start with strategy and move around the frame toward the other pieces… but I want to be clear that they are not in order of importance. It’s more like every side is required for the framework to be complete. You can’t effectively solve a problem if you’re missing any of those elements.

We'll begin next week with a discussion of strategy.