Hello Blueprint Leaders and Readers! At GLP, we are happy to welcome warm summer days, summer Fridays, and summer plans with family and friends. But we are still working and we imagine you are, too. Summer often brings time for leadership retreats so we wanted to explore a few topics that may be helpful as you take time to reflect and plan with your teams.

We also imagine that many of you, as you steer into summer work, are wondering how to coalesce a new team, integrate new folks, and/or address emerging needs and opportunities. Frankly, great leaders are always leading through change because no organization can afford to stand still. Challenges come from inside and outside. Usually they collide!

Whatever the context, we are reminded that leadership is a deeply human activity. This Blueprint explores how to uncover roadblocks and make progress on problems in ways that consider how we, as humans, respond to change and to one another. We hope these resources are helpful—whether you are leading through tough times, beginning transformational work, or building a healthier, adaptive, and more resilient organization. 

This is a long one…so bookmark it for summer reading. And stay tuned for our annual Summer read/watch/listen edition in July. 

- Stephanie

So much of today’s news focuses on rising rates of burnout, eroding trust, and a doubling down on standard advice for leaders: skill building. Great leadership certainly demands the purposeful development of your abilities, but what if the tendency to overly focus on your—the leader’s—role is part of the problem? 

What if instead we start by asking the question in this HBR article: “Are You Meeting the Needs of the People You Lead?”  

Focusing on your connection to others, on the relationship itself, can often be the key that unlocks solutions:

To help you see the relationship from the other end of the telescope, the authors outline six needs that your team has—and relevant questions to examine for each: 

• Protection: Do my people feel protected and backed by me—especially against external threats or pressures—or are they looking for someone else to step up and safeguard the group?
• Fairness: Are my decisions and procedures seen as fair, balanced, and unbiased or do people feel that conflicts and outcomes are handled inconsistently?
• Vision: Do people see a clear direction and shared goals or are they unsure where we are going and what we are working toward?
• Expertise: Do my team members feel they can learn from me and rely on my advice or are they lacking guidance, coaching, and know-how?
• Status: Do individuals feel that I help them gain recognition, standing, or success or do they feel overlooked in their contributions and prospects?
• Affiliation: Do people feel a sense of belonging and camaraderie or is the group fragmented, with weak ties and low cohesion?

Though the article speaks of “leaders” and “followers”—which is helpful for clarity—we think these ideas are equally relevant for leading across teams with peers, managing up, and leading through networks. 

Certainly, anyone in a greater position of power, authority, and title has a proportionately greater responsibility to approach leadership thoughtfully. For example, how you respond in a meeting when someone on your team offers a critical assessment can determine whether your team is willing to continue sharing the feedback that is essential for success. You model (or don’t) how human relationships have primacy when you create an open, respectful, and safe container for candor.

In “Why Your Team Won’t Speak Up (And How to Fix It),” Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, says:

There’s one more important reason to consider the relationship in how you lead. Duhigg adds an important layer of nuance: extensive research in neuroscience has revealed that when we engage in conversation there are actually multiple kinds of conversations happening at the same time and that these conversations tend to fall into three categories.

• Practical conversations—where we’re making plans or solving problems
• Emotion conversations—where you share what you’re feeling and want the other to empathize (rather than try to solve the feelings)
• Social conversations—about how we relate to each other and the outside world

“And what researchers have found is that supercommunicators, the people who communicate best, they really focus on having the same kind of conversation as the person they’re talking to at the same moment,” says Duhigg.

Pause for a moment and think about what this means. How might the identification of the conversation type shape your leadership playbook, and how you respond. If your teammate is in an “emotion conversation” or a “social conversation,” you have to pave the way to a “practical conversation” by building a bridge that recognizes where they are, names it, and then offers pathways forward.

Turning Connection into Teamwork

What if you have a talented group of individuals, but they’re not coming together as a team? This is one of the most common reasons GLP is engaged to lead retreats: to help bring talented people together in ways that actually change how they work. 

While an outside facilitator can move the needle for you in key moments, you really want to build this capacity within. Look for what this HBR article calls “super-facilitators”:

Unlike the “wisdom of crowds,” this model of collective intelligence is not about finding insights in the average answer. Rather it enables each member of the team to excel at their unique expertise and skills while maintaining the ability to bring it all together in support of the team’s results. 

The power of super-facilitators underscores again that leadership and teamwork happen in relation to one another. Super-facilitators understand the importance of dialogue and enabling each member of the team to have a voice.

Read more on this in GLP’s whitepaper “How to Build a Great Team.” 

Keeping Connected Through Change

Transitions, new leaders, new team members, and change in general are especially likely to create conversational mismatches—and even to inadvertently eliminate much-needed conversations. The MIT Sloan Management Review article “When Employees Are Drowning in Change” notes, “Dialogue is one thing many leaders cut back on during periods of change.” 

Whatever the nature of change, the tendency is to focus on the change rather than on the people living through it. When you think of it as “leading change,” you’re likely to start with practical conversations—focused on the why, what, and how for solving problems and creating plans. Instead, thinking of it as “leading people through change” will help you remember that in many cases people will come to the conversations—even conversations that are supposed to focus on solutions—with emotion top of mind. For example, if you say, “Let’s test out how we might implement AI into our workflow.” You might be focused on solutions. But others are likely to immediately wonder, “How will this affect my job?” or “How does this threaten my identity as a professional?” or "How much time is this going to take?"

Focusing on emotions is purposeful, but it's not an end in and of itself. A couple of key points:

Meeting people where they are doesn’t mean you have to agree. The focus is maintaining connection—throughout both agreement and disagreement. Part of this is establishing the conditions for psychological safety. 

Finally, it’s not enough to say “we want people to be comfortable.” Disagreement is both necessary and an ingredient of progress. You have to actively cultivate what this McKinsey article calls “professional dissent” defined as “the courage to voice a contrarian view.” The article highlights five ways:

• Frame dissent as duty. Help teams see challenge as service to the enterprise, not confrontation. Reframing it this way lowers emotional barriers and raises the collective standard of truth seeking.
• Build dissent loops. Set aside deliberate moments in meetings to invite missing or opposing perspectives. These structured pauses signal safety and turn disagreement into a productive muscle.
• Protect the challenger. Respond with curiosity rather than defensiveness. A leader’s tone in these moments sets the cultural norm more than any slide deck. Publicly thanking challengers reinforces the sense that courage is valued.
• Close the loop. Follow through visibly—show what changed or explain why it didn’t. When people see their input shaping outcomes, dissent becomes energizing.
• Measure breadth. Track where dissent comes from across levels and functions. Healthy dissent is system-wide, not limited to the confident few.

As a leader, how you ask questions will also play a key role in facilitating helpful responses. This MIT Sloan article explains:

Thoughtful choices in language can make a difference both when you are asking the questions—and when it is your responsibility to respond to your boss’s questions. 

Connections Are a Part of “Leading Up”

We’ve been focusing on how to lead others, but what about how to lead your leaders? All of the above tips apply, but let's steer straight into how to deal with those above you. In “Managing Up: A Skill Set That Matters Now,” the authors write that many struggle to connect with superiors:

Leadership in all its forms requires a commitment to translating, to spanning the distance. If you are a chief executive, this is deeply important to how you work with your board. Whether you are encouraging your team to share insights that may be uncomfortable or whether you are the one taking the risk to share those insights with your boss, that translation takes courage.

Governance as Leadership: 
Connection in and Beyond the Boardroom

When working with, and within boards, connection is equally important. Indeed, there will be times when it is the people rather than the practices or procedures that are difficult, impeding progress, and causing friction. 

In “Managing Difficult Directors,” the authors describe a common situation:

They identified three main types of difficult board members:

• Passive Passengers—who stay silent and hope to go unnoticed
• Dominators—who take control of every discussion
• Misguided Experts—who focus too much on the details

Even boards that establish norms in their board charter, build important factors such as the value of teamwork into their selection process, and sustain ongoing board education may encounter this issue. 

It is helpful to recognize that each of these difficult board member types can arise from experience and good intentions. Passive Passengers may be expert in narrow fields and hesitant to participate on other topics—so clearly invite them to do so. Dominators may have a long history of success and a genuine enthusiasm for the work—so help structure the meeting with protocols so that it doesn’t become a platform for lecturing on their opinions (and help them understand their role as one member of a team). Misguided Experts may continually bring the conversation back to their area of knowledge, even if it is not the most important for the task at hand—so help them recognize that, like Passive Passengers, they have a responsibility to elevate or release their experience to bear on all aspects of the governance work. 

And as Duhigg suggests, knowing what kind of conversation you are having is step one to managing these types. GLP works with boards to discipline and structure conversations, by identifying and managing the differences between dialogue, debate, and decision-making. A wise board chair can manage members with a clear protocol. We describe this in greater detail in our whitepaper: The Adaptive Board, and offer a few tips described in the paper here:  

• Uphold your board norms. 
• Appoint a facilitator. 
• Use protocols to manage discussions.
• Come prepared with open-ended questions to facilitate dialogue.
• Use tools for inclusion.
• Examine options and make decisions through the lens of mission and values.

Sometimes you just can’t affect personality or behavior.

When leadership is understood as happening in relationships, in connection, it plays a vital role in transforming a group of individuals into a team with a common purpose. As the authors of the HBR article above note: 

Finally, in boards, like teams, it begins with who is in the room. How you build your board is your most powerful tool. In “Building a Board That Adds and Creates Value,” we explore how the process of board composition is itself an ongoing education and team-building practice for both your current and prospective board members.

This is true for every team—not just for boards. Leadership is everyone’s responsibility.

Upcoming Workshop with GLP

What will you enjoy, explore, or learn this summer? We need your suggestions!

In our July Blueprint, we’ll share our annual list with recommendations for what to read, listen to, or watch. We’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions. Please email me at stephanierogen@greenwichleadershippartners.com.

Help us spread great ideas and new ways of thinking about governance, leadership and strategy! Forward The Blueprint to friends and colleagues who may find it helpful. And if you're not already on our mailing list and you'd like to receive future editions of The Blueprint, click the button below to subscribe! And don't forget to explore our Blueprint Archives.