Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.

Useful Frameworks

A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.

Many of my friends distrust their internet providers. The cable company I subscribe to for internet services, for example, has clearly demonstrated that they don’t care about my family. To fix a recent bandwidth issue, we had to call several times, explain our problem to several people and ask to speak to a manager to finally get a technician to visit our home to troubleshoot the recurring latency issues. Their gross demonstration of incompetence and lack of concern for me led me to have deep feelings of distrust for the firm. Even though the technician who ultimately resolved the issue was competent and clearly wanted to do a good job, the corporate bureaucracy, incompetence, and clear placement of profits over people broke any trust I had down. While my family is still paying for the service, the moment a better alternative comes along, what do you think we will be doing? I assure you, based on many conversations that I have had since the incident, that I am not alone.

If we take the time to break trust down and describe it mathematically, it will help us to be more purposeful with our language when we speak about it and when we use it to lead others. It will also help us to brainstorm and craft our tactical approach to earning more trust in more powerful ways with our teams.