Imagine a job where you have no doubt that your contributions matter. You see how your efforts help your team and organization achieve your mission. You know you belong. Each member of your team feels valued, respected, and supported. Because of this, each team member does their best work.
When managers practice inclusive leadership, they make it possible. At TMC, we equip mission-driven leaders to manage effectively using an approach we call conspire and align.
If conspiring sounds like you might be “up to something,” you’re right about that! We’re talking about making “good trouble,” as the late Rep. John Lewis put it, so we can advance social justice.
When we approach management this way, a whole new world opens up. We redefine what it means to manage effectively, we adopt new mindsets, and we use different tools to match our management practices to our values.
Want your management practices to match your values? Read the guide below and then join us for Managing to Change the World to practice a new approach to managing people and organizations.
The Problem
Ever worked somewhere where you felt like a cog in a machine? Maybe you were always expected to execute someone else’s orders. Maybe you’ve been on a team where you had to compete with your colleagues for resources and recognition. Perhaps you didn’t even know how your work really mattered in the long run.
That’s what happens under a command-and-control management approach.
Too many of us have experienced this style of management, an approach that values rote productivity over all else, including equity, inclusion, and belonging. It’s the default style in many institutions, and it’s easy to fall back on when your manager only sets one kind of objective. It can drive some outcomes, but it comes at the expense of others. Namely, your most valuable resource: people.
What is Inclusive Leadership? Conspire and Align
There’s a better way—one that reflects your values and commitment to social justice. We call it the conspire-and-align approach.
Conspiring and aligning means coming together with a team for a collective purpose, and getting on the same page to realize that purpose. When you conspire and align, everyone understands where you’re going and what role you each play in getting there.
This approach can work in all kinds of settings, from hierarchical structures to cooperative ones.
The word conspire comes from the Latin conspirare, which means “to breathe together,” and shares a root with the words inspire and aspire. When we conspire, we co-inspire our team with a shared, co-crafted vision of success. When we align, we get in formation—the way birds flock, dancers get in place, and people assemble at marches.
Under a conspire-and-align approach, we understand that managers can only be truly effective when they balance equity, sustainability, and results. We call these the three dimensions of effective management. Each dimension is important and effective managers develop skills to discern when one dimension needs more or less attention.
As managers, we view staff as partners—people we exercise power with, not over. But, we don’t ignore power dynamics either. Quite the opposite! The conspire-and-align approach recognizes power, gets honest about it, and asks leaders to exercise it responsibly, for the good of the work, the organization, and your team.
Conspire-and-Align Mindsets
A conspire-and-align approach leads us to think about effective management in three ways:
Management is a Practice
Like any craft, effective management is something we do. And things we do can be broken down into skills and techniques that we apply over and over, like delegation, goal-setting, and relationship-building. We don’t get good at management just by reading, thinking, and talking about it. We build our craft through consistent and rigorous practice, which includes trying, making mistakes, experimenting, and (hopefully) getting better over time.
Management is a Duty
We have a duty to our movements and communities to get the best results we can. Whether it’s registering enough voters to build local power or increasing math scores for 4th graders, we are doing this work because we feel a duty to make real change in the world. We also have a duty to our team members to exercise our power responsibly and to be good stewards of their time and energy. People spend a lot of their lives at work, and how we manage people influences whether they feel a sense of purpose or dread coming back the next day.
Management is a Balance
To conspire and align effectively, we must balance competing ideas and priorities. We balance our care for an exhausted colleague with our need to get a press release out about a new legislation. We balance sharing guidance with giving team members room to grow and truly own their work. “Balance” isn’t just finding a happy medium; it can also mean switching between different approaches depending on the circumstance (like taking a week off after putting in extra hours for a sprint), or grounding yourself in two different values at the same time (like caring for your people and committing to getting great results).
Tools for Practicing Conspire and Align
Many of you might already take a conspire-and-align approach to management. If you’ve ever genuinely sought input before making an important decision, you’ve conspired and aligned!
These are the five most important tools we use daily in a conspire-and-align approach to management:
- Sphere of control: Focusing your time and energy only on the things you can control, and letting go of the things you can’t.
- Choice Points: Turning off autopilot and pausing at every “fork in the road” to consider equity implications and alternative options for the decisions you make.
- PTR: Learning to tell the difference between preferences, traditions, and requirements (and focusing on requirements!).
- Make the implicit explicit: Taking the invisible expectations and assumptions you have in your head and articulating them.
- Seek perspective: Getting input from others, especially those most impacted by your decisions.
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Conspire and Align Discussion Questions
We encourage you to share this article with your fellow managers and staff members to open a dialogue about practicing conspire and align in management. Use the questions below as a guide for conversation:
With fellow managers
- What parts of your current management style look more like conspire and align? What parts look more like command and control?
- What are some concrete ways you could bring the conspire-and-align approach to your management?
- What, if anything, is holding you back from implementing a great conspire-and-align management approach? (Examples might include: expectations from your manager, your organizational culture, the naysayer in your head, old habits, etc.)
- When it comes to either the three dimensions of effective management (equity, sustainability, results) or the three mindsets of effective management (management is a practice, duty, balance), is there an area that you have a harder time adopting or applying? Why?
With your staff
- What experiences have you had with the command-and-control style of management in prior jobs? What do you want me to know as your manager about those experiences and how they impacted you? [Ask if your staff would like to hear from you, too: if so, share your experiences and be honest about what you’re still unlearning].
- I’d love to get some feedback from you about my management. When it comes to seeking your perspective, being clear about our collective purpose, and having alignment, what am I doing well? What could be better?
- Equity, sustainability, and results are like three strands of a braided rope that weaken if you try to separate the strands. All three are essential to effective management. How am I doing as your manager to balance these three strands? Where could I be focusing more/less?
Under command-and-control management styles, leaders are only “effective” when their team is productive, even if that “productivity” harms the well-being and dignity of employees, the greater good of society, or the health of our planet. As leaders, we can and must do better.
Read more about conspire and align in our book, Management in a Changing World.
Jakada is the CEO of The Management Center and co-author of “Management in a Changing World: How to Manage for Equity, Sustainability, and Results.” Before becoming CEO, he was a Senior Coach at TMC.