Episode 295 Transcript:

 This is about the one strategy that leaders who wanna elevate their career reach that next level, increase their impact miss so often.

And if you do this and you listen all the way to the end to really understand how to execute this strategy, you will become more effective in your communication and the impact that you have, which increases your probability for a promotion. Let’s talk about why leaders must build their own frameworks.

 Here are the two questions. This podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted,

although the competition and the expectations get bigger. This show with a manager track podcast will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw.

I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead. So everyone wins and gross. In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate and act as a confident and competent leader.

You know, you can be.

 Welcome to The Manager Track podcast. I wanna talk about something that is genuinely important and so often overlooked. Something that is critical to a leader’s impact and can dramatically change how others perceive their level of expertise, your level of expertise.

It’s about developing clear frameworks and models. To take sort of what’s complex, nuanced, and often stuck in your head, and turning that into something simpler, more structured, and easier for others to understand and ultimately to follow. Now, I wanna record this video, this episode, because this is a common topic that shows up in my work as an executive coach, for example, last year I worked with a client, highly capable, really well respected, but they were hitting a ceiling, and the reason was that their thinking lift mostly in their head.

And they weren’t really able to articulate what they were doing and why. The thing that they were doing was giving them results. And so they were using sort of single examples. They were trying to convince people to do it their way, but it was all in their head. And they had a hard time to really articulate this and to demonstrate

how valuable this expertise that’s living in their, in their. Articulating how valuable this expertise that was living in their head actually was. So for many leaders who are looking to increase con their contribution, their impact, get ready for a promotion. So if you are thinking, now I wanna get promoted in 2026, it obviously doesn’t start with the performance conversations.

That process needs to start at the beginning of the year, to 12 months before you have a performance conversation. And at this stage, the strategy to define a clear framework for how you do your work is not a nice to have, but it is the difference between being seen as competent and being recognized as truly impactful versus.

Not, and I’ve had these conversations with many leaders over the years, across different industries and across different levels. So this is not just for senior leaders, when you take the time to name, structure and articulate. Your approach that was created because of your own experience and your expertise, your influence starts to expand faster.

Your decisions land more clearly, and other people can start to follow your thinking a lot easier. And with that, the value that you bring to the organization becomes more scalable.

Now, recently in a coaching conversation, this topic came up again and because that particular situation was a bit unique, I wanted to make sure that.

My client truly understood what we’re talking about with a framework, so I was looking for other resources, specific content out there, articles or examples of the frameworks that other leaders have created to support the conversation that we had during our call.

Now there is so much content out there on leadership models created by big firms or well-known thinkers, but it’s actually what I found very little on how individual leaders develop their own frameworks from their own lived experience.

And that gap is really what inspired this video, this episode, because for you as a leader, if you do have an approach, a process, a method, but the language is missing to easily communicate that, then it’s actually your responsibility to create it.

And over the course of the next 15, 20 minutes, we’re gonna talk about

How to actually put this into practice because it could be that single most important strategy you pursue this year to prepare yourself for that promotion.

Now I wanna emphasize sometimes this type of work is hard to do on our own. A, we’re too busy even not making the time for it, and B, when we’re inside the chart, it’s hard to read the label.

So what you may think is totally obvious or where you’re not sure what you should actually create as a model, as a framework, and what would be most impactful because you’re so deep into it, working with a coach who helps you pull that out and then guide you through the process so that what you end up with is a really solid and effective framework that you can go out and communicate.

That can be a game changer. If you’re interested this year to. Take your leadership role seriously to invest in your growth, to improve and strengthen your performance and your capabilities, as well as your confidence as a leader in any room that you walk into. Then check out the link in the show notes to schedule a strategy call where you and I will meet and discuss what executive coaching could look like for you, what you can expect, and how it will benefit you.

Okay, now let’s get into this. To be clear, this isn’t about being a thought leader for the sake of LinkedIn cloud.

This is about something way more practical, right? The frameworks are almost like sense making devices and tools that how you translate. Your experience into something other people can actually use,

and that’s what we are gonna talk about today. We’re gonna talk about why leaders need to develop their own frameworks, how to actually build one and the mistakes to avoid so, you don’t look like you’re just creating more corporate jargon.

So if you are ready to move from having personal insights and expertise to actually influencing others and growing your impact, then this is for you and you don’t want to miss it. All right. Uh, let’s start with the basics. What is the framework? Because I think most people hear that word, hear that word, and they think it’s some branded graphic you put on a slide deck, or it’s an acronym that you maybe even trademark or it’s some maybe academic theory that lives in business schools and case studies, but while that might all be true, that’s not the type of framework we’re gonna talk about today. A framework in this context is a structured way of seeing and solving a recurring problem. Now let me clarify one distinction here. ’cause this is important. This is not about opinions. Opinions sort of are comments on reality of like ideally the fact of what you’re observing? I think, for example, I think remote work is better.

That is an opinion, or I believe feedback should be direct. Those are opinions. Now, frameworks go way beyond that. They give people a mental model and they typically create a repeatable process. So a strong framework does three things.  One, it names the problem really clearly. Not in vague terms, but in a way where someone says, yes, that’s exactly what I’m dealing with.

This framework is for me. So that’s sort of the intro to the framework.  Then two, it simplifies complexity. Something that’s nuanced, complicated, or complex, and it makes that easier to understand and it simplifies it.

And then  three, it creates shared language that others can repeat. And when people start using your terminology in meetings. When they reference your model without you being there, that’s when you know it’s working.  Now, for many leaders, this is the leverage they need to scale their impact and again, ultimately make their promotion inevitable.

This is exactly the type of work to do. ’cause you stop being someone who comments on problems and you become someone who defines the problem and offers a structured way to solve it. And. In a way that other people can help you in a way that’s not just dependent on you being in it, you having all the information, but you are sharing a framework that enables and empowers other people to solve problems or challenges more effectively.

This is not about ego. Again, not about your thought leadership on LinkedIn. It’s a lot more helpful to think about this as a responsibility. ’cause as you continue to grow your expertise, your experience. But every year you get better at something, you start to see patterns more. You start to refine your processes, you get more efficient. Now it’s on you to pass that information on, to elevate others. That’s leadership. So, if you have clarity that can help navigate complexity faster, keeping it locked in your head is a totally missed opportunity. So let’s look at some examples.   📍 Take the T-shaped talent model. It’s about having depth in one area and breadth across others.

That simple visual changed how hiring and team design conversations happen, especially in tech and product organizations. This T shaped model to talent acquisition became a shared language, and how people looked at the different candidates and evaluated them. 

Someone came up with this, so instead of debating endlessly about whether someone is technical enough or strategic enough. Leaders can say, we need a T-shaped profile here with strong expertise in X.

Right? What’s the depth of it and everyone understands the capability that they’re optimizing for. So the complexity of talent trade-offs gets reduced to a single, portable, scalable idea. Let’s look at another example.

 The two way door, one-way door decision model. At Amazon, this framework reframed how leaders think about speed and risk. One door decisions are hard to reverse and require rigor in the process of execution. Two-way door. Decisions are reversible, right? You can walk in and back out and we should actually move fast. 

So when Jeff Bezos, I believe, introduced this model to Amazon, that distinction didn’t just improve decision making at scale. It gave thousands of leaders permission to act without over escalating everything.

It was a nuanced leadership judgment that became a simple filter. People could apply on their own, right? People could refer to that share language and say, this is a two door decision. We go fast. That’s a model. The same thing happened with OKRs. Objectives and key results did not just take off because they were the most sophisticated goal setting system ever created.

They spread because they gave leaders a clear way to separate what they wanted to achieve from how they would measure progress. It solved a common challenge and common problem with that shared language in that framework. And once companies like Google adopted them, oKRs sort of became shorthand for goal setting and alignment and focus on accountability. Even across teams that don’t share the same context, don’t work in the same field. It’s that process that once created, the language created, the framework created, was then scaled out and had massive impact.

So this is what effective frameworks do. They compress experience into something that’s teachable. They make complex thinking. Easier to transmit. And once they exist, they get referenced, reused, and relied on without the original thinker actually needing to be in the room. Right?

This is how your expertise can start to scale, not by you explaining more, but by you giving people a simple way to think better and more methodical. Now here is the critical counterpoint I want to address because I know some of you might be thinking this. Not every framework deserves to exist. The world really does not need more recycled acronyms.

Please know more  signal and rise and path and sore labels and acronyms that just turn ideas into words that need to match letters in a catchy acronym. You know what I mean? Let’s not do that. We don’t just need another model for the sake of it. Or you know, a model that’s just basically old wine in a new bottle.

A framework earns its place by solving a real persistent problem better than what you currently observe is happening. So don’t just take someone else’s approach and then sort of add a clever name to it. People will quickly notice it or try to solve something that’s not actually a problem and then you attach and stick some on it. I’d say Bueno. And that’s not helping you scale. So really hone in on what is it that you observe or people don’t really know how to do it, or they do it in a very incongruent, inconsistent way, and that’s creating a problem. How can you abstract what you know your experience, where it’s actually useful?

People will wanna gravitate towards this ’cause it’s gonna towards your model and framework because it’s gonna make their job easier. So if you actually figured something out, if you’ve solved a problem or created a process in a way that’s repeatable and teachable, then.

Emphasize again, you have a responsibility to codify it, and to double emphasize when you don’t, this all stays trapped. In your head, you are trapped. Having to explain yourself or do it for other people over and over again, maybe slightly different every time, but it always depends on you being there and you explaining it, or you maybe even doing the work because other people have a hard time replicating it or explaining it to someone else.

So frameworks create that leverage. They allow you to distill years of experience into repeatable systems.

And now another objection that might be coming up, if you are thinking, well, my work is too nuanced for a framework, it’s too complicated. It’s too situational. That’s often a signal that the thinking is still.

Implicit. Not that it’s too advanced, it just means you haven’t done the hard work yet. There’s a reason the saying goes that it takes more time to write a short letter than a long one, right? Clarity is the work. So creating that clarity, simplifying it is not easy Distilling, complex thinking into sort of the fewer words.

Requires discipline. It requires judgment and a real understanding of what’s going on and what other people need in order to be effective with leveraging that framework or model. Anyone can explain something at length and be really nuanced. Few can reduce it to something simple enough to remember and use, and that is exactly why strong frameworks matter.

They’re not shortcuts. They are proof that the thinking underneath is solid. Now, for those of you now, if you are very analytical, I know this can feel hard because you’re thinking about all the edge cases and they don’t fit into a model, but that’s exactly the work to do. Your model doesn’t need to fit all the sort of edge cases out there.

It needs to be effective. People will need to feel like using this model is helping them most of the time. Um, I’m gonna give you another quick example on this. Simon Sinek, uh, uses this framework called the   📍 Golden Circle. Now the idea beha behind the golden circle wasn’t actually new. That idea of purpose driven leadership kind of existed for a long time.

It’s all about starting with why. Instead of what, and that is not really groundbreaking philosophy, but what Sinek, did was he codified it. He gave it a structure, a visual even. Right? Three clear elements.

Why, how what? Logical flow, easy to remember, easy to teach, easy to visualize. And that model spread faster than any single keynote or book ever could or that. Old philosophy that purpose-driven leadership. People kind of talked about it, but they didn’t use a framework like the Golden Circle one. Simon Sinek took that a wisdom, and he created a framework and a structure and clearly labeled it.

That’s super easy to grasp. It’s a good visual. And he would go out and teach that. People had like an aha moment, not because it was new, but because it was so simple that it clicked. And it became more tangible. 

And with that, they could easily explain it to their team. They could use it in a strategy session. Uh, it became a tool, no longer just a philosophy or an idea. And so that is the power of simplicity. It’s not to dumb things down for the sake of it.

It’s about simplifying to make something complex, more accessible,

so ideally your framework is something that can fit on one page, maybe one slide, but it also opens doors to deeper thinking. People realize it’s not just, oh, we open an email, we write the email, we send it. People are like, oh, duh. Okay. That’s, that’s not very profound. It’s really about something that you take a complex issue, you then you simplify it.

Okay. Another quick example. In our leadership development work, we use the a PS model. Same work. What I noticed from coaching over and over, and talking to leaders day in and day out, working on their goals, their development, working with HR teams and CEOs to help them build stronger leaders internally, what I notice is that it always boils down to three things.

It’s either we’re building awareness, self-awareness of how we operate, how other people operate. It’s about clear leadership principles that are grounded in values, either personal values of how we want to be as a leader, and then how do we show that what our guiding principles or company values. If you are a company that values collaboration or innovation, then what are the leadership.

Principles that you wanna cultivate in your organization. That’s an important second part. And then the third part that fuels leadership growth is the leadership system. So A for awareness, P for principles and s for system. It’s those

three components or buckets that we have to fill in order to create leadership growth. The system by the way, is all the routines, the practices. It could be the behaviors, the practical things, and ideally things that you do on a regular basis. There’s some kind of routine or cadence to it. But it operates as a system and it’s coherent with your principles and your awareness of understanding what, who you are, what your preference are, who your team is, what the org, what they need, what the team needs.

All of these three things come together, are aligned, and we fill each bucket as we go. That is a framework that we developed and practice at our cova with our clients. Just to add here, one more example now let’s get a bit more practical. I’m gonna walk you through four steps to help you get started on this process. Now, if you’re driving, you’re at the gym, don’t worry, keep this super simple. But if you can

grab a pen and paper to write things down as we go.  So step one is to isolate a high value problem, right? Start with something you are uniquely qualified to speak to. It might be hiring, building marketing campaigns, evaluating partnerships, solving technical problems, setting goals and priorities for your team.

Whatever that may be. It could be leadership, it could be your technical domain. It it does not matter. What matters is that you have pattern recognition. Others do not yet have, or you have experience and expertise. In that niche or in that field. Also. Look for a problem that shows up repeatedly, right?

Something that may create friction or confusion. For the a PS model, one of the things we realized is, oh, leaders have a hard time figuring out like how do they grow? And some people will. Really gravitate towards, like, I wanna get to know myself better and that’s gonna make me a better leader.

Other people were really tactical and wanting to pick up like leadership behaviors, but we can’t just do one without the other. And so that was the problem and to simplify in our communication to say, this is good, but it’s one of three components. We need to work on all three of them in parallel for you to have

sustainable and significant leadership growth. Right? So that is the repeatable problem that we’ve detected.

It could, by the way, also be something that is poorly handled by existing models or frameworks. If people come to you with the same issue or venting about something or asking for advice and then still lack a clear tool to solve it. You are probably getting close. There might be something there for you to do.

So pay attention to what you explain over and over again. Notice the moments where you think, man, I’ve said this 10 times this month. The issues others consistently struggle with, or maybe we’re sort of the, the standard or default approach just don’t seem to work.

That repetition is not accidental and we should ignore it. It is really the raw material for a framework that probably only you can create. So that’s number one.   Number two is to now codify how you solve it. So you reverse engineer your best work.

What decisions do you make consistently? What do you notice that other people miss? How do you think about the problem or the process? What sequence actually works in practice? Look at your last three success. For example, you could look at your last three successes in this area. What was the pattern?

What did you do first? What trade-offs did you make? Where did you push back? Where did you compromise, like. Really inspect those situations. I personally like to use mind maps or one of those like large posters to write everything down because it allows me to then see it on one page and I can let all this sink in and before I know it, patterns and simplifications connections start to emerge.

So if you really wanna get into it. Write down everything that you know about that problem or that challenge. All the resources, all the approaches, the examples, the case studies that you have, all of that. Put it on paper, then let it sink in now your first draft may still be too complicated, right?

Don’t sweat that. It’s going to have the 12 steps in there. 17 sub points. And all the caveats, that’s okay. But once you have that, you can now see, okay, what is truly important here? How can I cut this down? What are the core elements and what sort of the minimum viable structure that captures the essence of it, the insights.

Let the other things sort of fall to the side. It does not have to cover all edge cases as we talked about earlier.  Then step number three is to design for recall and use. So this is where often people struggle. They build something that makes sense to them, but then it doesn’t stick with others. So if other people can’t explain your framework to someone else, it won’t stick.

You need three things here. A clear name please. No farfetched acronyms. Don’t do that. Need to be the name. Like for us it’s the a PS method. It need to be something that’s memorable and something that’s memorable, or maybe it’s also something that hints at what it does.

The Golden Circle. I actually don’t quite know where the golden is coming from,

but Simon Sinek might have chosen that term to emphasize how valuable it is, right? The rewards of following this process. And then follow a simple structure. Ideally three to five elements or process steps. Our brains love patterns of three.

They also love visuals. So if you can sketch something on a whiteboard, and it’s memorable, like a flywheel, for example, that’s great. If you can keep it to three to five, either elements or steps, that also makes it memorable. Ask yourself if someone else could explain it without having slides or additional information that they can read.

Someone else could explain it and then a third person would actually get it. And if that’s true, then you’re on the right track. Way to make this memorable is really to prioritize the cleanest, the elegance of it a bit more than trying to make it as complete as possible. ’cause again, once you’re trying to make it complete and all inclusive, it likely gets too complicated.

It will live on your slide or your paper, and then die with that. People won’t we call it? So you want something that’s like 80% of the solution, but a hundred percent memorable. That will be far better for you than to try to make it a hundred percent of the solution and 0% memorable.

Okay?  Now step four is to validate before you broadcast. So don’t launch this on LinkedIn before you test it with real people. Again, ideally you have a coach or someone else who’s helping you with this. Run it by your team, use it with clients. See where people get stuck, what language resonates, what actually changes behavior.

Fine. Tune it right before you make it official. And this is critical because you are going to learn things in the process. Maybe your terminology is confusing. Maybe one of your steps is actually two steps. Maybe people skip the third element because it doesn’t feel necessary. Collect that data, collect proof.

When does it work, when does it not? What adjustments would make it better? Again, both in quality and in being more memorable. And then once you have evidence that it’s actually helping people solve real problems, once you see that they get it and they’re able to. Share back or pass it on to someone else, that’s when you can start to broadcast it

more widely. And I actually at that point do recommend writing a LinkedIn post about it and inviting people to comment on it. ’cause it now actually, it’s your intellectual property, it’s your ip. It’s now your thought leadership. It’s now something that you bring to the table for your current company, how you wanna grow with them, or if you were to go elsewhere, you would talk about your framework as well. Now, many frameworks, not all of them, but many of them evolve. They may be living assets, not necessarily a finished product. You might be refining it over years as you learn more about how people use them.  Okay, now I wanna talk a little bit about what not to do, because I see these two mistakes too much. Mistake number one is creating frameworks that describes something rather than being a guide,

a framework that just categorizes things isn’t useful, like. Here are four types of managers. Yeah. We have a quiz that says what manager archetype are you check the show notes, take the quiz. Is this helpful?

But it’s not a framework, it’s just a category it provides awareness, it provides insights. It tells you more about potential blind spots. It’s a tool for you to reflect and learn, not a framework. While it may give you some tips, it doesn’t really help. Beyond that, your framework really needs to help people make decisions or take actions and not just be some taxonomy.

Mistake number two is to over-engineer complexity, to signal intelligence. We all wanna look and appear smart, but if your framework needs a 30 minute explanation before someone can use it, you failed. And I’m gonna really hone this in because it’s such a common mistake.

Complexity is easy, simplicity is hard. Aim for the simplicity. Do the work to simplify it. Now, right now you probably have years of experience. You’ve solved heart problems, you figured things out, and you have insights. But again, if that knowledge stays in your head, if you are explaining it slightly differently, every time someone asks, you’re not creating leverage.

So frameworks are how you scale your expertise. They’re how you transfer that judgment, discernment. Not just instructions, they’re also how you lead when you are not in the room. While this is a nice to have, it’s not about becoming a thought leader for the sake of speaking GI gigs, although great if that happens, but it’s about your responsibility as a leader to elevate others, to support others and becoming better in their work or their ways of thinking.

It’s also about your impact. So if you figured something out that can help others navigate complexity faster, codify it, make it teachable, make it repeatable.

So if you can answer that question, what problem do people consistently come to you for? What process or approach to work do you have nailed down? But it lifts in your head. , If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with another leader who needs to hear it.

Who would benefit from hearing this, and if you haven’t already, please make sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss the next episode. And it helps us reach more leaders just like you. Thanks so much again. I’m Ram Shah. Now you go build your model. I’ll see you next time.

 If you enjoy this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader. People love to work with. This includes a free master class on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out@ourcova.org forward slash masterclass.

The second resource is my best-selling book, the confident and competent new manager, how to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out at our cova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there.

You can find all those links

In the show notes down below.

Reflection & Discussion Questions:

1. Why is it important for leaders to invest in their leadership growth?
2. How does investing in leadership development contribute to job advancement and salary increases?
3. What are some potential consequences of neglecting your leadership development?
4. How can you recognize and address your blind spots?
5. What role does ongoing leadership development play in creating fulfilling work environments?