How To Use The MOVE Framework To Be A More Effective Leader

In their new book, Real-Time Leadership, leadership coaches David Noble and Carol Kauffman teach leaders how to use their unique MOVE framework to help leaders adjust their reflexive reactions and optimize their responses to any situation – including unexpected and complex leadership challenges.

The MOVE framework includes these four key elements:

M: Be Mindfully Alert. Attune yourself to the three essential dimensions of leadership: what you want or need to achieve, who you want to be as a leader, and how to help unlock others’ potential.

O: Generate Options. Identify at least four pathways forward by making decisions as each challenge requires, from slow and pensive, to whip fast.

V: Validate Your Vantage Point. Choose the best reality-based point of view – even if it wasn’t your own or initial thought. Leaders can be prone to missteps if they’re unclear on their perspective.

E: Engage and Effect Change. Do this first as an individual, then at scale – or all else is moot.

“The MOVE framework is applicable to immediate challenges as well as longer-term challenges that you need to tackle in real time as they unfold,” explain the authors. “The framework takes some practice to master, but it can be helpful to you right now.” They add that you can use the elements of MOVE in any sequence you want to tailor to your situation.

Read this informative and powerful playbook to discover a greater in-depth understanding of what constitutes each of the four key MOVE framework elements.

Carol Kauffman

David Noble

Today, the authors share these additional insights with us:

Question: Can leaders train their employees to make better choices in the moment – even in a crisis?

Noble/Kauffman: Yes, the MOVE framework applies to everyone: current leaders, aspiring leaders and to individual contributors. It can help employees be crystal clear on their goals; create many pathways to a win; ensure that their vision is clear of distortion and blind spots; and then engage and effect change in their organization.

Question: Why are today’s businesses and organizations facing a leadership crisis? How should leaders prepare?

Noble/Kauffman: Leaders are generally well equipped to deal with familiar types of crises, like a system outage, or opportunities such as new product launches.

But as volatility and uncertainty continue their upward climb, leaders need to be able to pivot and respond to new types of crises as well as new types of opportunities that are presenting themselves on an unprecedented scale and scope. Things like advances in generative AI, fast moving social and geopolitical issues, and more.

During the past three years, leaders have been playing catchup on surprises like COVID, inflation, supply chain disruptions, armed conflict in the world, social issues, and the changing nature of work.

Now, the world needs more real time leaders. It’s time to get ahead of the curve to anticipate what’s ahead and to make the best leadership moves when new developments actually happen. To do this, leaders need a new playbook to tackle the biggest opportunities of their careers at work, and they need a lifeline when facing unfamiliar types of crises. This is what we show leaders how to do in our Real-Time Leadership book.

Question: Why is kindness the key to truly effective leadership?

Noble/Kauffman: We believe the world needs more Real Time Leaders – to us this means being even more effective at driving outcomes, and also developing personally to become even better people. Cultivating character strengths like kindness, perspective and curiosity are factors that unlock personal fulfillment and create followership. Who you are as a person is inextricably tied to how great a leader you are.

Question: Tell us about a current leader who responded to a crisis with exceptional expertise. How did they do it?

Noble/Kauffman: Noelle was facing a major catastrophe and she had only hours to act. The FDA had just recalled one of her major products. Her instinct was to fight and attack the announcement, but she was able to name her reflex and see that it would only make things worse. Instead, she quickly scanned and answered three questions that came to mind:

Q: What do I need to do right now?
A: When she reflected, she saw that she needed to safeguard the public by ensuring the recall is done immediately. Then, publicly accept accountability on behalf of the organization while committing to a plan to fix the quality issue.

Q: Who do I want and need to be right now?

A: She needed to be courageous. And to walk the talk around being caring to consumers, employees and all stakeholders.

Q: How can I best relate to others right now?
A: Lean in and activate the organization’s crisis mitigation plan. Lean back and quickly gather more data on remedies. Lean with employees in the organization to let them know she has their backs. Don’t Lean for just a moment, to ground herself and avoid panic.

Noelle practiced what we call three-dimensional leadership: being clear on what she needed to do; clear on who she wanted to be as a person; and clear on how she needed to relate to others.

This allowed her to then make the most of every moment as she worked with her team to generate options to solve the crisis, checked her vantage point to make sure she was seeing reality for what it was rather than what she hoped or feared it to be, and then engaged with all stakeholders to affect their plans. Today, the organization maintains its leadership in its space!

Question: What can any leader start doing today to master leadership in real time?

Noble/Kauffman: Start by asking yourself three questions:

What’s the most important thing I need to accomplish right now? This helps you to get clarity on what you need to do to make the most of every moment.
Who do I want to be, right now? Know which character strengths you want to project, or need to cultivate, in order to achieve your goals. Is it listening, kindness, courage, or something else?
How can you best relate to others to unlock their potential and achieve goals together? This is the Platinum Rule: relating to others how they want and need to be related to, rather than how you need to relate. Do you need to lean in (take an active stand and provide a point of view?); lean back (gather more data, ask questions, get input from others?); lean with (connect with other people, encourage them and believe in them?); or don’t lean (not feel compelled to act in the moment and instead let your intuition tell you what you may be missing?).

Finally, some of my favorite leadership takeaways from the book are:

Your aim is not to treat people how you want to be treated, but to treat them as they need to be treated.
Leadership isn’t just what you say and do. You emanate signals, subconsciously, that others pick up on. They are neurologically aware of how you bring yourself to interpersonal situations, even if they don’t realize it. Therefore, be cognizant of your tone of voice, facial expressions, and be aware that people pick up on authentic communication.
In very big roles it’s not your job to be the specialist, you are the generalist. Draw on the second dimension of leadership to embrace the concept that others know more than you.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book..

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