How to Apply the Working Together Management System in Notion (Includes Template)
Who you are and what you do are the fundamental axioms to define precisely when it comes to leading a group of people. When those two things are not clear, there is confusion, lack of understanding, frustration, and passive aggression. Most of the situations you say you don’t want are caused by your avoidance of those situations.
There are many frameworks you can use to lead and manage your business. Picking one and running an experiment before deciding whether to stick with it is likely the most effective way to figure out what works and doesn’t for you in this historical moment. The environment and you change over time, which makes some things obsolete and others worth exploring and uncovering further.
A modern framework for leadership is the “Working Together Management System”, popularized by Alan Mulally, “former President and CEO of the Ford Motor Company, which was struggling during the late-2000s recession before Mulally used his teamwork-oriented philosophy to save the company” (The Knowledge Project, 2023).
If you are currently leading your company without a clear underlying framework and principles, this can be for you. I have systematized the Working Together system in a plug-and-play (and customizable) system that you can test right away as a way to align yourself and your team toward the version of the world you wish to shape. Evolution starts and spreads from and through you.
Breakdown of the Working Together Management System
There are some specific components of the framework as defined by Mulally.
Principles and practices
These are the foundation, creating a healthy organizational culture with clear operating processes and expected behaviors for all participants and stakeholders. Everyone commits to these with zero tolerance for violations.
Culture of Love by Design: People are given the honest opportunity to contribute their ideas and skills to the organization. “People first, love ‘em up”. Behaviors follow incentives, and this is a core incentive that fosters engaged contribution.
Operating Processes: These are the reliable, transparent processes that guide how the organization manages itself, shares information, makes decisions, manages risk, and stays aligned to deliver on its vision and strategy—more on these in the sections below.
Expected Behaviors: The agreed-upon standards of behavior for everyone in the organization, ensuring accountability and respect. Explicitly stating standards makes them real. It may sound obvious, and it is not. Writing up exactly what you expect requires effort, clarity, and a degree of vulnerability (to open up and share what you believe to be true about the world, rather than hiding behind layers of seeming correctness for fear of disappointing someone).
Creating Value for All: The ultimate objective is to deliver value to all stakeholders (everyone involved in the ecosystem of the business), including shareholders, employees, suppliers, partners, customers, etc.
Governance
Governance refers to how the organization manages itself through leadership and processes.
All Stakeholders: Governance is designed to include all stakeholders for broad engagement and alignment.
Board of Directors: The board plays a formal oversight and decision-making role within the governance structure.
Leadership Team: Leaders are fully committed to the vision, strategy, and holding themselves and their teams accountable to the system’s processes and behaviors. Again, it may sound banal, except it is not when considered in practice. You must define the game(s) you are playing for them to comply with your preferences; otherwise, you play games other people created, which can be ok if you consciously decide so.
Creating Value Roadmap: A value roadmap is a structured, visual representation of your team’s long-term strategy for creating and delivering value. It connects the vision and strategy to specific initiatives, milestones, and performance metrics over time, incorporating analysis of the business environment, including market trends, customer needs, technology, and competition. You continually update the Value Roadmap to reflect changes and opportunities (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Kerr & Phaal, 2022; Vishnevskiy et al., 2016).
The value roadmap differs from the business plan. The business plan provides the “what” and “how” for organizational success, while the value roadmap visually connects strategy to execution.
A few definitions to make the above statements clear and concrete:
Strategy: what game you play and how you play it. This is your blueprint for making decisions daily. Read about business strategy in Seth Godin’s book and watch this video by Roger Martin to learn more. To delve deeper, you may then expand to source books such as The Art of War by Sun Tzu. You must pick a strategy. If you don’t, there is no identity and clarity around who you are, and such weakness most often leads to dissolution. I like this analogy I once heard from Roger Martin: strategy is your overarching philosophy of what and how you eat; tactics/plan is what you specifically eat today for lunch. When the overarching philosophy is clear, the tactics unfold naturally. Importantly, strategy is constantly in flux because you and the environment change.
Vision: what you wish the world to be in a few decades from now. What impact does your business specifically have on the people you serve, and maybe the world at large? No need to fake your vision with generic, meaningless words that you don’t even know where they came from. Define your identity, who you serve, what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. And the vision will unfold. If you are in the early stages, maybe there is no long-term vision. That’s ok, and the vision will unfold over time as things become stable. Humility and honesty pay off. You may be unsure about how to even define your business personality, or find it very challenging. In truth, you have preferences and inclinations. Start from those. Let them come forth and own them, instead of hiding them in the background out of shame. Showing your face attracts the right people, and you will experience a great sense of alignment (living through truth).
Initiatives: short/medium-term projects you undertake to implement your strategy and serve your customers in the best way possible, delivering on your promises. They can be tracked in a project management system, ideally centralized with the other components, so that all context is visible and accessible.
Milestones: checkpoints across initiatives. Since initiatives can last a long time and involve complexity (lots of interwoven and diverse inputs and outputs), milestones exist to define how you measure progress on the initiatives. What specific things will be done by X weeks/months that will signify progress in the right direction?
Performance metrics: how do you define success on your strategy? What metrics most accurately reflect the health and status of your business? Some metrics are useful, others miss the mark, others yet are useless and distracting (often vanity metrics that don’t move the needle). Be aware of that and define metrics accordingly—it may take trial and error over many months. The metrics you track drive incentives. Incentives drive behavior.
If you use standard industry metrics for the sake of convenience and fear, but they are not aligned with your actual strategy, you get misalignment (chaos, a sense of fakeness), and after a while, you will wonder why. Make sure what you track is relevant and aligned with the behaviors you wish to see in the world. Metrics are tracked at specific intervals (typically weekly).
Scott runs a boutique custom surfboard shop. His work is top-quality and meticulous—skills he learned from his grandfather, who taught him the craft as a child. He has shaped boards for elite US surfers and commands premium prices. Scott deliberately limits himself to three concurrent projects and completes 90% of the work by hand.
For a business like Scott's, conversion rate would be a misleading metric. He works with a small number of highly qualified clients, not high-volume traffic. Instead, revenue per customer serves as a better performance metric—it reflects business health and helps Scott determine whether his pricing strategy aligns with his premium positioning.
| Component | Description | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| Vision | The organization's long-term purpose and aspirations | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Kingsly, 2023) |
| Strategy | The approach for achieving the vision, including market, product, and operational strategies | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Vishnevskiy et al., 2016) |
| Business Plan | Unified, actionable plan detailing objectives, actions, and resource allocation | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Kingsly, 2023; Sary & Winarno, 2025) |
| Value Roadmap | Visual timeline linking strategy to value-creating initiatives and milestones | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Kerr & Phaal, 2022; Vishnevskiy et al., 2016) |
| Performance Review | Regular assessment of progress, risks, and opportunities | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Kerr & Phaal, 2022) |
Business Plan Review (BPR): A weekly meeting where the entire leadership team reviews progress on the organization's value creation roadmap and business plan. Each leader presents updates on their area, including strategy, status, forecasts, and issues requiring special attention.
Importantly, the BPR does not address in-depth problem-solving ("gems"); instead, these are handled in separate monthly meetings dedicated to strategy, products, production, and people (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Gottfredson, 2023). The BPR is a powerful tool to stay on track, focused, and aligned on the mission, while cultivating a culture of respect and empowerment.
Part of you may think that this is “fluff”, apparently cute hypotheses that don’t apply to your real world and business. The truth is, what you believe is as true as you wish it to be, to a significant degree. Looking at it evolutionarily, having regular meetings to discuss the tribe’s concerns, open issues, and overall interpersonal and environmental situations makes sense.
When you work together, you are part of the same tribe, and developing trust and respect requires tending the garden of relationships. You can only tend to the garden through repeated exposure. Exposure builds trust and aligns everyone who stays to contribute to the flourishing of your tribe.
You may predict emotional discomfort at the idea of holding regular meetings with the same people, maybe worrying that you run out of things to discuss, or that you will be criticized for your lack of confidence in handling such situations. In truth, this is the avoidance of something due to fear. Almost all “problems” stem from avoidance (Joe Hudson, 2025). Avoidance acts as a deterrent to action and leaves you wondering what it would be like to act, which creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that makes you smaller, less aligned, living from a lack of truth, which creates many kinks in your nervous system, leading to health and psychological obstacles you may be “surprised” about.
| Element | Description | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting Frequency | Weekly review of business plan and value roadmap | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Gottfredson, 2023) |
| Participants | Entire leadership team | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Gottfredson, 2023) |
| Focus Areas | Strategy, status, forecasts, issues needing attention | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Gottfredson, 2023) |
| Culture | Open communication, respect, empowerment | (Collard & Ireland, 2024; McArthur et al., 2025) |
| Continuous Improvement | Ongoing adaptation and refinement of plans | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022; Gottfredson, 2023) |
Special Attention Meetings: Other meetings designed to address “gems” (specific issues) are special attention meetings. These meetings are focused on problem-solving, unlike the BPR described above.
Focus on Critical Issues: Special attention meetings are dedicated to addressing “reds” (issues without a current solution) and “yellows” (issues with a solution in progress) identified during the weekly Business Plan Review (BPR) (Mulally & McArthur, 2022).
Monthly Cadence: Special attention meetings are held monthly and are organized around four key areas: strategy, products, production, and people. Each meeting brings together relevant leaders and stakeholders to work through the most pressing challenges in detail (Mulally & McArthur, 2022).
Open, Supportive Culture: The meetings are positive, with a “find-a-way” attitude, encouraging team members to surface problems without fear of blame. Again, notice how avoidance and fear are at the core of any perceived problem. Be aware of such truth and act accordingly.
| Meeting Type | Frequency | Focus Areas | Purpose | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Plan Review (BPR) | Weekly | All business areas | Status updates, identify issues | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022) |
| Special Attention Meetings | Monthly | Strategy, Products, Production, People | Deep-dive problem-solving for "gems" | (Mulally & McArthur, 2022) |
Resources
Collard, D., & Ireland, S. (2024). THE BUSINESS PLAN REVIEW—THE HEARTBEAT OF OUR ORGANIZATION. Leader to Leader. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20846
Gottfredson, R. (2023). ELEVATED LEADERS EMPLOY ELEVATED SYSTEMS THAT ELEVATE THEIR ORGANIZATIONS. Leader to Leader. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20778
McArthur, S., Mulally, A., Dornseif, D., Lombardi, M., Morton, P., Andersen, L., Ostrowski, R., & Roundhill, J. (2025). PEOPLE “WORKING TOGETHER”© TO PRODUCE THE PREFERRED BOEING 777 AIRPLANE FAMILY. Leader to Leader, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20891
Vishnevskiy, K., Karasev, O., & Meissner, D. (2016). Integrated roadmaps for strategic management and planning. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 110, 153-166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2015.10.020
Kerr, C., & Phaal, R. (2022). Roadmapping and Roadmaps: Definition and Underpinning Concepts. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 69, 6-16. https://doi.org/10.1109/tem.2021.3096012
Sary, I., & Winarno, A. (2025). Strategies and Challenges of Building a Successful Business Model for Start-Ups. Formosa Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. https://doi.org/10.55927/fjmr.v4i5.211
Mulally, A., & McArthur, S. (2022). A CONVERSATION WITH ALAN MULALLY ABOUT HIS “Working Together”© STRATEGIC, OPERATIONAL, AND STAKEHOLDER‐CENTERED MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. Leader to Leader. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20628
Kingsly, P. (2023). Components of a Bankable Business Plan. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4391918
