Introduction


The Compass is a draft now. Please submit your comments in the comment section below or email them to us: info@omimo.org
The review stage ends on 2025-11-01.

This Leader’s Behavior Compass, or Compass for short, is a structured model of observable behaviors that are desirable for most leaders to have most of the time.

The Compass may be useful to many people, but it’s primarily designed for leaders in the project ecosystem. These two key terms are defined as follows in OMIMO.

The project ecosystem

In OMIMO, the phrase “project ecosystem” refers to the 5 levels of management that directly relate to projects and help make sense of them:

Depending on the organization, other types of management outside the project ecosystem, such as operations management, can also have significant impacts on the results of projects.

Leaders

A leader is someone who motivates, guides, and sometimes pushes a group of people toward creating desirable results.

The following are examples of leaders in the project ecosystem:

Leader vs. manager

A manager is a leader who’s officially in charge.

All managers are leaders, but not all leaders are managers. A secretary who’s not in charge as a manager but actively guides people toward the right path is a leader. Healthy environments usually uncover leaders who are not managers and gradually convert them to managers.

The practical difference between a leader who’s a manager and one who’s not a manager is that the former can use organizational power in addition to other sources of power to get results, which makes them potentially more impactful.

Minimalism

The Compass doesn’t provide you with a list of all potentially desirable behaviors: it’s a minimalist model that avoids clutter by focusing on the most essential behaviors. These are behaviors that have the biggest impact and are necessary for most leaders most of the time.

Listing all potentially desirable behaviors would result in a list more than ten times the size of this Compass.

Scope of impact

The behaviors described in the Compass have impacts in four areas:

Leaders should be careful not to underestimate any of these four domains.

Skills

Most behaviors in the Compass are only possible or effective when the leader has certain skills. However, it’s the behaviors that create results, and skills are among the enablers for those behaviors. Besides skills, behaviors require other elements such as habits. That’s why the Compass is focused on behaviors rather than skills.

Moreover, behaviors are actionable and observable, which makes them more practical than abstract skills, especially because many skills often come mixed with distracting, misleading buzzwords.

Behavioral model

The Compass is more than the sum of its behaviors. What’s extra is the “behavioral model” that categorizes the behaviors, as shown in the diagram.

The model starts with the solutions category in the center because the main reason for having leaders is to get results, and solutions are how we achieve that.

Each solution works in a context, and that context constantly changes. Some of these changes make the solution less effective or even irrelevant. As a result, it doesn’t matter how well the solution is designed, we need to constantly adapt it to its environment. That’s why the adaptation category is the second ring in the diagram, surrounding solutions.

The next ring in the diagram is divided into three categories: safeguarding, resilience, and efficiency. These categories help us to be more successful with our adapted solutions. Think of the adaptive solution as the direction, and “efficiency” as our speed in that direction. There may be various difficulties in our path, and we try to avoid them via the safeguarding behaviors. Finally, it doesn’t matter how we move, we’ll always run into some problems; and when that happens, we should be able to get over them and move on, because of our resilience.

The next ring is the people category, because we need more power for designing and adapting solutions, to safeguard them, to make ourselves more resilient, and to move faster.

Having people makes it possible or easier to get results but also makes it necessary to act ethically. That’s why the outer ring that surrounds everything is the ethics category.

How to use the Compass

This Compass can help aspiring leaders as well as experienced ones. One way of using it is to go through the model, discover the gaps, prioritize them, and then start improving those behaviors in yourself by developing new skills and habits.

An alternative way is to use the self-assessment system, which suggests a plan that will potentially bring you the maximum improvement.

(Note: The self-assessment system is under development.)

Finally, in addition to individuals, trainers can also use this model in their courses and workshops. You can ask your attendees to take the self-assessment and give you their report codes, and then you can import all the codes into the self-assessment system to create a list of topics that’s most useful to your audience as a whole.