Introduction


This is a draft of the manual for public review. If you have any comments, please email them to info@omimo.org. Please check back for the final version.

This Leader’s Behavior Compass, or Compass for short, is a structured model of observable behaviors that make most leaders more effective 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.

Definition of the project ecosystem

In OMIMO, the phrase “project ecosystem” refers to the five 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.

Definition of a leader

A leader is anyone who actively and repeatedly causes a group of people to act in a way that enables or improves the achievement of expected results.

Portfolio managers, program sponsors, program managers, project sponsors, project managers, and team managers are examples of leaders in the project ecosystem. However, there are also some leaders in this ecosystem who are not managers.

Leader vs. manager

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

All managers are leaders, but not all leaders are managers. A normal team member who’s not in charge as a manager or team lead but actively and repeatedly guides other team members toward the right path is a leader. Organizations should uncover such leaders and consider converting them to managers so that they can become more effective.

A leader who becomes a manager gains organizational power, which is an additional source of power they can use to get results. While that usually makes the leader more effective, the level of trust people have in the leader can increase or decrease when they become a manager depending on people’s attitude towards the organization. For this reason, in rare cases, the organization may find it more effective not to make the leader a manager but to support them in other ways.

Minimalism

The Compass doesn’t provide you with every potentially effective behaviors: It’s a minimalist model that avoids clutter by focusing on the most essential behaviors. These are behaviors that have the biggest effect and are necessary for most leaders most of the time.

Listing all potentially effective behaviors would result in a list many times larger than 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 and balance them carefully when needed.

Enabling and sustaining behaviors

Behaviors need multiple enablers and sustainers such as skills, habits, confidence, resources, and perseverance. The right formula for enabling and sustaining each behavior can be very different from one person to another. This makes it important for individuals to pay attention to and take responsibility for discovering what works for them, without expecting an outside resource or person to give them a detailed, working recipe.

Behavioral model

The Compass is more than the sum of its behaviors. What’s extra is the “behavioral model” that structures 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, no 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 adapted 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, no matter how well we safeguard, we’ll always run into some problems, and when that happens, we should be resilient enough to get over them and move on.

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. The Leadership Self-Assessment can help you by evaluating your self-reported behaviors and reporting your strength in each of the categories in the Compass.

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 by checking their combined results, you will know which topics need more emphasis in any courses you provide about the project ecosystem.