It’s Time to Recognize the Project Manager as a Leader
The most challenging leadership positions are the informal roles where an individual leads based on his or her credibility and capability without the backing of a formal reporting structure. These positions are often characterized by a high-level or responsibility for results with little direct authority over the people doing the work. The role of Project Manager matches this description perfectly, with organizations increasingly looking to the individuals charged with project or program management to play key roles in executing on strategic priorities.
Unfortunately, in many organizations, the role of Project Manager is inappropriately disconnected from the strategy process and is often viewed and treated by executives as a mid-level or administrative role. This is wrong. Senior executives would be wise to tap into the unique skills, insights and capabilities of the best Project Managers as they look to build out their leadership teams and to propel their organizations faster.
How do Ideas Turn Into Actions in Your Firm? Hint: Check Your Leadership Culture
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Product Management
Seriously. If you are at or near the top of the food chain in your organization, this is one of those perplexing questions that can have you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, asking yourself, "Yeah, how do insights and ideas turn into actions in our business?" and "Who is really responsible for new ideas here?"
This is a particularly bothersome issue if you are thinking in terms of strategy and wanting to make certain that profound insights and ideas gained in the market are turned into actions that create value for your stakeholders.
Stress at Work, Great Leadership Practices and Ignoring Bad Advice
Every once in awhile, a number of articles or blog posts converge nicely to build on each other. Today over at Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog in his post entitled Sunday Afternoons, Wally offers his perspective on an article describing that many people report feeling a high degree of anxiety about work as Monday looms in the foreground. Wally’s guidance for the leader’s role in helping eradicate the causes of this unproductive stress is priceless and timeless (go ahead and click over and read it) and it puts the exclamation point on the leadership themes found in several other recent articles and posts.
Improve Managerial Effectiveness by Broadening Span of Control?
There’s a great, thought-provoking article today in the March 24, 2008 Wall Street Journal. by George Anders, entitled: Overseeing More Employees with Fewer Managers. The sub-title of the article identifies the source of this so-called trend: Consultants Are Urging Companies to Loosen Their Supervising Views.
Want to Change? Manage Strategy in Bursts!
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Project Management, Strategy
Traditional strategic planning approaches often fail to deliver the results that firms require to jump start growth or pull out of a sustained decline. Legacy approaches emphasize a periodic focus on strategy—often an annual refresh against a long-range plan. This “strategy as an event” approach is increasingly obsolete in a world that changes overnight, with markets being born, maturing and dying at hyper-speed. Instead, what is needed is a more dynamic means for professionals to experiment, innovate and to assess results and refine activities in near-real time.
Organizations that learn to work in “Strategy Bursts” are able to learn, adapt and refine their strategic activities faster than more plodding competitors, but this new style requires learning and internalizing a new approach to strategy management and execution. For many leaders and executives, succeeding with this new model requires letting go of old strategy habits and biases.
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