Managing Leadership^®

The project management mindset is an excellent tool to employ for almost any manager at any level engaged in any activity. With particular respect to our current discussion, it has the following three key beneficial features:

Clear taskings. It creates carefully structured and defined tasks with clear operational standards and completion deadlines.

Operational integration. It relates tasks to each other in the context of a larger project of which they are a part. These relationships are neither casual nor simplistic. They are precisely defined with regard to their degrees of interdependence. For example, the output of task A may be the input only for task B, and thus apparently irrelevant to task C. However, the output of task B (together with those of other tasks) may be the necessary input(s) for initiation of task C. The project management mindset encourages one to develop and retain this vital sense of operational integration.

Strategic integration. The outcome of the overall project itself has a specific purpose or role to play in the organization‘s plans and goals. Every aspect of every activity of the project, beginning with its initiation, is thus never pursued in strategically detached isolation, but is pulled toward and disciplined by its part in producing the ultimate project outcome.

Almost any assignment any manager has can be viewed as such a set of interrelated tasks. The key for a specialist, however, is to focus, depending on his or her unique circumstances on the last two points: operational and strategic integration.

It doesn’t matter if the outcome is a discrete result at an appointed time – such as might be the case with a special assignment, or if it is a general state of affairs or output that is the purpose of the procedural or functional division in which the manager works. In either event it is important to invest the specific tasks you happen to be performing – or, more broadly, the specialty in which you currently find yourself – with the wider organizational purpose for which you are doing it.

This gives your work the motive force and managerial discipline you need – the traction – to help you make meaningful progress. It also helps ensure that you avoid becoming organizationally irrelevant through your isolation or, even worse, an outright drain on organizational energy through misguided devotion to your specialty.

Cultivating this frame of mind is a very effective way to drive your own individual thinking and actions, as well as those of your team. But perhaps just as importantly, it also helps you to retain and deepen the broader intellectual skills and outlook you will need later in your career as a manager.

There is, of course, another aspect to this problem of the parts drifting away from contribution to the whole. We will attempt to address that tomorrow. See you then!

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Today’s tip: In view of our recent discussions of the meaning of shareholder activism, please view this interesting coverage, from The Economist, of how it is currently playing out in Japan.

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