Leadership is now available for everyone, effortlessly!
Robin Wikström, Senior Researcher at PBI
Johnny Långstedt, PhD Student at Åbo Akademi University
As discussed in a previous blog post, there is an increasing need to develop new types of tools for aiding organizations with making decisions. It is important to embrace the thought that these tools should not only address established processes, but preferably introduce new ways of thinking and acting.
Leadership has traditionally been something related to CEO’s, ex. Steve Jobs, these figures have been exalted by their person to near divine dimensions. Not surprisingly, leadership is something of a mythical trait associated with people with more or less eccentric character traits. Relying on one person to lead an agile decentralized organization - such as project businesses tend to be, if they aren’t they should be! – is a foolhardy strategy. Empowering the operational managers to lead – rather than manage! - their teams and projects will result in a considerably smoother execution of any task.
We set forth on a mission to de-mystify leadership and give managers the appropriate tools to lead their teams and projects. PBI, together with Åbo Akademi University, developed a framework that is based on the ten universal motivational type values defined by Schwartz (1992). By contextualizing the motivational types to represent scenarios that project managers are confronted with in their projects, it becomes possible to identify what type of argumentation and actions to use with the various actors when leading the project network and simultaneously avoid unnecessary friction.
It is a fact that operational managers shape the daily culture of the organization, their work will make a difference and we strive towards supporting exactly that. With the challenge management framework we see to it that managers become leaders. Challenge Management 2.0 offers managers an agile and powerful tool to frame their cases in a complex environment. It offers the user specific frameworks for attracting stakeholders to accept his ideas. This is, for instance, especially valuable if one needs to change the attitudes of the project members to address specific challenges that might arise during the course of the project.
We believe that today’s leaders have less time but more to achieve, therefore they might become overwhelmed with tasks and struggle with understanding their counterparts. We solve this challenge by giving the leaders a tool through which they can effortlessly find the potential challenges and create an efficient strategy for addressing them.
Johnny Långstedt (M.A.) is a PhD Student at Åbo Akademi University, Department of Comparative Religion. His research focuses on the role human values have in increasing performance in projects and organizations.
Robin Wikström (D.Sc) is a Senior Researcher at PBI. His research background is in decision support systems, and at the moment, he develops new services and products related to organizational signal systems.