Protecting value

A set of questions to challenge projects, priorities and busywork

#12 - 2026/02/01

Welcome to The Intentional Manager, a pragmatic and practical take on strategy, leadership and change management that you can use.

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Once value is defined (here), the real challenge begins: ensuring that daily work actually produces it and protecting it relentlessly - because your results depend on it.

Lead by asking questions

Questions are the most powerful tools at a leader’s disposal: they slow things down, force thinking into the open and protect the other person’s ego.

To steer conversations toward value, I consistently rely on the following questions, adapted from from No Bullshit Leadership by Martin G. Moore:

1. If we invest the organization’s resources in this work, how big is the payback?

2. Where, specifically, will the value from this work materialize?

3. When will we see the value from this work?

4. Who’s accountable for ensuring that this value is captured?

5. Are all the elements of this project critical to delivering value?

6. If you could ask me for one thing to increase the value of your initiative, what would it be?

7. If you could only deliver three of your 20 projects, which three would you choose?

8. If everything goes exactly to plan, does this solve our core problem?

9. Is this expenditure really unavoidable?

In practice

To make these questions work for you, you might need to tweak them a bit and choose which ones apply to each situation.

Example 1 - as direct manager

You lead a Clinical Operations team, “value” is defined as “obtaining high-quality data to fuel publications and regulatory submissions” and a person in your team proposes to include a new hospital in the trial:

• If we include them, how many patients can we expect and how much effort will be needed to achieve the desired quality of the data?

• Considering activation time and follow-up, when will we start adding patients to the database?

• Who in the team will be accountable for this hospital performance?

• Thinking of everything else you have on your plate right now, would you consider this among the top three activities in terms of increasing our data quality?

• If this goes exactly according to plan, does it help us generate data on the specific clinical outcome of interest?

• What are the risks?

• Do we truly need this or could we obtain the same data from an existing hospital instead?

Example 2 - among peers

You are a member of the Marketing team, “value” is defined as “increasing customer retention” and a colleague has proposed to launch a new social media campaign. You know that your boss is prone to approve it because it looks cool and it will create internal visibility, yet you believe it will not materially improve retention:

• Great proposal! Do we have an estimate of the net effect it will have in terms of customer retention?

• How much effort would we need to put in setting up the project prior to launching it?

• Which of us will own this project and be accountable for the results?

• I am wondering whether X and Y are truly critical or whether we could do without. What do you think?

• Considering the currently active projects, where would this rank in terms of potential to increase customer retention?

• A few months ago our competitor did a similar campaign, but it backfired because of X: how are you thinking about avoiding the same?

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If your calendar, projects and conversations are not explicitly tied to value, you are managing activity, not outcomes.

I have yet to find a more effective way to close that gap.

Thanks for reading,

Luca