While many business books tell you how to manage other people, The Effective Executive, a 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker, explains how to manage yourself to be effective.
Drucker defines effectiveness as choosing and doing the right things—that is, the things that significantly improve personal and organizational performance and results. He argues that effectiveness derives from a set of five practices anyone can learn rather than from unique talents or charisma. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.
A leader in management theory and practice for over 60 years, Drucker, who died in 2005, authored 39 books and countless articles, including more than 30 essays in the Harvard Business Review. He’s credited with being the founder of modern management.
(Shortform note: Drucker’s obituary in the New York Times noted that his ideas on management were so influential that a comment from him could change the way top corporate leaders operated. His thinking has continued to inspire business leaders and authors—for example, the late Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Jim Collins (Good to Great), Ken Blanchard, Andrew Grove (High Output Management), Jeff Bezos, Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), and Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek).)
Drucker’s first practice for effectiveness is managing your time. He argues that you first need to understand what you’re currently doing with your time then take control of it. There are three steps: Analyze your time, cut time wasters, and time block. (Shortform note: Drucker's approach differs from the advice in many time management books such as Getting Things Done and The One Thing. These books recommend immediately determining and focusing on what’s most important (prioritizing), rather than first analyzing how you currently spend your time.)
Drucker’s guidelines for tracking and analyzing your time are:
Once you’ve recorded your time for a few weeks, Drucker advises rooting out your time-wasting activities with these steps:
1) Identify and eliminate activities that don’t produce results, including things that don’t need to be done in the first place. For each item on your time record, ask yourself what would happen if you hadn’t done it or don’t do it going forward. If the answer is nothing, stop doing it. Drucker claims that most executives could eliminate about 25% of their activities without anyone noticing; he cites speeches, social events, committee memberships, directorships, and lunch or dinner events as often unnecessary.
(Shortform note: Today, such activities might be considered essential parts of branding, marketing, or networking. A way to evaluate these activities and decide if they’re useful enough to continue is to borrow the lean manufacturing idea of determining which ones are value-added versus non-value-added: Value-added activities add customer value to a business process, product, or service. This aligns with Drucker’s advice to say “no” to doing anything that doesn’t help your organization or enhance your contribution to the organization’s performance.)
2) Determine which activities could be done by someone else, and delegate them. While some people view delegating as being lazy or taking advantage of a subordinate, Drucker emphasizes that as an executive, you’re being paid for your unique contribution to the organization’s performance—and when you allow yourself to be distracted from this by tasks someone else can do, you undercut your effectiveness as well as the organization's.
How to Delegate Effectively
In High Output Management, CEO Andrew Grove identifies the following requirements for effective delegating:
You and the person you’re delegating to need to have the same information and agree on how to do the task.
You can keep the tasks you like doing as long as you’re fully aware of your motivations for not delegating them.
You monitor the person you’re delegating to.
You delegate tasks you’re familiar with, because it’s easier to monitor things you already know how to do.
If you’re delegating decision-making, monitor the decision-making process.
3) Identify the ways in which you waste others’ time (and therefore your own). Drucker advises asking your employees and colleagues what you do that wastes their time (that doesn’t increase their effectiveness or contribution).
You may be doing something that’s productive for you but that still wastes others’ time—for example, requiring an employee to track weekly data and produce a report that you rarely refer to.
Don’t Be a Negative Influence
A Stanford study found that leaders often waste others’ time because they don’t notice subordinates’ needs and problems:
They don’t realize how much work their orders entail.
They micromanage instead of delegating.
They make unthinking comments that employees interpret as orders or criticism, triggering unnecessary work.
They constantly announce new initiatives that conflict or compete with prior initiatives (and take time to adopt).
They prompt employees to work hard to please them or tell them what they want to hear, taking time away from these employees’ core tasks.
The antidote to these issues is to encourage candor and criticism from subordinates and to act on it.
4) Cut time-wasters resulting from poor management. Drucker identifies several types of time-wasters resulting from poor management. Chief among them is wasting time with an excessive number of meetings, which keeps executives and others from getting important work done. (Shortform note: A 2017 HBR article noted that executives spend about 23 hours a week in meetings, up from 10 hours in the 1960s. Other surveys and estimates range much higher—for example, 45 hours a week or 72% of their time.)
Drucker says meetings should be the exception rather than the rule. They are sometimes needed—people have to cooperate by sharing knowledge and information to get a specific task done. But to avoid wasting time, meetings should be focused.
Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting
The key to an effective, focused meeting is arguably having a well-planned and designed agenda. In the Harvard Business Review, Roger Schwarz discusses the steps for designing an effective agenda, including:
Solicit topics from your team and decide which to include in the meeting.
Determine the goal of discussing each topic you include.
Structure the discussion of each topic (time limit, discussion leader, how a decision (if any) will be made).
Share the agenda with participants so they can prepare.
Conduct the meeting by sticking to the agenda.
Debrief at the end of the meeting on what could have gone better.
Read our summary of the HBR article to see our customized agenda template for an effective meeting.
The third step for managing your time (after analyzing it and cutting time-wasters), according to Drucker, is to make the most of the little nonscheduled time you have left (your discretionary time for important tasks that contribute significantly to your company’s performance). He says this typically amounts to only 25% of your total time.
The way to make the most of this time is to consolidate it into blocks as large as possible. Drucker contends that small increments of time are useless—you can’t write a report by spending 15 minutes on it a day. If you try, you won’t get anywhere and will have to start over the next time. But if you can get four or five hours of uninterrupted time, you can create a solid draft that you can flesh out later in smaller time increments. (Shortform note: While time blocking (also called time boxing) is widely recommended and practiced today, it was new when Drucker first wrote about it.)
A Time Blocking Method
In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes one potential time-blocking method:
Plan your day in half-hour blocks.
Make a list of tasks you need to finish in the day. Schedule time for each task to the nearest half-hour.
Schedule time in advance for when you'll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.
Schedule overrun blocks for tasks you suspect might run overtime.
If you have lots of shallow tasks (more than 30-50% time), consider how you can replace these with deeper work.
At the end of the day, review the accuracy of your time blocks.
The second practice for effectiveness is focus, which Drucker defines as focusing on only a few key things and doing them one at a time. (Shortform note: Drucker actually lists focus as his fourth practice. We’ve moved it to #2 because it encompasses prioritizing, which is closely related to Practice #1, managing your time.)
Drucker says the ability to focus is central to executive performance because:
How to Focus
While Drucker emphasizes the need for and value of focusing, he doesn’t discuss how to focus beyond simply scheduling “alone” time. However, later authors discuss how to focus or do deep (focused) work.
For example, in Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that you must strengthen your ability to focus by working it like a muscle. He says that after practicing four steps daily for a few months, you’ll increase your ability to do deep work, and raise your level of concentration:
Schedule when you’ll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.
Set tight deadlines for yourself that require you to concentrate at the limit of your ability to make the deadlines.
Practice productive meditation—think about a problem while you do a low-intensity physical activity, like walking or showering.
Practice memorization techniques.
Multitasking
The opposite of focus is multitasking, which Drucker recognized as unproductive. Gary Keller writes in The One Thing that people can do two things at once—for instance, walk and talk. But like computers, we alternate our focus. A conflict occurs when a new activity requires a brain channel already in use or when one task demands greater attention—for example, when you’re driving and start focusing on a text message instead of on the road.
Downsides of multitasking include:
You get less done.
When you bounce between activities, you lose time as your brain reorients.
You make more mistakes and make bad decisions.
You stress yourself.
After eliminating unproductive activities, Drucker’s next step is deciding which productive tasks and opportunities are priorities—the right tasks on which you concentrate one at a time—and which are non-priorities, things you don’t do.
While most people focus on determining priorities, Drucker contends that consciously deciding your non-priorities is equally important, because non-priorities tend to encroach on priorities unless you actively resist or eliminate them. Non-priorities are tasks you’ve decided you won’t do or opportunities you won’t pursue now, if at all. These are activities that offer little or no significant long-term value.
Identifying Non-Priorities
Several authors, especially sales consultant and author Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog), have built on Drucker’s idea of priorities and non-priorities. To determine what activities you can drop, Tracy recommends these steps:
List the work activities that take the most of your time.
Ask yourself whether you’d pay someone the equivalent of your salary to do each of them. If not, stop doing them—delegate or eliminate them.
Drucker doesn’t give any specific advice on how to set priorities—he says setting priorities requires courage more than analysis. In his view, courage requires that you:
How to Prioritize
In Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy proposes the ABCDE method for prioritizing a to-do list. Write down everything you have to do for the next day. Then, rank each item by marking it with an A, B, C, D, or E, as follows:
A—must do
B—should do
C—would be nice to do
D—delegate
E—eliminate
Drucker’s third practice for effectiveness is determining and applying your unique contribution. This means looking beyond your immediate work or task and being guided by the larger question, “What unique contribution can I make to significantly increase organizational performance and results?”
Drucker advises you to take responsibility for your own contribution and results, then request the same from your employees by asking, “What contribution do you intend to make, and what’s our best use of your contribution (knowledge and ability)?” Finally, only hold meetings if their purpose advances your contribution to the organization.
Determining Your Contribution
In The Effective Executive, Drucker leaves it up to the reader to determine her unique contribution for results. However, years later in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, Drucker listed three questions executives and knowledge workers should ask to determine their contribution. Instead of the typical question, “What do I want to do?”, ask:
What does the situation require?
Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done?
What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
The fourth practice for effectiveness is building or leveraging strengths—your own strengths and the strengths of those around you—to achieve results.
Drucker argues that you can’t accomplish anything significant by focusing on your own or others’ weaknesses. When you focus on weaknesses, you undermine the purpose of the organization, which is to translate people’s strengths into performance for results. He says that morally, managers owe it to the organization to maximize the strength of every employee, and owe it to employees to enable them to excel to the extent possible.
What Is a Strengths-Based Approach?
The Gallup organization popularized strengths-based development for performance management and leadership development in 2001, although the idea arose in the 1980s as an approach to social work. Embraced by HR professionals and major companies, strengths-based development launched the trend of strengths coaching.
Gallup defines strengths as a person’s unique combination of talents, abilities, and motivators. Strengths-based development helps employees understand and leverage their capabilities; it focuses on what they do well rather than what they do poorly.
Gallup says its research over 40 years shows that when employers focus on workers’ strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses, they have better employee engagement, performance, retention, customer engagement, and profitability.
Drucker’s fifth and final practice for effectiveness is making sound decisions. He lays out a five-step process:
Step 1: Determine whether the situation requiring a decision is typical or unique. If it’s typical, it can be solved by applying a principle or rule.
Step 2: Determine the objectives the decision must meet, and the limitations or constraints (such as budget) affecting the solution.
Step 3: In considering options, focus on the right action rather than the acceptable action (this sets a benchmark before making any compromises or concessions with the decision).
Step 4: As part of the decision, determine how it will be implemented (otherwise, it’s just an intention).
Step 5: Establish a feedback mechanism for testing whether the decision works.
Comparison With Other Decision-Making Processes
Although there are variations, many business textbooks and leadership programs teach these typical steps for making decisions:
Identify the decision (the problem you must solve or question you must answer).
Gather the relevant information (from both internal and external sources).
Identify the options.
Weigh the pros and cons of each option.
Choose among the options (make your decision).
Take action (create a plan and assign tasks).
Review your decision (ultimately, what worked and what didn’t).
This process differs from Drucker’s first two steps of categorizing the decision and determining parameters, and his fourth step of focusing on right versus acceptable. These steps are bigger-picture elements not included in typical decision-making processes.
While business books often tell you how to manage other people, The Effective Executive, a 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker, explains how to manage yourself to be effective. He defines effectiveness as choosing and doing the right things—that is, the things that significantly improve personal and organizational performance. He argues that effectiveness derives from a set of five practices that anyone can learn rather than from innate talents or charisma. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up more than 50 years later and how others have built on them.
Drucker, who died in 2005, is referred to as the founder of modern management. A leader in management theory and practice for over 60 years, he authored 39 books and countless articles, including more than 30 essays in the Harvard Business Review.
Drucker was born in Austria, received a doctoral degree in Frankfurt, and worked as a reporter in Germany before fleeing to England upon Hitler’s rise to power. He moved to the U.S. in 1937, later becoming a citizen, and taught at New York University and Claremont Graduate University, among other institutions.
In 1939, he published his first book, The End of Economic Man, an examination of totalitarianism that influenced Winston Churchill. He began writing about management with Concept of the Corporation in 1946, about his study of General Motors (GM). He followed up with The Practice of Management (1954), Managing for Results (1964), Drucker on Management (1971), and many more works. He continued to write books and articles into the early 2000s.
President George W. Bush awarded Drucker the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 for his contributions to management theory. Drucker’s obituary in the New York Times noted that his ideas on management were so influential that a comment from him could change the way top corporate leaders operated.
Published in 1967, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done was Drucker’s eighth book.
The Effective Executive and other Drucker books are published by HarperCollins and Routledge. USA Today listed it as one of the 12 best business books of all time, and it continues to get regular reviews on Amazon and GoodReads 55 years after publication.
Drucker and Joseph Maciariello wrote a follow-up workbook, The Effective Executive in Action: A Journal for Getting the Right Things Done, published in 2006. The workbook contains journaling prompts and other activities based on Drucker’s ideas.
In an author’s note in the 2002 HarperBusiness Essentials edition of The Effective Executive, Drucker wrote that he originally developed the ideas in the book as a program for senior officials in the Eisenhower administration. But the concepts still apply to all kinds of executives, knowledge workers, and organizations, including nonprofits.
Drucker was a wide-ranging and prescient thinker. For example, he recognized the rise of the information society. He also coined the term knowledge worker, recognizing the economic transition from manual workers to professionals who independently apply analytical knowledge and creativity to solve complex problems or to develop products and services.
His understanding of the knowledge worker informed his ideas about what makes a leader, or anyone tasked with independent thinking and decision-making, effective. In The Effective Executive and further writing, he described how leaders should manage knowledge workers differently from task workers and how both can get better results for the organization.
Drucker’s ideas helped shape the corporation as we know it. He developed the concept of MBOs, or management by objectives, in the 1950s, a forerunner of today’s OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). He was a leader in the development of management education, having started one of the nation’s first executive MBA programs. Drucker also understood the importance of decentralization, strategic planning, innovation, marketing, and customer service.
In addition to inspiring the widespread adoption of MBOs and other business practices, Drucker’s work served as the foundation for countless leadership and personal development books and training programs. For example, his ideas on time blocking and prioritizing in The Effective Executive inspired contemporary time management practices.
Drucker’s ideas about effectiveness and management have continued to influence business leaders and authors—for example, the late Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Jim Collins (Good to Great), Ken Blanchard, Andrew Grove (High Output Management), Jeff Bezos, Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First) and Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek). In an article on his website, Collins discusses 10 lessons learned from Drucker—for instance, determine the most distinctive contribution you can make to your organization, and focus on making it.
Others look for answers to contemporary issues in Drucker’s work. Harvard Business School researcher and management theorist Rosabeth Moss Kantor wrote several HBR articles (including What would Peter say?) on how Drucker might have viewed challenges such as climate change and health care, excessive executive pay, and competition from emerging markets.
The fact that so many people have adopted and built on Drucker’s ideas about effectiveness and management over decades—despite the sea changes in technology and organizations since he started writing about business—is a testament to their enduring value and utility. As noted earlier, The Effective Executive continues to get online reviews from contemporary readers who cite the ideas’ practicality. The main criticism is that Drucker’s language and writing style are “dated,” or that the ideas are “nothing new,” notwithstanding the fact that they are foundational.
Specifically, Drucker’s books have come in for little criticism—although overall, he’s been criticized for being more of a popular writer and generalist than a scholar and for being more practical than theoretical. Many of his ideas have simply become the way businesses are run. (For example, a 2009 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Read Peter Drucker?”, describes his ideas as part of “today’s commonsense understanding of business.”)
Drucker’s overall theme was that organizations—corporations, governments, and nonprofits—are critical to the smooth functioning of society, and thus they have a social responsibility beyond goals such as making a profit. Executives who improve their effectiveness at getting results improve themselves, their organizations, and the greater world.
The Effective Executive explains management nut-and-bolts, such as prioritizing, time management, handling meetings, and making decisions. These ideas weren’t widely appreciated or practiced at the time of the book’s writing, but have since become popular, ongoing topics of books and articles. As a forerunner, this book offers time-tested strategies for effectiveness without the buzzwords and acronyms created for them by later authors.
The Effective Executive’s practical tips are useful for people new to management or new to their positions. Drucker also felt they applied to the then-emerging knowledge workers, because he realized their work significantly affected organizational performance. Their work is even more critical decades later—in Management Challenges for the 21st Century published in 1999, he called knowledge workers and their productivity “the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution.” So this book still speaks to an ongoing challenge of, as Drucker put it, learning to manage yourself.
After an introduction discussing the meaning of effectiveness, business evolution, and the rise of knowledge workers, Drucker devotes a chapter to each of five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making your unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. His presentation is straightforward, although the lengthy examples and language are now dated.
We’ve reordered Drucker’s five practices slightly to be more logical—he lists “Focus” as his fourth practice, but we’ve moved it to #2 because it encompasses prioritizing, which is closely related to Practice #1, “Managing your time.”
Further, we discuss how Drucker refined his thinking on effectiveness after he wrote this book, as well as how others have built on or interpreted his ideas. For example, we synthesize updated advice and tools for managing your time and prioritizing.
In addition, where Drucker gives advice without explaining how to implement it (for example, he tells you to determine your unique contribution without elaborating on how), we provide how-to ideas from other writers.
Note: The book’s language is from an era when executives were assumed to be white men—for instance, Drucker often describes the practices of “the effective man.” This guide updates the language to be inclusive.
The Effective Executive focuses on how to manage yourself so you get results and help others in your organization get results.
When it comes to results, Drucker differentiates between efficiency and effectiveness: Efficiency is getting a lot of things done, while effectiveness is choosing and getting the right things done. (Shortform note: Elsewhere, Drucker regularly made the often-quoted comment that there’s “nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”) He defined the right things as those that significantly improve personal and organizational performance.
Further, he writes that effectiveness, unlike innate attributes such as talent and intelligence, entails a set of practices you can learn. In fact, it’s essential to learn effectiveness because without it, talent and intelligence won’t get you anywhere. You need effectiveness to magnify and translate them into results.
Individual effectiveness is necessary for organizational effectiveness as well. Drucker argues that rather than hiring for talent, charisma, or a broad set of skills, organizations would be better off if they prioritized effectiveness: Hiring for and developing individual effectiveness strengthens organizations by increasing their performance and results. In turn, successful organizations—businesses, nonprofits, government, and educational institutions—strengthen the social order and provide services and products valuable to society.
Hiring for Charisma Doesn’t Work
Companies and their boards are often prone to hiring charismatic, high-profile, attention-getting CEOs. But Drucker wrote in 2005 that in 65 years of interviewing executives, he found no common qualities for success (neither charisma nor anything else). Top-performing executives varied in personality and style. Rather, what they had in common were key practices for effectiveness.
Similarly, Jim Collins writes in Good to Great that charisma is overrated in hiring CEOs; some of the best CEOs he found were unassuming but disciplined and resolute. In Quiet, Susan Cain quotes a study of 128 executives showing that extroverted or charismatic leaders were no more effective than introverts. In some instances, introverted leaders performed better. Further, psychologist Carol Dweck writes in Mindset that hiring for charisma alone can lead to disaster, with the fall of Enron due to the arrogance of its leaders (who ignored the company’s issues) as a case in point.
Defining Personal Effectiveness Today
In the years since Drucker defined effectiveness, much more has been written about what it is and how to achieve it. Many self-help authors on individual effectiveness define effectiveness either in terms of productivity (Drucker’s efficiency), or as a collection of personal qualities and leadership ability.
For example, Getting Things Done focuses on effectiveness as productivity, but Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People focuses more broadly on qualities and behaviors such as developing initiative, collaborating, and communicating. In The 21 Immutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell argues that effectiveness is contingent on leadership ability, then explains the behaviors, attitudes, and skills necessary for leadership—for example, planning, prioritizing, and persistence.
In The Effective Executive, Drucker doesn’t define leadership, but treats it as an assumed outgrowth of effectiveness. His practical definition of effectiveness focuses on doing rather than being or becoming a certain type of leader.
Defining Organizational Effectiveness Today
Most current definitions of organizational effectiveness incorporate or morph into efficiency—for example, a typical definition of effectiveness is how efficiently an organization meets the outcomes and objectives it has defined for itself. However, efficiency is unsustainable—once you’ve maximized your process, there’s nowhere else to go; further, as your competitors improve, your process is no longer a differentiator. In contrast, Drucker’s definition of effectiveness—focusing on what an organization can do better rather than faster or cheaper—lends itself to innovation and ongoing growth.
This section presents an overview of Drucker’s five practices for effectiveness and how they’re viewed today.
The practices are interconnected, and they revolve around strategic thinking and prioritizing—that is, determining the highest-impact things you can do and making sure you get them done. Practices 1, 2, and 5—managing your time, doing key tasks, and making good decisions—all involve prioritizing; maximizing strengths (practice 4) requires knowing your unique contribution (practice 3) because it likely will relate to a strength. Here’s a brief look at each practice, then and now.
1) Manage your time: Know exactly how you’re using your time. Work diligently to manage the limited amount of your time you can control.
2) Focus: Concentrate on a few high-impact tasks—areas where you can produce excellent results—one at a time. Set priorities and stick with them, ignoring distractions.
3) Make your unique contribution: Focus on what you personally can do to significantly impact company performance and results. Ask yourself what results you need to produce rather than what tasks you need to do.
4) Maximize strengths: Build on your strengths and those of the people around you, including your boss, to enhance their contributions and thus, the organization’s performance.
5) Make sound decisions: Focus on making only a few key decisions following a systematic process. Don’t strive for consensus but make a judgment after exploring a full spectrum of opinions, especially dissenting opinions.
In The Effective Executive and subsequent writing, Drucker stressed that becoming effective is a modest, achievable goal for individuals and organizations. By building on strengths in particular, average people and organizations can achieve above-average performance. Everyone should be able to become effective by working at it. (Shortform note: The subsequent tools and training programs built on Drucker’s ideas underscore his point that effectiveness is learnable.)
In upcoming sections, we’ll explore in detail each of the five effectiveness practices, how they connect, and how others have interpreted the ideas.
How Drucker Refined His Five Practices
In the decades following The Effective Executive, Drucker wrote multiple articles on effectiveness, continuing to restate and refine the practices. His core ideas remained the same over many decades, but he divided his ideas into two approaches to effectiveness—individual and organizational. (Note that these approaches continued to overlap.)
In a 2004 article, Drucker outlined these practices for organizational effectiveness:
Ask what needs to be done and what’s right for the organization: The answers require setting priorities, sticking with them, and putting everything else on the back burner; determining and doing what you’re best at and delegating what you’re poor at doing.
Develop action plans: This requires thinking about what results you want, possible constraints, check-in points and revisions, and how you’ll spend your time.
Take responsibility for decisions and implementation: Determine who’s accountable, the deadlines, and who’s affected or needs to be informed; communicate and then hold people accountable for performance.
Focus on exploiting opportunities rather than fixing problems.
Make your meetings efficient and productive.
Use ”we” rather than “I”; listen before speaking.
In a second article, Drucker outlined practices for personal development and managing your career:
Determine your strengths and focus on improving them.
Determine how you work best, and then work that way.
Identify your values.
Determine where you belong (where your strengths will produce results).
Ask what your contribution should be.
Take responsibility for relationships (know and play to the strengths and preferences of your boss and coworkers).
Take responsibility for communicating what you’re doing, how, and why.
In addition to executives, Drucker’s intended audience for his ideas on effectiveness includes knowledge workers.
The first to use the term in 1959, he defined knowledge workers as those who independently use knowledge acquired through formal education to produce results—in other words, people who think for a living. Drucker argues that knowledge workers are, in effect, executives because, whether or not they supervise anyone else, they make the same types of decisions as managers (about planning, organizing, integrating) as opposed to following orders. Therefore, they, too, need to be effective.
(Shortform note: Examples of knowledge workers include professionals, scientists, educators, analysts, system designers, software developers, health care workers, engineers, and other white-collar workers. These workers find and analyze information and apply it to solve problems, generate ideas, or create new products and services.)
Previously, manual or blue-collar work predominated. Manual workers only needed to do things efficiently and as directed. Productivity meant producing a quantity of something—effectiveness wasn’t needed. (Shortform note: In 1920, manual workers outnumbered knowledge workers 2-1 but by 1980, the situation had completely reversed; 1956, around the time Drucker began writing about the shift, was the point at which white-collar workers first outnumbered blue-collar workers.)
In contrast to manual workers, Drucker realized that for the knowledge worker, productivity requires effectiveness. They must apply and share information effectively. Rather than being told what to do, knowledge workers determine and contribute information and ideas important to the organization’s performance (what Drucker refers to as “the right things”).
Drucker realized the economic shift had implications for the way organizations were structured and managed. Knowledge work requires a decentralized, collaborative environment where employees exercise initiative and, for effectiveness, must think and manage themselves, communicate their information in a useful form to the people who need it, and learn continuously. (Shortform note: Part of creating an environment where knowledge workers can succeed is acknowledging and treating them as experts.)
Knowledge Workers Today
Knowledge work continues to be the world's fastest-growing employment sector, according to the Reference for Business.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2016 that in the U.S., jobs in knowledge work were growing by about 1.9 million a year, more than any other type of job since the 1980s. By another estimate, the world surpassed 1 billion knowledge workers in 2019. Forbes declared 2020, a year in which the Covid-19 pandemic forced a global shift to remote work, the year of the knowledge worker.
In the future, a combination of factors, including the retirement of the baby boom generation, lack of access to college by blue-collar workers, and the continually expanding knowledge economy, may create a shortage of knowledge workers. To fill positions, businesses will need to offer competitive salaries and benefits, flexibility, autonomy, growth opportunities, and an attractive work environment. To get jobs, employees will need to show motivation, creativity, interpersonal skills, and continuous learning, besides having the right knowledge base.
However, a Harvard Business Review article argues that businesses should consider all of their employees to be knowledge workers—including those engaged in seemingly routine tasks. As companies move from an efficiency to an effectiveness mindset to innovate and address constant disruption, encouraging everyone to be a problem-solver will be a key to improving company performance.
(Shortform note: Because time management is such a broad topic, we’ve limited the discussion here to Drucker’s ideas and how others have extended or countered them. For wider-ranging examinations of time management, see the list of our guides to top books on time management at the end of this guide.)
Drucker’s first practice for effectiveness is managing your time. He argues that you first need to understand what you’re currently doing with your time then take control of it. There are three steps: Analyze your time, cut time wasters, and time block. (Shortform note: Drucker's approach differs from the advice in many time management books such as Getting Things Done and The One Thing. These books recommend immediately determining and focusing on what’s most important (prioritizing), rather than first analyzing how you currently spend your time.)
Executives have little unscheduled or discretionary time to begin with, Drucker writes, and they’re under constant pressure to use it reactively, dealing with whatever comes up. (Shortform note: Although there was little research on executives’ use of time when Drucker wrote this book, organizations were growing, and Drucker viewed the demands on executive time as a problem that was likely only to increase. Research suggests that he was right: A Harvard study of CEOs’ time use published in 2018 found that 75% of executives’ time was scheduled in advance. The majority of scheduled time was spent in meetings.)
Drucker believed that the increasing time pressure was related to the shift to knowledge work—and this analysis rings true today. In the book, he explains:
Despite the time pressures to do more, Drucker argues that to be effective—to maximize your contribution to the organization—you need significant blocks of uninterrupted time to focus. (Shortform note: According to the 2019 Harvard study, only about 28% of CEOs’ work time on average was uninterrupted “alone” time.)
Knowledge Work Is Deep Work
Fifty years after this book, Cal Newport writes that the ability to do Deep Work—that is, focused, uninterrupted, undistracted work on a task that maximizes your cognitive abilities—is a requirement for working effectively in the knowledge economy. Newport argues that this kind of mental concentration enables you to continuously learn and apply critical knowledge skills such as complex problem-solving, data analysis, and computer programming.
Newport also notes that technology has driven and enhanced knowledge work, but it has also undermined the concentration needed to do it well. For example, emails, texts, alerts, and addictive apps generate distraction and anxiety that prevent deep work.
To manage your time to carve out discretionary time, Drucker recommends three steps:
We’ll explore each of these steps and how they continue to be applied today.
Since the advent of Scientific Management in 1900 to optimize factory production, we’ve recorded and managed time spent on manual work. Identifying and eliminating wasted time has increased efficiency and lowered costs. Drucker argues that executives and knowledge workers should likewise root out wasted time to increase their effectiveness and get better results.
He says it’s important to track and understand what you’re doing with your time because:
Drucker’s guidelines for tracking your time are:
Once you’ve recorded your time for a few weeks, Drucker advises rooting out your time-wasting activities with these steps:
1) Identify and eliminate activities that don’t produce results, including things that don’t need to be done in the first place. For each item on your time record, ask yourself what would happen if you hadn’t done it or don’t do it going forward. If the answer is nothing, stop doing it. Drucker claims that most executives could eliminate about 25% of their activities without anyone noticing; he cites speeches, social events, committee memberships, directorships, and lunch or dinner events as often unnecessary.
Should We Cut the Activities Drucker Recommends?
Today, the activities Drucker suggests cutting might be considered an essential part of branding, marketing, or networking. A way to evaluate these activities and decide if they’re useful enough to continue is to borrow the lean manufacturing idea of determining which ones are value-added versus non-value-added: Value-added activities add customer value to a business process, product, or service. This aligns with Drucker’s advice to say “no” to doing anything that doesn’t help your organization or enhance your contribution to the organization’s performance.
Similarly, in Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy writes that you should creatively procrastinate or put off, eliminate, or delegate activities that don’t add value to your work. Also, he says you should keep reviewing your activities for time wasters, looking especially hard at major time consumers.
2) Determine which activities could be done just as well or better by someone else, and delegate them. While some people view delegating as being lazy or taking advantage of a subordinate, Drucker emphasizes that as an executive, you’re being paid for your unique contribution to the organization’s performance—and when you allow yourself to be distracted from this by tasks someone else can do, you undercut your effectiveness as well as the organization's.
How to Delegate Effectively
In High Output Management, CEO Andrew Grove identifies the following requirements for effective delegating:
You and the person you’re delegating to need to have the same information and agree on how to do the task.
You can keep the tasks you like doing as long as you’re fully aware of your motivations for not delegating them.
You monitor the person you’re delegating to.
You delegate tasks you’re familiar with, because it’s easier to monitor things you already know how to do.
If you’re delegating decision-making, monitor the decision-making process.
3) Identify the ways in which you waste others’ time (and therefore your own). Drucker advises asking your employees and colleagues what you do that wastes their time (that doesn’t increase their effectiveness or contribution).
You may be doing something that’s productive for you but that still wastes others’ time—for example, requiring an employee to track weekly data and produce a report that you occasionally refer to but that isn’t useful to the employee creating it.
Don’t Be a Negative Influence
A Stanford study found that leaders often waste others’ time because they don’t notice subordinates’ needs and problems:
They don’t realize how much work their orders entail.
They micromanage instead of delegating.
They make unthinking comments that employees interpret as orders or criticism, triggering unnecessary work.
They constantly announce new initiatives that conflict or compete with prior initiatives (and take time to adopt).
They prompt employees to work hard to please them or tell them what they want to hear, taking time away from these employees’ core tasks.
The antidote to these issues is to encourage candor and criticism from subordinates and to act on it. Also, appreciate employees who habitually point out flaws, as opposed to praising those who do what you want, no questions asked.
Similarly, in High Output Management, Andrew Grove warns against activities with “negative leverage”—those that decrease value or output. Examples include micromanaging, waffling, or spreading a negative attitude.
4) Cut time-wasters resulting from poor management. Drucker identifies several types of time-wasters resulting from poor management. They’re under your control and are therefore fixable:
Wasted time resulting from lack of planning. An example is the recurring crisis—for instance, the annual audit—which suddenly requires everyone’s full attention because it was left until the last minute. A recurring crisis around a regular event can be foreseen and prevented by creating a routine that administrative workers can handle. (Shortform note: Management by crisis—not the same thing as crisis management—has many downsides. The biggest is that a preoccupation with putting out fires keeps you in fight-or-flight mode, blocking the higher-order thinking needed for problem-solving. Also, it prevents you from troubleshooting future problems, planning, or communicating effectively.)
Wasted time resulting from mishandled information. Examples include:
Wasted time resulting from too many meetings. Drucker contends that one of the worst things about poor organization is that it spawns an excessive number of meetings, which keeps executives and others from getting important work done. (Shortform note: A 2017 HBR article noted that executives spend about 23 hours a week in meetings, up from 10 hours in the 1960s. Other surveys and estimates range much higher. The article points out that many meetings not only waste time but also interrupt deep work.)
Drucker says meetings should comprise no more than a quarter of an organization’s time—and if executives spend more than that in meetings, there’s a structural problem:
Drucker says meetings should be the exception rather than the rule. They are sometimes needed—people have to cooperate by sharing knowledge and information to get a specific task done. But to avoid wasting time, meetings should be purposeful and focused. In his discussion of practice #3, Drucker argues that your meetings should be focused specifically on enhancing your contribution to the organization; we’ll discuss this in detail later.
Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting
The key to an effective, focused meeting is arguably having a well-planned and designed agenda. In the Harvard Business Review, Roger Schwarz discusses the steps for designing an effective agenda, including:
Solicit topics from your team and decide which to include in the meeting.
Determine the goal of discussing each topic you include.
Structure the discussion of each topic (time limit, discussion leader, how a decision (if any) will be made.
Share the agenda with participants so they can prepare.
Conduct the meeting by following the agenda.
Debrief at the end of the meeting on what could have gone better.
Read our summary of the article to see our customized agenda template for an effective meeting.
Countless other articles and books discuss how to hold meetings. To cite just a few:
In Traction, Gino Wickman discusses two types of necessary leadership meetings (annual and weekly), and he lists specific items that should be on the agenda for each.
In High Output Management, Andrew Grove differentiates between process-oriented and mission-oriented meetings, and he gives tips for conducting both.
In Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni cites three meeting shortcomings and how to fix them: lack of drama (they’re boring), lack of structure, and infrequency.
How to Handle Email Efficiently
While email didn’t exist when Drucker wrote The Effective Executive, it’s become not only a vital business tool, but also a huge drain on managers’ and employees’ time. Estimates vary widely, but one annual survey, by Adobe, found that U.S. workers average more than five hours a day checking work and personal email.)
Deep Work recommends reducing unproductive emails by requesting that emails sent to you be thoughtful and by responding thoughtfully in turn. Specifically:
Publicize a policy on how you’ll handle emails and which emails you’ll reject—for example, “Please only send things that would interest me. I may not reply unless it’s a good fit for my schedule and interests
When replying to an email, articulate the current state of things, where the ultimate goal is, and what the most effective next steps are.
- For example, instead of replying, “Here’s the edited draft. Thoughts?”, be specific: “I’ve reviewed your draft, added major comments, and made line edits for specific language. Things are looking good—you’re free to take this to the final draft without running it by me again.“
Consider not replying to less thoughtful emails, or emails where no reply wouldn’t be a bad thing. If it’s important enough, they’ll send another, hopefully more thoughtful email.
A Harvard Business Review article offers these further tips for processing email efficiently:
To avoid compulsively checking email, turn off notifications and schedule about five minutes every hour to check email.
Move every email out of your inbox after you read it the first time.
Use the search functions to retrieve emails
Set up only two email folders—“archive” for those you’ll respond to later and “reading” for anything you might want to read later. Use shortcuts to move emails to your two folders. (Organizing email into numerous folders wastes time.)
Use spam blockers, unsubscribing, and filters to avoid having to process irrelevant or unimportant emails.
The third step for managing your time (after analyzing it and cutting time wasters), according to Drucker, is to make the most of the little nonscheduled time you have left (your discretionary time for important tasks that contribute significantly to your company’s performance). He says this typically amounts to only 25% of your total time—you spend the other 75% on things that aren’t necessarily productive but you have to do them—for example, making client calls.
The way to make the most of this time is to consolidate it into blocks as large as possible. Drucker contends that small increments of time are useless—you can’t write a report by spending 15 minutes on it a day. If you try, you won’t get anywhere and will have to start over the next time. But if you can get four or five hours of uninterrupted time, you can create a solid draft that you can flesh out later in smaller time increments.
(Shortform note: While time blocking (also called time boxing) is widely recommended and practiced today, it was new when Drucker first wrote about it.)
Drucker suggests the following ways to consolidate your time:
Time Blocking Methods
Numerous books offer a variety of time blocking methods. Here’s a sampling:
1) Deep Work: Plan your day in half-hour blocks, and:
Make a list of tasks you need to finish in the day.
Schedule time for each task to the nearest half-hour. Be realistic, but also set a challenging deadline to force focus.
Schedule time in advance for when you'll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.
Schedule overrun blocks for tasks you suspect might run overtime.
Look over your schedule. If you have lots of shallow tasks (more than 30-50% time), consider how you can replace these with deeper work.
During the day, if you have momentum on a task or feel particularly inspired, keep going. After you're done, reorganize your schedule.
At the end of the day, review the accuracy of your time blocks.
Reflect: How well did you focus during the day? How could you focus better tomorrow?
2) The 12-Week Year: Use three types of blocks for peak performance:
Strategic block: Dedicate a three-hour chuck once a week to a project that advances your strategic plan.
Buffer block: Designate 30 minutes to an hour once or twice a day to handling miscellaneous activities such as email and phone calls that disrupt your workflow.
Breakout block: Schedule a three-hour period weekly to rest, relax, and recharge.
3) The One Thing: Use this method to block time for your priority and treat that time as sacrosanct:
Block off your vacation time for the year.
Time block your One Thing (your priority purpose or task). Block off at least four consecutive hours of uninterrupted time to focus on it each day.
Block an hour each week for planning time.
Protect your blocked time.
Time Blocking Tools
Deep Work author Cal Newport has published The Time-Block Planner. Also, various tools and apps are available online—here are 10 recommended apps, including the no-frills Google Calendar.
Typically, 75% of your time as an executive is spent on things that don’t produce results but are unavoidable. That leaves only 25% to spend on the things that contribute most to organizational performance.
What are three to five time-wasters that affect your day-to-day work?
What is your single biggest time-waster? How much time do you spend on it?
Why haven’t you felt comfortable eliminating it?
How could you eliminate this time-waster?
What could you do with the freed-up time that would be more productive?
The next practice for effectiveness is focus, which Drucker defines as focusing on only a few key things and doing them one at a time.
Drucker argues that the ability to focus is central to executive performance because:
(Shortform note: In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss echoes Drucker’s ideas of focusing: Instead of being so busy that you have to manage your time, he argues for reducing the number of things you have to do as well as decreasing the amount of time you spend on them. To get more done, he says, do less.)
Drucker notes that the principle of focus applies to company as well as individual performance: Companies that try to do too many disparate things don’t excel at anything and therefore fail to differentiate themselves. (Shortform note: Companies can apply focus in two ways: product focus and/or market focus. For example, Apple focuses on producing superior products, while Microsoft is market-focused, bent on discovering and delivering on customer wants and needs.)
Another company pitfall is focusing on preserving legacy products while failing to devote resources to developing products that will sustain the business in the future. Drucker recommends regularly asking, “If we weren’t already doing this, would it make any sense to start doing it?” If the answer is “no,” drop the activity or product. (Shortform note: Besides Drucker’s question, considerations for eliminating a legacy product include cost versus revenue, and the number of customers impacted and their lifetime value (how much revenue that customer will generate for the business for the entirety of the business relationship).)
How to Focus
While Drucker emphasizes the need for and value of focusing, he doesn’t discuss how to focus beyond simply scheduling “alone” time. However, later authors discuss how to achieve focus or do deep (focused) work. Here are several approaches:
In Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that you must strengthen your ability to focus by working it like a muscle. He says that after practicing four steps daily for a few months, you’ll increase your ability to do deep work, and raise your level of concentration:
Schedule when you’ll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.
Set tight deadlines for yourself that require you to concentrate at the limit of your ability to make the deadlines. (Estimate how much time you’d ordinarily need for the task, cut that time down drastically, and set it as your deadline.)
Practice productive meditation—think about a problem while you do a low-intensity physical activity, like walking or showering.
Practice memorization techniques.
In Indistractable, Nir Eyal contends that the key to being able to focus is becoming “indistractable” or resistant to distractions through a four-step method:
Control your internal distraction triggers.
Build your schedule around your values (so you’re doing what’s important to you rather than reacting to whatever comes up).
Reduce external distraction triggers.
Create precommitments, or pledges you make in advance for how you’ll respond when tempted by a distraction.
Multitasking
The opposite of focus is multitasking, which Drucker recognized as unproductive. Gary Keller writes in The One Thing that people actually can do two things at once—for instance, walk and talk. But like computers, we alternate our focus. A conflict occurs when a new activity requires a brain channel already in use or when one task demands greater attention—for example, when you’re driving and start focusing on a text message instead of on the road.
Keller writes that the downsides of multitasking (besides car accidents) are:
When you divide your limited brain capacity, you decrease your effectiveness.
The more time you spend on a task you switched to, the less likely you are to resume your original task.
When you bounce between activities, you lose time as your brain reorients.
Multitasking skews your sense of how long it takes to do things and you overestimate the time required.
Multitasking wastes time: Researchers estimate that employees are interrupted every 11 minutes and spend a third of their day recovering from interruptions. It also takes longer to do things. Depending on the complexity of the task, switching can add 25% to 100% more time to completing it.
When you multitask, you make more mistakes and make bad decisions because you favor new information over old, whether it’s relevant or not.
Multitasking creates stress.
Once you understand how to focus, the next step is deciding which productive tasks and opportunities you should focus on—that is, which are your priority tasks (things you should focus on one at a time) and which are non-priorities (things you don’t do).
While most people focus on determining priorities, Drucker contends that consciously deciding your non-priorities is equally important, because non-priorities tend to encroach on priorities unless you actively resist or eliminate them. Non-priorities are tasks you’ve decided you won’t do or opportunities you won’t pursue now, if at all. These are activities that offer little or no significant long-term value, but they can be difficult to jettison if they’re someone else’s baby.
Non-Priorities
Several authors, especially sales consultant and author Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog), have built on Drucker’s idea of priorities and non-priorities. To determine what activities you can drop, Tracy recommends these steps:
List the work activities that take the most of your time.
Ask yourself whether you’d pay someone the equivalent of your salary to do each of them. If not, stop doing them—delegate or eliminate them.
Jim Collins (Good to Great), a Drucker disciple, recommends creating a “stop doing” list instead of an annual New Year’s resolution list of things you will do, whether personal or professional. Similarly, Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) proposes a “not-to-do” list of nine things to stop, such as not agreeing to meetings and calls that lack a specific agenda and end time and not spending time with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.
Regarding priorities, Drucker says they’re typically established in one of two ways: You actively decide something is a priority, or it gets pushed to the top of your list by external pressure. When pressure determines what gets your attention, the most important work—which is working on the future—won’t get done. Because it’s non-urgent, it’s easily postponed.
Drucker doesn’t give any specific advice on how to set priorities—he says setting priorities requires courage more than analysis. In his view, courage requires that you:
Methods of Prioritizing
Various authors offer specific advice on how to prioritize.
In Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy proposes what he calls the ABCDE method for prioritizing a to-do list. Write down everything you have to do for the next day. Then rank each item by marking it with an A, B, C, D, or E, as follows:
A—must do: These tasks are very important. You must do them because not doing them will have serious negative consequences. For instance, an “A” task might be something your boss directed you to do.
B—should do: These are tasks that you should do, such as returning a non-critical call or email. They have much less dire consequences than “A” tasks—for instance, someone may be unhappy if you don’t do it.
C—would be nice to do: While it would be nice, it doesn’t matter whether you do these tasks or not. Examples include having lunch with a coworker or phoning a friend. These tasks don’t affect your work.
D—delegate: These are tasks you can delegate. You should delegate everything possible to create time to do your “A” tasks.
E—eliminate: Tasks you can eliminate include things that were important at one time but are no longer relevant, or they’re unnecessary things that have become habits. Any time spent on them is time diverted from an “A” task.
In First Things First, Stephen R. Covey suggests categorizing activities in four quadrants:
Quadrant 1 activities are important and urgent—for example, work deadlines.
Quadrant 2 activities are important but not urgent—for example, personal development.
Quadrant 3 activities are urgent but not important—for example, checking your work email on the weekend.
Quadrant 4 activities are neither urgent nor important—for example, checking social media.
You should spend most of your time on Quadrant 2 activities.
In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss advises prioritizing by following two principles:
The 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of results come from 20% of effort
Parkinson’s Law, which states that a task will take up as much time as you give it, and the more time you give it, the more important it will seem
Thus, you should only do the 20% of your tasks that give you the greatest return, and give yourself short deadlines for those tasks.
Drucker’s second practice for effectiveness is: Determine your priorities and concentrate on them one at a time.
What are two or three or your key priorities at work?
What non-priorities do you also give attention to?
How much did you concentrate on these priorities in the past week? What other tasks or non-priorities diverted your attention?
What can you do next week to improve your ability to concentrate on your priorities?
Drucker’s third practice for effectiveness is determining and applying your unique contribution. This means looking beyond your immediate work or task and being guided by the larger question, “What unique contribution can I make to significantly increase organizational performance and results?”
Drucker says most executives focus downward on handling short-term issues and tasks. In addition, many focus inwardly on what they can get from the organization rather than on what they can contribute.
However, Drucker argues that focusing outwardly on contribution is the key to quality and results, your working relationships, and the way you handle reports and meetings. When you think about your contribution, you see the bigger picture of how your skills and actions relate to the organization and its purpose. You also think in terms of the customer, client, or others with whom the organization interacts.
Determining Your Contribution
In The Effective Executive, Drucker leaves it up to the reader to determine her unique contribution for results. However, years later in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, Drucker listed three questions executives and knowledge workers should ask to determine their contribution Instead of the typical question, “What do I want to do?”, ask:
What does the situation require?
Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done?
What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
Authors Gary Keller and Brian Tracy recommend asking other key questions to determine the most valuable thing you can do:
In The One Thing, Keller recommends a “focusing question” that takes two forms: What’s my top priority (my most important goal)? and What’s the most important thing I can do right now to advance my top priority?
In Eat That Frog, Tracy recommends asking, What are the key areas and expected results for my job?, then rating yourself on how you’re doing, where you need to improve, and what key skill would make the most difference if you developed it so that you excelled.
Ultimately, your unique contribution to your organization might align with a personal strength, thus tying in with the fourth practice for effectiveness: maximizing strengths—yours and others’.
Besides producing results, contribution should come into play in two other areas, according to Drucker: in your relationships with others at work and in your handling of meetings.
Drucker cites several areas in which you can focus on contribution in relationships:
Drucker argues that communication often doesn’t lead to the results companies or managers want because it’s one-way: Management communicates what it wants but employees aren’t receptive to the message because they weren’t asked for input.
Instead, executives should create two-way communication around contribution—first, by taking responsibility for their own contribution and results; then, by requesting the same from their employees by asking, “What contribution do you intend to make, and what’s our best use of your contribution (knowledge and ability)?” The two can then have a productive conversation. (Shortform note: By allowing for feedback, two-way communication creates a democratic environment, improves job satisfaction and efficiency, decreases confusion and ambiguity, and improves relationships.)
In contrast to manager-employee communication, knowledge workers often communicate peer-to-peer, contributing knowledge to those who need it, and in teams bringing together diverse knowledge and skills to address a single task (like caring for a particular patient in a hospital). For their contribution to be useful, Drucker says knowledge workers must take responsibility for being understood—that is, for ensuring that those who need information can make sense of it and apply it in the form in which they receive it.
(Shortform note: Team communication presents challenges when some or all team members work remotely. Tips for communicating effectively in remote or mixed teams include: keeping team documentation up to date, observing time zone etiquette, and considering how the medium affects communication—for instance, tone can be more difficult to convey and judge in an email conversation compared to a face-to-face conversation.)
Autonomy Enhances Contribution
Drucker doesn’t elaborate on how knowledge workers can enhance their contribution and their teammates’ other than by communicating clearly. However, a 2018 survey of knowledge workers by Slack indicates that with the right kind of support from managers, these workers can collaborate more and perform better.
First, the workers surveyed want companies to invest in employees, which means paying competitively, providing the opportunity to master skills, providing autonomy, reducing bureaucracy, and having efficient processes and procedures. With this level of support, employees say they can collaborate successfully with coworkers and add value for customers.
The employees surveyed particularly valued autonomy, underscoring Drucker’s contention more than 50 years earlier that knowledge workers required independence and support from managers, rather than being told what to do as task workers were. Today, the Slack report noted, autonomy is a key driver of collaboration and innovation. (Survey respondents defined a collaborative atmosphere as encompassing clear responsibilities and goals, ease of communication, and trust that colleagues will do good work.) Autonomy is also a key factor in job satisfaction, and it results in higher retention and greater productivity.
However, autonomy requires agreed-upon goals, the necessary information to perform the job well, and the agency to move forward.
Tech Problems Get in the Way
For future knowledge workers to share knowledge effectively, companies will need to eliminate technology barriers. A 2018 Medium article quoting multiple studies notes that knowledge workers’ ability to find, retrieve, and transform information into a useful asset is critical. But more than 90% of information is “unstructured,” meaning it exists outside databases—within “content silos” such as documents, communication applications, and so on. Plus, it’s spread across teams using different devices, operating systems, and applications. Difficulty accessing information creates stress, inhibits effective communication, and wastes time and money.
Self-development is an outgrowth of focusing on contribution, Drucker says. When you ask what your most important contribution is, you’re also asking how you must develop yourself to make that contribution, what strengths you need to apply, and what standards you need to meet.
(Shortform note: Drucker doesn’t elaborate on how to develop yourself. However in Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy offers advice on improving your skills to increase your value and productivity: Determine what you need to learn in order to do your job better, identify your most important tasks and capabilities, then draw up a plan to continually upgrade your skills in these areas.
Further, in The Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod explains how to implement seven daily self-development practices: silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, and writing.)
Drucker says when you develop yourself to enhance your contribution, you also motivate everyone around you to develop themselves. For example, when an athlete sets a record, she resets the bar for every other athlete; average athletes then begin exceeding the old records, while the best begin breaking the latest record, so that everyone’s performance improves.
Encourage Others to Excel
In High Performance Habits, Brendon Burchard expresses a similar view to Drucker, noting that inspiring and challenging others to raise their performance is part of developing your influence and leadership. Burchard’s approach is a more “tough love” approach than Drucker’s, requiring that you set standards, push people to meet and exceed them, and hold people accountable. It also requires you to meet the standards you set.
Burchard recommends challenging people to increase their performance in three areas. He echos Drucker by tying performance (results) to contribution:
Contribution: Challenge others to contribute more value to the group. Praise people when they go above and beyond. On the other hand, call people out when they’re falling short. For example, if someone misses an important deadline, point out that they’ve let the team down.
Character: Challenge others to embody values such as trustworthiness, self-control, responsibility, and perseverance. Praise people when they show strong character, and point out when they violate their values.
Connection: Challenge others to treat people well, listen to them, and build them up. Praise teams that show strong communication and connection. Also, call people out when they treat others poorly.
Meetings, reports, and presentations are time-consuming executive tasks. But if handled wisely, Drucker says that meetings, in particular, are a tool for furthering contribution. Here’s how to make meetings effective by focusing on contribution from the outset:
Planning a Purposeful Meeting
Here are some additional tips for defining a meeting’s purpose:
1) Start by deciding among eight basic reasons for a meeting:
Analysis
Assignments
Decision-making
Idea generation
Information exchange
Persuasion
Inspiration
Relationship-building
2) Define your purpose (the “why” of the meeting) by focusing on the result you want: Ask what you want to accomplish, what outcome you want, and what you want people to do after the meeting.
3) Communicate the purpose in your calendar invitation. Invite only people who can contribute to the outcome you want. (Then, follow the typical steps from Practice #1 for conducting an efficient meeting, such as having an agenda, taking notes, and so on.)
4) Finally, end the meeting by restating the purpose, outcome, and next steps.
Exercise: Review each meeting on your calendar for the week, and see if you can clearly state the purpose and desired outcomes. If you can’t, revise the purpose and ensure the attendees can contribute to it.
Your job as an executive is to determine your contribution to the organization’s performance and results and to maximize it.
What’s your answer to the question, “What unique contribution can I make to significantly increase organizational performance and results?”
What results will it produce and how will you measure them? How can you use your contribution to develop people?
How can you maximize your contribution in the coming week (for example, by focusing meetings on contribution)?
The fourth practice for effectiveness is maximizing strengths—your own strengths and the strengths of those around you—to achieve results.
Drucker argues that you can’t accomplish anything significant by focusing on your own or others’ weaknesses. (Shortform note: Drucker wrote in 2005 that it takes more effort to improve from incompetent to mediocre than from good to excellent.)
When you focus on weaknesses, you undermine the purpose of the organization, which is to translate people’s strengths into performance for results. He says that morally, managers owe it to the organization to maximize the strength of every employee, and owe it to employees to enable them to excel to the extent possible.
What Is a Strengths-Based Approach?
The Gallup organization popularized strength-based development for performance management and leadership development in 2001, although the idea arose in the 1980s as an approach to social work. Embraced by HR professionals and big companies, it launched the trend of strengths coaching.
Gallup defines strengths as a person’s unique combination of talents, abilities, and motivators, apart from competencies. Strengths-based development helps employees understand and leverage their capabilities; it focuses on what they do well rather than what they do poorly, or on maximizing strengths rather than improving weaknesses.
Focusing on Employees’ Strengths Pays Off
Gallup says its research over 40 years shows that when employers focus on workers’ strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses, they have better employee engagement, performance, retention, customer engagement, and profitability.
In fact, a recent Gallup study found that businesses saw as much as a 30% increase in profits when they focused on strengths-based development.
The Counterpoint
A 2016 Harvard Business Review article argues that strengths development has gone too far and weakens organizations. When it comes to leadership development, author Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology, argues:
There’s no scientific evidence that strengths development is better at improving performance than traditional feedback.
It can make people feel more competent than they really are.
It results in resources being wasted on lesser performers rather than spent on the top 20% of people responsible for 80% of productivity.
Overused strengths become liabilities. (Confidence can turn into overconfidence, and so on.)
Strengths training doesn’t address the real problem: incompetent leaders and disengaged employees.
Companies often try to minimize weaknesses in the organization by hiring or promoting the person with the fewest weaknesses. However, Drucker argues that this results only in mediocrity. Instead, he says, you should fill positions based on what a person can do.
Start by hiring for strength—ask a candidate what she does extremely well. Look for excellence in one key area relevant to the organization, where excellence will make a significant difference, rather than adequacy in all areas. Once you’ve hired for strength, build on it by demanding performance—that is, demand that the person do what she should be able to do well.
Hire for Talent
Many companies hire for experience or skills, intelligence, and persistence. However, like Drucker, Gallup argues in First, Break All the Rules that you should hire for talent (strength) instead. Among people with all the above attributes, talent determines who excels.
To hire for talent, the authors recommend first listing the talents of the ideal person for the position. Here are several tips:
Think about the structure of your company. The talents associated with any given role will change based on the way your company is run. This is because your expectations and the way you interact with the person in that position are both unique to your organization.
Think about your current team members. Consider what talents you can add to your team to increase performance. Make sure that the people you hire have the appropriate talents to interact with your team effectively.
Think about three types of talent: striving, thinking, and relating. What combination of these talents does the position require? For example, if you’re hiring a call center rep, you might want someone who will strive or work hard to satisfy customers and will relate well to them.
Look at your best employees. When coming up with your list of talents, think about the best employee you’ve ever had in that role or a closely related one. Then, consider the talents that allow them to succeed, and use them to guide your search.
Strengths-Based Recruiting Questions
The corporate recruiting consultant Harver recommends that you ask questions, including the following, to uncover strengths, effectiveness, and motivators in applicants:
What are you naturally good at doing?
What types of skills do you learn quickly?
What do you procrastinate on?
What do you enjoy (and not enjoy) doing at work?
When do you feel the most motivated?
How will this role play to your strengths?
In addition to hiring talented people, Drucker recommends putting current employees in roles that maximize their strengths. He outlines several steps:
1) Make sure the job is realistically designed: Many jobs are designed for a perfect person, so no one measures up. Signs that you’ve created an impossible job include requiring someone with a mix of temperaments (such people don’t exist) and making several hires with good track records who then fail in the job. (Shortform note: Examples of ludicrously unrealistic job postings still abound. Reasons that employers write unrealistic job descriptions include inexperience at posting jobs, hoping unrealistically for a perfect candidate, or just going through the motions to meet a requirement when they already have an internal candidate.)
2) Make the job big and challenging: A job has to be demanding enough to bring out a person’s strength, and also big enough that applying a relevant strength will significantly impact the organization’s performance. In contrast, Drucker says most organizations create small jobs to fit a person or moment, but the person no longer fits when the organization’s needs change. A person can only meet the challenge of new demands when the job is demanding to begin with. (Shortform note: Some ways to motivate employees by making work challenging include offering new experiences, and (counterintuitively) giving people projects they don’t like that force them to use and learn new skills.)
3) Appraise people for strengths: Most company appraisal processes focus on what's wrong with people rather than their strengths. This ruins a manager's relationship with employees. The purpose of an appraisal should be to understand strengths and how you can build on them. Start by establishing the major contributions expected from the person, and how her performance has matched them. Then ask:
Drucker contends that these questions actually prompt a more critical appraisal than the typical process does. By starting with what a person can do, this approach views weaknesses as limitations on the full use of the person’s strengths or on their effectiveness.
Creating a Strengths-Based Performance Appraisal
Marcus Buckingham, author of the original edition of First, Break All the Rules, offers tips in a Harvard Business Review article on creating a strengths-based appraisal system, which he calls future-focused coaching (as opposed to feedback on past performance):
It must be a real-time system focused on coaching in the moment (at least weekly), rather than a once-a-year review.
It must be about the individual and driven by them (where am I and how can I get better?).
It must be based on strengths, not remediation. Weaknesses offer the least potential for growth.
It must be simple and straightforward, asking just two questions: What are you going to get done this week, and what help do you need?
It must be a “local” system, not a centralized system flowing from company goals.
When a Role Is the Wrong Fit
When an employee ends up in a role for which they lack talent, it’s a manager’s responsibility to remove them so they don’t drag down the team’s performance.
The authors of First, Break All the Rules recommend keeping the following in mind:
If an employee consistently performs around or below average with no upward growth, they’re likely not going to achieve excellence in their position.
Caring about your employees doesn’t mean lying to them. Your job is to set your employees up for success. When you remove an employee from a role that they’re not well-suited for, you’re freeing them from the frustrations of putting energy into a position they won’t excel in.
Sometimes, employees know they’re struggling but don’t know how to get out of their positions. In some cases, they may even push you to fire them by acting out—and you’ll be helping them (and the team) by removing them.
In addition to leveraging the strength of your employees, Drucker says you should do the same with your boss. He claims that “managing up” in this way is smart for two reasons:
(Shortform note: Managing up is typically defined more broadly as keeping the boss happy or having a good relationship with your boss. A Harvard Business Review article discusses scenarios in which managing up is particularly useful, including getting along with an insecure or indecisive boss.)
According to Drucker, you don’t build your boss’s strengths by currying her favor. Instead, ask yourself the same questions you ask about your employees: What does she do really well? What does she need from me in order to build this strength? Then, provide it. For example, if your boss is great at representing the company positively in the community and schmoozing with local leaders, use your network contacts to create more opportunities to do so.
Drucker says you can also help your boss perform better if you understand and work with her preferred way of processing information. When you present an issue in a way that’s accessible to your boss, she can effectively apply her strength to a solution. People may be either “listeners” or “readers.” Listeners pick up cues and information from listening to others; readers get their information from reading. Don’t give a listener a detailed report to read, or talk to a reader about a report before she’s had a chance to read it.
(Shortform note: While Drucker notes that a few people, such as lawyers, may be both readers and listeners, it’s also true that a few people may be neither. For example, A Warning, an insider’s view on the Trump White House, discusses how former President Trump’s staff learned to provide information to him in an eye-catching visual format because he was neither a reader nor a listener.)
Additionally, some people prefer seeing a summary; others want to know the full thought process behind a recommendation. Some want the earliest details; others don’t want to hear about an issue until the options have been fully developed. (Shortform note: Similarly, some bosses have distinct email preferences: Some prefer emails over phone calls or meetings; others don’t want you cluttering up their inboxes.)
General Tips for Managing Up
A Harvard Business Review article noted that managing your relationship with your boss is essential for your effectiveness. While it doesn’t directly address Drucker’s advice to build on your boss’s strengths, it offers tips that provide a foundation for doing so:
Recognize that your relationship is one of two mutually dependent, fallible people.
Understand the other person and yourself (for instance, your strengths, weaknesses, work styles, needs, and pressures).
Use the above information to create a compatible working relationship based on mutual expectations and meeting each other’s most critical needs.
Additionally, The Wall Street Journal recommends these steps for a productive relationship:
Identify what bothers your boss, and don’t do it.
Ask questions so you understand expectations.
Keep the boss in the loop.
Be proactive (don’t wait to be told what to do).
Take responsibility for your mistakes and offer a solution.
Offer solutions, not problems.
Make requests instead of complaints.
In addition to building on your employees’ and boss’s strengths, Drucker recommends also maximizing your own strength to produce results.
While most people think they know their strengths, Drucker says they’re often wrong. To determine your strengths, he recommends analyzing your performance to see what comes more easily to you than to others.
(Shortform note: In the 2005 article cited earlier in this section, Drucker was a bit more specific. He advised determining your strengths by collecting feedback. When you make an important decision or take action, write down what you expect will happen; compare expectations with results six to 12 months later to see where you were on point. This will show you your areas of strength (what you got right) and weakness (what you got wrong). Alternatively, you can use Gallup’s StrengthFinder. Once you know your strengths, find ways to continually improve on and expand them.)
To further leverage your strengths, know your most productive work style and use it. Know whether you’re a listener or reader, whether you work best on a committee or alone, in the morning or evening, or from an outline or just rough notes. Use your work habits to enhance your effectiveness
In summary, build on what you know you can do, and do it in the way you know you do best.
What’s Your Work Style?
The career and jobs website Indeed.com lists four primary work styles, which go beyond habits:
Logical: These people are action-oriented. Their linear way of thinking allows them to focus intensely on a goal or problem and get things done.
Detail-oriented: They’re strategic, organized, and pragmatic, approaching actions or decisions with caution and only after thorough research.
Supportive: They value collaboration above all, and work to build relationships, facilitate communications, and get teams working harmoniously.
Idea-oriented: These people are big-picture thinkers who see possibilities and opportunities, articulate a vision, and inspire others to sign on.
To pinpoint your style:
Determine your preferred way of communicating.
Consider how you like to carry out your day.
Understand how you handle conflict. (For example, supportive workers may work harder than others to smooth over office conflicts.)
Consider taking a personality assessment.
For a slightly different breakdown of work styles, see motivational speaker and author Tony Robbins’s website. Robbins highlights different categories you may fall under, such as the independent working style (preferring to work alone) and the proximity working style (working with others, but still maintaining ownership over your projects).
Drucker wraps up his discussion of practice #4 with tips repeated elsewhere. But one tip for leveraging your strengths has proven to be especially durable: Drucker himself repeated it numerous times over the years, and it’s often quoted by others:
His point is that many businesses do the opposite—but that addressing problems (weaknesses) doesn’t increase performance and produce results. Only applying strengths to opportunities does that.
How to Become Opportunity-Focused
Drucker doesn’t offer specific advice in The Effective Executive on how to become opportunity-focused. But in a 2004 article, he reiterated that while problems need to be addressed, doing so only prevents damage; in contrast, only capitalizing on opportunities leads to results.
The keys to being opportunity-focused are to prevent problems from overpowering opportunities, assign your best people to work on opportunities, and focus meetings on opportunities over problems.
Note that the typical SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which is often used in strategic planning, implies applying equal attention to opportunities and problems; however, Drucker argues that you should apply the bulk of your thought and resources to opportunities.
Drucker advocated always treating change as an opportunity. He identified the following change scenarios as presenting opportunities:
A surprising success or failure in your business, a competitor’s, or in the industry
A gap between current and potential results in a market, process, product, or service—for example, you may have a larger than “normal” gap between the number of cold calls you make and the number of positive responses. This suggests an opportunity to generate more positive responses by changing your qualifying process.
An innovation or technological advance in a relevant process, product, or service
Changes in industry or market structure
Changing demographics (for instance, millennials becoming established in their careers and increasing their buying power)
To increase your effectiveness and that of your organization, identify and build the strengths of those around you, as well as your own.
What’s your main strength? Analyze your performance over the past month. What came more easily to you than to others?
How can you maximize this strength to boost your performance and your organization’s?
Think of a person who works for you—what comes to mind first, strengths or weaknesses? What is a strength of this person that can have a significant impact? To what extent are you helping her maximize this strength?
What’s your boss great at and how can you support and build on this strength?
Drucker’s fifth and final practice for effectiveness is making sound decisions, for which he offers a five-step process. Effectiveness in this area is crucial because executives’ decisions significantly affect the entire organization and its performance.
(Shortform note: Because decision-making is such a broad topic, we’ve limited the discussion here to Drucker’s ideas and how others have extended or countered them. For wider-ranging examinations of decision-making, see the list of our guides to top books on the subject at the end of this guide.)
Drucker advocates this overall approach to decision-making:
(Shortform note: In Principles, billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates Ray Dalio offers further principles for decision-making, including:
Pros and Cons of Fast Decision-Making
Since Drucker’s time of writing, many other authors have analyzed the utility of fast decision making. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell differentiates between conscious and unconscious decision making, and he argues that unconscious decisions—snap judgments or intuition—have advantages over deliberation. The process is quick, efficient, and can generate good decisions. Further, he says that while bias is a downside of unconscious decision making, you can improve your ability to make snap judgments that are smarter and less biased.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman also differentiates between the two types of thinking: He refers to unconscious thinking as System 1 thinking and conscious thinking as System 2 thinking. But in contrast to Gladwell, he’s more concerned about how often snap judgments can be wrong, and about adjusting for bias and overconfidence in our gut instincts with System 2 thinking.
While Drucker advises against fast decisions above, his process for decision-making also accounts for potential bias by actively seeking dissenting views, which we discuss further below.
In this section, we’ll first introduce Drucker’s decision-making steps and comment on his process as a whole, as it compares to other decision-making approaches. Then we’ll examine each step more closely and conclude with a discussion of cultivating dissent.
Step 1: Determine whether the situation requiring a decision is typical or unique. If it’s typical, it can be solved by applying a principle or rule.
Step 2: Determine the objectives the decision must meet, and the limitations or constraints (such as budget) affecting the solution.
Step 3: In considering options, focus on the right action rather than the acceptable action (this sets a benchmark before making any compromises or concessions with the decision).
Step 4: As part of the decision, determine how it will be implemented (otherwise, it’s just an intention).
Step 5: Establish a feedback mechanism for testing whether the decision works.
(Shortform note: In addition to Drucker’s five-step process for decision-making, he goes on to discuss another critical aspect of decision-making: cultivating dissent. His exploration of this aspect separately suggests he didn’t consider his five steps to be all-inclusive. Drucker didn’t further develop or refine his ideas on decision-making in later writing, as he did with other key ideas.)
Comparison With Other Decision-Making Processes
Although there are variations, business textbooks and leadership programs teach these typical steps for making decisions:
Identify the decision (the problem you must solve or question you must answer).
Gather the relevant information (from both internal and external sources).
Identify the options.
Weigh the pros and cons of each option.
Choose among the options (make your decision).
Take action (create a plan and assign tasks).
Review your decision (ultimately, what worked and what didn’t).
This process differs from Drucker’s first two steps of categorizing the decision and determining parameters, and his fourth step of focusing on right versus acceptable. These are bigger-picture elements not included in typical decision-making processes.
Gallup Process
The Gallup organization proposes a three-phase process encompassing 12 steps, which mostly align with Drucker’s (except for Steps 1 and 4). The phases are:
Foundation: Key steps—Understand the purpose and nature of the decision required; gather relevant data; involve relevant people.
Development: Key steps—Clarify roles, encourage debate, develop a plan including contingencies.
Realization: Key steps—Communicate the plan and ensure follow-through; identify lessons for future decisions.
Linear vs. Circular
While typical decision-making processes are linear, a Harvard Business Review article argues that making decisions should be circular. The process should operate as a feedback loop in which you gather information, analyze it, factor it into your thinking, adjust your preferred solution, gather more information, and so on.
Methods vs. Processes
Note that decision-making methods (centered on who will make the decision) differ from the processes described above. Crucial Conversations describes four methods: command, consult, vote, and consensus. While Drucker doesn’t discuss methods, his practices for effective decision-making are aimed at executives. Therefore, he’s using a command or command-consult method, in which the executive takes charge of making decisions.
Drucker’s first step is asking whether the situation requiring a decision is typical or unique:
Two Main Decision Types
Another decision-making approach that’s similar to Drucker’s classifies decisions as programmed or non-programmed. Programmed decisions are routine, have a predetermined structure, and apply to recurring situations (Drucker’s “typical” situations). Non-programmed decisions lack a predetermined approach and apply to non-recurring (unique) situations.
Programmed decisions may be made by lower-level managers or non-managers, while non-programmed decisions are made by executives.
Getting involved in programmed or routine decisions, requesting frequent updates, or insisting on signing off on minor decisions are signs that an executive is micromanaging (wasting time as discussed under practice #1). Also, micromanaging routine decisions runs counter to Drucker’s approach of making only a few key decisions.
Non-programmed decisions include strategic decisions, such as whether to launch a new product or enter a new market. According to a Harvard Business Review article, making these executive decisions requires strong analytical skill and the ability to take bold action.
Drucker’s second step for making effective decisions is understanding what objectives the decision must accomplish to be considered successful. In addition, it’s important to understand any limitations that might apply. Limitations are constraints—for example, a tight budget—that limit the possible solutions. The objectives and limitations need to be clearly defined, so you can come up with an effective solution; otherwise, you won’t be sure of what you’re trying to achieve.
For example, your objective might be to speed up new product development by streamlining your company’s processes and removing bottlenecks. However, the need to support a culture of creativity and innovation (your “constraint”) would prevent you from enacting strict procedures, reporting requirements, and deadlines. So the solution might be improving teamwork and removing bureaucratic hurdles, or implementing a fast-testing method.
Understanding the Decision’s Nature and Parameters
Drucker doesn’t explain how to determine your objectives and limitations. However, other decision-making processes offer a place to start: First, define the decision (identify and understand the problem you must solve or question you must answer). To understand the problem, a Harvard Business Review article, “Are you Solving the Right Problem?”, recommends these steps:
Establish the need for a solution (ask: What’s the basic need and the desired outcome?)
Justify the need (What’s the benefit to the company and how will we measure it?)
Put the problem in context (What solutions have we and others tried; what are the internal and external constraints on implementing a solution?)
Write a problem statement (What requirements must the solution meet; how will solutions be evaluated?)
Once you fully understand the problem, you’ll be better able to define your objectives and see your limitations.
Drucker’s third step in making an effective decision is, when considering options, focusing on what’s right rather than on what will be acceptable to those involved.
In many cases, you’ll have to compromise in the end. But by starting with what you think is the right solution based on the objectives and conditions, Drucker argues you’ll have a standard for differentiating good from bad compromises. A half-a-loaf compromise will still satisfy some objectives or conditions, while a poor compromise won’t satisfy any.
(Shortform note: In Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss argues against compromise as a lazy way of making a decision—because you’re accepting half a loaf without working through the risk, uncertainty, and conflict that lead to the best solutions. Further, he says compromise is more often a win-lose approach, like paying a ransom, than a win-win).
Drucker’s fourth step in decision-making is knowing how you’ll implement the decision. It won’t become a reality unless you build in the steps for carrying it out. He advises determining:
(Shortform note: Other implementation steps are: identifying outcomes and assigning a champion for each outcome, creating a tracking sheet, and following a project management methodology.)
Drucker says the fact that companies often overlook defining and carrying out the implementation steps is a reason people are often cynical about company or manager statements: They don’t expect or see follow-through. (Shortform note: A Forbes article cites lack of manager follow-through as a key reason employees don’t trust leaders.)
Drucker’s fifth and final step is getting feedback to determine whether the decision or solution is working. This step is important because decisions are sometimes wrong, or the solution needs to be adjusted due to aspects that don’t work or to changed conditions.
(Shortform note: The U.S. experience in Iraq illustrates Drucker’s point about adjusting to changing conditions. In Team of Teams, Gen. Stanley McChrystal details how the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force needed to drastically reorganize and adopt new tactics in response to the rise of Al Qaeda and its disruptive strategy of quick bombing strikes by small, decentralized, agile teams.)
Drucker says the best way to determine whether a solution is working is the military way: Personally observe the situation on the ground. He adds that leaders not knowing what’s really happening is a common reason activities outlive their usefulness. Therefore, leaders should constantly check plans against reality.
(Shortform note: Many project management methodologies make follow-up more structured than it was in Drucker’s time by building in a formal post-implementation review (PIR) process, including steps such as conducting a “gap analysis” that compares expectations against results.)
Besides his five-step decision-making process, Drucker advocates making sure you hear divergent and conflicting opinions before taking action. He says a leader should purposely create disagreement in order to fully understand the issue and the alternative solutions. Good decisions are made not by acclamation or consensus, but by dialogue and conflict, followed by the decision-maker’s judgment among the various points of view.
(Shortform note: Presumably, Drucker is again referring to strategic decisions necessarily made by leadership, rather than decisions by teams or mid-level managers who may need to get buy-in to implement decisions effectively. Consensus decision-making may be useful in teams where the decision is critical, requires everyone’s commitment, and affects the team’s long-term performance. However, there are also downsides to consensus decisions similar to those that can occur when leaders fail to cultivate dissent or when they stifle it. They fall under the umbrella of groupthink, which we’ll discuss below.)
Specifically, Drucker says disagreement is valuable because:
(Shortform note: Other benefits of encouraging disagreement include restraining your ego, engaging everyone more strongly in the discussion, and increasing creativity.)
Perhaps the best-known historical example of a leader who welcomed dissent is Abraham Lincoln. (Shortform note: As recounted in Team of Rivals by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lincoln built his cabinet around three fierce political opponents—William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates—to ensure he would hear a range of ideas for preserving the Union and winning the Civil War. By some accounts, former President Trump was Lincoln’s polar opposite—punishing dissent and boasting about his superior knowledge and gut instincts.)
What Is Constructive Dissent?
Constructive dissent has become a more recent buzzword for encouraging disagreement. A Harvard Law blog defines it as disagreeing in a way that respectfully and productively challenges others’ views. “Collaborative” leaders must not only promote conflict but also manage it constructively—that is, by using disagreement to open up new perspectives and ensure a rigorous decision-making process.
To ensure that dissent is constructive, the article recommends:
Remind team members they don’t have to be right, but should be ready to disagree to help the team make a good decision.
Encourage team members to share their reasoning rather than simply present data for their point of view. Ask: “What’s your logic?”
Expect things to occasionally become heated: If disagreements get out of hand, encourage people to reveal the true concerns behind accusations.
How to Encourage Constructive Dissent
The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. instructs every new hire that they have “an obligation to dissent”—that is, the most junior person in a meeting is deemed, and expected, to disagree with the most senior person. No one is expected to agree with everything the boss says. The company believes that practicing the obligation to dissent leads to the best ideas and outcomes, and employees feel empowered in this environment.
Groupthink and Fixed Mindsets Stifle Dissent
Today’s emphasis on teamwork can have the effect of stifling dissent when people feel pressured to go along with the group, even though they disagree. In Originals, Adam Grant contends that groupthink, in which people conform in the interest of harmony, can become toxic to a company, calcifying the culture and hindering its ability to compete in a changing industry. He says groupthink develops from overconfidence, which leads to confirmation bias and suppressing dissent.
To prevent a company culture from fossilizing, Grant says leaders should encourage employees to dissent against cultural values, especially new employees who care about the company’s well-being but who haven’t conformed.
Along with groupthink, leaders with a fixed mindset also discourage conflicting views. In her book Mindset, psychologist Carol S. Dweck defines a fixed mindset as one in which a person believes that traits such as intelligence and talent are innate and unchanging. In contrast, someone with a growth mindset believes she can develop her abilities through learning and effort.
Dweck writes that fixed mindset leaders, who believe in their own genius above all, tend to punish dissent; as a result, people in their organizations are afraid to speak up when they differ.
When you’ve thought through your objectives, encouraged disagreement, explored the alternatives, and are thus ready to make a decision, Drucker recommends that you pause for a moment and make sure a decision is necessary. He likens decisions to surgery—when you intervene, you risk upsetting the system. Unnecessary surgery and unnecessary decisions are both too risky.
(Shortform note: Drucker’s final point about ensuring that a decision is necessary before you make one aligns with his opening argument that executives should make only a few key decisions. His motivation was to avoid wasting time on routine decisions that could be handled automatically by policies and rules. However, research since Drucker’s time of writing suggests another reason for making fewer decisions—you’ll make better ones. As you make many decisions in the course of a day, their quality declines: You suffer from decision fatigue.)
It’s difficult to make a decision that will be unpopular, but Drucker warns, don’t be tempted to delay it for more study in order to put off the negative reaction. As an executive, you’re paid to get the right things done—which requires making effective decisions, no matter how unpopular they may be. (Shortform note: A Harvard Business Review article suggests several ways to make unpopular decisions more palatable—for example, framing the harm as a sacrifice for the greater good.)
Following is a list of Shortform guides to time management books:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Following is a list of Shortform guides to books on decision-making: