The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Become an Effective Executive: 5 Key Practices

Summary of the book: The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

You can be talented and charismatic, but that’s not enough to be a good leader.

That’s the strong message from Peter Drucker in his book, The Effective Executive.

How does Drucker define effectiveness?

“Effectiveness is doing the right things.”

And his definition of an “executive” is not limited to someone who leads teams, but includes anyone who is a “knowledge worker.”

Why?

Because your choices about planning, organizing, and integrating will impact your environment.

More and more of us are “knowledge workers.” Becoming effective is no longer a choice.

Here are Drucker’s 5 practices for becoming more effective:

1. Manage your time

Analyze your time.

Unlike other methods such as GTD, Drucker asks us to start by auditing our time. Knowledge workers are known to work more and have little “unplanned” time. Several articles estimate a leader’s “alone time” at less than 30%.
How CEOs Manage Time & The Work Resolutions Report by Zapier

Drucker asserts that to make a difference, a knowledge worker must have “alone time” to concentrate. The book Deep Work confirms this theory 50 years later.

So analyzing your time to find out where you’re wasting it makes sense.

How do you analyze your time?

A simple method: track your time over 1 month to see what you can cut from your activities. There are some very simple tools available today, such as Toggl.

I did this experiment during my professional career and it helped me.

Eliminate regularly

Drucker stresses the importance of doing this experiment every 6 months. Why? As our activities evolve, we are constantly adding points that are no longer needed.

I recently changed phones. By default, it offers me a page on the latest technologies. I’ve got into the bad habit of looking at it almost every day.

The direction Drucker gives us to recognize wasted time is the result. “Does this activity bring results?”

What activities do you do regularly that don’t help you move your important projects forward?

If you’re managing a team, think about the tasks you ask them to do that are no longer necessary. The ultimate goal is to reduce, eliminate or delegate what doesn’t bring results.

Blocking time

If I had to choose one method to speed up my important projects, this would be it.

Simple and effective.

How to do it?

• Block time in your calendar in advance for your important projects.
• Define a focus time of 25/60/90 minutes.
• Work on only one subject at a time. The newsletter you’re reading was created using this approach.
• If you can, try to block your mornings at home for this type of work or block one day a week where you don’t go to the office. Context helps.
• If you manage teams, try to group essential operational tasks (meetings, reviews, etc.) on one or two days to allow yourself alone time and leave some for your teams.

2. Priorities, choice and focus

Even when you’re very busy, it’s good to remember that you always have a choice.

“Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
-Viktor Frankl

Drucker doesn’t give specific tips for prioritizing the most important tasks. He says that making choices is not a question of tools, but of courage.

Stephen Covey popularized the Eisenhower matrix to help us prioritize.

3. Your Unique Contribution

You can work on anything, but you’ll be much more effective if you focus on your unique contribution.

Drucker asks us these questions:

• What unique contribution can I make to improving the organization’s performance?
• What are the results to be achieved to make a difference?
• Given my strengths, how can I make the greatest contribution?

If you work with teams, developing your leadership is a form of unique contribution and an efficiency accelerator.

4. Work on your strengths and those of your team

Drucker was among the first to promote working on our strengths as a development accelerator.

Gallup then popularized it.

He recommends that we integrate it into the various facets of our leadership:

• Recruiting on strengths
• Focus people’s development plans on strengths.
• Focus on opportunities rather than problems. When something works well, do more of it.
• Help our bosses by building on their strengths. The more your boss succeeds, the more likely you are to create your next opportunity. Drucker offers us these questions:
  • What does he do really well?
  • What does he need from me to develop this strength?

When I think back to my 8 promotions in the corporate, they were always linked to a boss offering me a next step.

5. Make the right decisions

Drucker offers us a 5-step process:

1. Is a decision necessary? He returns to his central point of effectiveness. How do you know? Necessary: if doing nothing will worsen the situation or I will miss an opportunity.
   
2. What are the objectives and constraints? Define the scope of your decision.
   
3. What’s the right thing to do? We often tend to start from history to make a decision. Drucker invites us to first think about what should be done if we were starting from scratch and then consider the constraints.
   
4. How will the decision be implemented? There is no progress without a plan and execution.
   
5. How will you monitor progress? He points out that leaders don’t always know what happens after they’ve made a decision.
   Follow-up enables me to guarantee results for leaders in their leadership coaching plans. Intention and evaluation are powerful mechanisms for change.

Conclusion

Being effective is not a choice, but a need. It amplifies all our other qualities. And Drucker reminds us that it’s a skill we can all learn.

What do you think?

See you soon.
Dror

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