The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker is one of my favorite books ever. It is a short book, but it took me a long time to read it, every page made me think about how I approach work and life. In my first blog post Favorite Books of 2016 I proposed changing its name to “The Effective Human”.
In this article I will explain how the principles presented in this management classic apply to our daily lives. The main theme of this book is focusing on doing the right things and nothing else. This book is about taking control of our lives, it is about setting our own priorities and living up to them.
We are all executives.
Regardless of our profession, each of us is the CEO, COO, CFO, CwhateverO of our lives. We are also the managers and the line workers. It is our responsibility to figure out what we want out of life and make it happen, nobody else will do it for us. According to Drucker every executive owes effectiveness to the organization for which he/she works. If we are the executives of our lives, we owe effectiveness to ourselves. Effectiveness is about doing the right things, taking care of what is important and focusing solely on it. Personal effectiveness means getting what we truly want from life.
The Effective Mindset
Effectiveness requires a different mindset. It demands us to turn off autopilot and pay attention to our thoughts and actions:
- Effective people are not self-centered, they always think how they can contribute to the goals of the organization (job, community, family, etc.).
- They focus on what people (and themselves) can do well, not on their weaknesses.
- Effective people are not scared of changes. They see changes as a source of opportunities. Instead of worrying or complaining, they are focus on making the best out of any change.
- They always put opportunities before problems.
- Effective people make sure they have listened and understood others before speaking.
- They are not intimidated by alternative or opposite points of view, quite the contrary, they look for them to build a realistic worldview.
- Effective people are aware of their priority and focus solely on it.
What effective humans do different than the rest
There’s people who achieve everything they want, while others wish they could be more like them. Effectiveness is what makes the difference between the former and the latter. The good news is that effectiveness can be learned. People are not born effective, they learn how to be effective.
“What effective people have in common is a set of practices that they apply everyday in their lives, so we can say that effectiveness becomes a habit.”
These practices are quite straightforward and do not require anything but discipline.
Focus on their contribution
“The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results. He is likely to have to think through what relationships his skills, his specialty, his function, or his department have to the entire organization and its purpose. He therefore will also come to think in terms of the customer, the client, or the patient, who is the ultimate reason for whatever the organization produces, whether it be economic good, governmental policies, or health services. As a result, what he does and how he does it will be materially different.”
Effectiveness means doing the right things, but how can we know what’s the right thing to do?
Without getting into philosophical grounds, a good heuristic is to ask yourself: what can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of this group? This practice can be applied to everything we do in life, here are some examples:
- What I can do to increase the happiness and well being of my family?
- What can I contribute to my community?
- How can I be helpful to my friends?
- How can I help my team reach its goals?
- What value can I create with my interests or hobbies?
- Of all the things I can do, what contributes the most to my long-term goals and well being? (hint: it’s not being on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or watching series)
Thinking about our contribution disconnects us from our selfish desires and allows us to notice what others might need. When we focus on our contribution we find new ways to create value for us and others. This new perspective will lead to better processes, new products or even new ventures.
Focusing on our contribution also improves the quality of our relationships since we are not thinking about what we are getting back. Paradoxically, this is how we get the most out of relationships — by focusing on helping others instead of what we are getting from them.
Focusing on the needs and goals of the whole will lead us to the development of the skills needed to increase our contribution:
The man who asks himself, “ What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?” asks in effect, “What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution I should be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards do I have to set myself?
Being effective means having a craftsman’s mindset.
Make strengths productive
Most of us pay too much attention to our own weaknesses and the weaknesses of others. Hence, most of our efforts go into hiding these weaknesses. Drucker explains why this is a big mistake:
“The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths — the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superiors, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of the organization. It cannot, of course overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.” […]
Whoever tries to place a man or staff an organization to avoid weakness will end up at best with mediocrity”
Focusing on how to avoid weaknesses means not paying attention to strengths. As we shift our focus to strengths, we will start noticing all the things that we can do better than anybody else. Our strengths will show us opportunities, our weaknesses problems. As Drucker said, we cannot overcome our weaknesses but we can make them irrelevant by making our strengths productive. He also advises to accept people as they are:
“Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys.”
I found this line extremely useful. Idealizing how people should behave often times prevents us from creating a connection. It is easier to connect with others when we focus on what we like rather than what we don’t.
First things first
It’s hard to accept it, but we can’t do everything we want. It’s actually worse than that, we can only do few of those things. If we can only do a small number of activities, we should focus on doing those that matter the most. Most of us navigate life reacting to what happens, we usually let other people set out priorities without knowing it.
“They set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know they have no choice but to do first things first, and second things not at all. […]
The effective executive does not, in other words, truly commit himself beyond the one task he concentrates on right now. Then he reviews the situation and picks the next one task that now comes first.”
The cornerstone of effectiveness is concentrating solely in our priority. I spelled it in singular for a reason, we can’t focus on more than one thing. Effective humans know their priority and focus on it until they achieved what they wanted. After scratching their priority they don’t go to number 2. They take a pause and figure out the new priority according to the current situation.
Effective humans break out of auto pilot and take control of their lives:
“Concentration — that is, the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first — is the executive’s only hope of becoming the master of time and events instead of their whipping boy.”
Keeping our commitment to our priorities is hard. As Drucker states very accurately, it requires courage. It takes courage to say no. When we say no, we have to face many fears such as the fear of missing out, or fear of not being liked. In the end, most people won’t care at all.
They know where their time goes
“Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, more over, is the on easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it”
Time is the only thing we have. It’s a non renewable resource, once it’s consumed it’s gone. Effectiveness requires using our most precious resource on the few activities that matter. Drucker explains that the only way to manage your time is to measure it.
Effective people keep track of where their time goes. The goal of this practice is to verify that they are allocating most of their time to their priority. Drucker suggests to keep a time log, that is registering all the activities they do during the day. Keeping a time log is not easy at all. Luckily, we live in an age where there are plenty of digital solutions for almost any problem. A simple way to keep track how you spend your time is registering all your activities in a digital calendar and reviewing it weekly or monthly. In the case you want to an accurate measure, you can try time tracking tools such as toggl.
They make effective decisions
“They know that an effective decision is always a judgement based on dissenting opinions rather than on consensus of the facts.”
Effective people don’t take their opinion too seriously. They know that their opinion is just an unproven hypothesis about reality so they are open to alternative and contrarian opinions. They are not concerned about who is right or wrong, but what is the right thing to do. They make decisions methodically (more of this in a future post). They don’t get emotionally attached to the final decision. They continually test the results, if the decision doesn’t yield the desired results, they pivot to something that fits reality. Effective people learn from their decisions. They keep decision logs which help them learn from both success and failure.
Wrapping it up
I want to make clear that these practices are simple but not easy. Writing this post has been a big reality check. As I typed each word, I realized that I’m applying just a small percentage of the principles presented here. On the bright side, it is also comforting to know that there’s a lot of room for improvement.
I want to close this post with my favorite quote from this book:
“People in general, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature — without any more effort than is expended by the non achievers.”
Let’s raise the bar, if we believe we are average that’s what we are going to be. As stated above, we can do extraordinary things without any extra effort (you still have to wake up every day, go to work and spend time with your family regardless of your choice to apply these practices). The trick is quite simple, you just have to think that you owe it to yourself. And don’t stop there, celebrate others’ strengths and talents — help those who surround you realize that they can build the life they want.
