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5 Characteristics of the Effective Executive — And Why This Matters for Everyone, Including People in Ministry

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From Drucker’s The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done:

  1. Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under control.
  2. Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.
  3. Effective executives build on strengths — their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths of the situation, that is, on what they can do. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.
  4. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first — and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.
  5. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions.

But Does This Apply to Everyone?

It’s easy to dismiss counsel on effectiveness by saying “everyone is different and has their own way.” But that objection falls apart upon closer inspection.

It is certainly true that everyone has their own style and uniqueness. Drucker points out that effective executives differ from another widely in their style and temperaments and unique talents — and so do ineffective ones.

However, effectiveness is not about style or temperament, but rather a set of practices. “What all effective executives have in common is the practices that make effective whatever they have and whatever they are. And these practices are the same, whether the effective executive works in business or in a government agency, as hospital administrator or university dean.”

He goes on:

But whenever I have found a man, no matter how great his intelligence, his industry, his imagination, or his knowledge, who fails to observe these practices, I have also found an executive deficient in effectiveness.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so….But practices are exceedingly  hard to do well. They have to be acquired….Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.

Is Effectiveness Possible for Everyone?

Since effectiveness is a practice, not an innate talent, the answer is yes:

There is, in other words, no reason why anyone with normal endowment should not acquire competence in any practice. Mastery might well elude him; for this one might need special talents. But what is needed in effectiveness is competence. What is needed are “the scales.”

In fact, even if you are really bad at being effective and getting the right things done, there is much hope, because it turns out that nobody (except, I think John Piper) is a natural at being effective. As Drucker points out earlier:

In forty-five years of work as a consultant with a large number of executives in a wide range of organizations — large and small; businesses, government agencies, labor unions, hospitals, universities, community services; American, European, Latin American and Japanese — I have not come across a single “natural”: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones have had to learn to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became a habit. 

But all the ones who worked on making themselves effective executives succeeded in doing so. Effectiveness can be learned — and it also has to be learned.

Does Effectiveness Matter for Everyone?

There are two other, and related, significant objections that can be raised. First of all, one might misunderstand and think I am only talking about top management here. That effectiveness matters if you are a CEO, vice president, or otherwise very high up, but not if you are in the other far more common positions in an organization.

Drucker dispatches this objection very well. He points out that “executive” is not equal to “top management.” Rather, an executive is anyone whose decisions affect the capacity of the organization to make its contributions. This means you don’t even have to be a manager at all to be an executive. You could be a developer who codes the website, or a content editor who writes content for the web, or someone in customer service. If your work requires any self-direction at all (and all knowledge work does) and you make decisions that affect the performance of your organization, you are an executive. 

This means that just about everyone in today’s knowledge economy is an executive.

On the other hand, you can be a manager of people and not be an executive at all, if your goal is simply to supervise, do what you’re told, and get other people to do what they’re told. If you remove all need for judgment from your role, you are not an executive, no matter how many people you manage or how high up you are.

Should Even People in Ministry Learn About Effectiveness?

The second objection that could be made here is that this may apply to knowledge workers in all areas of life, except for those who work in churches and at ministries. There has indeed been, I would say, an unfortunate lack of attention to the unique needs and situations of those who work in ministry roles. Many books on effectiveness and getting things done focus almost entirely on the secular arena. I’m seeking to change that in the things I write by directly applying things to and thinking things through in relation to the non-profit and ministry sector, just as much as the business sector.

But there is also an odd notion among some in ministry that everything is different in ministry, and that therefore people in ministry ought to look with skepticism upon most thinking on being effective and getting things done.

I disagree. The reality is that whether you are in ministry or the business world, your work is about dealing with people and managing yourself. These things are the same across all industries and areas. There certainly are unique factors that apply to ministry, as to any specific area. There are some real adjustments that need to be made. But, having worked extensively in both ministry and non-ministry roles, the unique factors are about 10 – 25% of what you do; a full 75 – 90% of the principles for effectiveness and managing yourself (and your organization) well are the same across all areas.

Further, and ironically, I think some ministries get things backward here. They think that if you learn from “the business world” you risk bringing worldly thinking into your organization. But in my experience, worldly thinking exists just as much in some churches and ministries as it does in the business world, and often this is precisely because of looking upon business practices with skepticism and failing to learn from the best of secular thinking.

The reason is that there are two kinds of business thinking: good business thinking, and bad business thinking. Most of the time those in ministry who reject “business thinking” have only been exposed to the bad kind of business thinking. They then superficially, and wrongly, think that’s what all business thinking is like.

But it’s not! The bad business thinking is, in fact, bad not just in ministries but in businesses as well. The best business thinkers in our day are realizing this, and coming to show that effectiveness in business actually comes from putting others first, from putting people before profit, and from seeking to serve others and do them good before yourself. They are coming to see (as the best business thinking always has) that the most significant trend in business is actually the downfall of the barracudas and sharks and the rise of “nice, smart people” (as Fast Company summarizes Tim Sanders’ excellent book Love Is the Killer App).

In other words, some in the business world are actually outdoing the church right now in their commitment to serve others and put them first. Ironically, by closing ourselves off from this kind of “business thinking,” we  are not protecting ourselves from worldliness at all, but rather inviting it to come in by roping ourselves off from the very important practice of “outside-of-your-area-awareness.” By roping ourselves off from “business thinking,” the all-too-often-result is that we actually end up adopting the worst practices of business out of the air, while remaining ignorant to what truly are the actual best practices that apply across all areas of life, work, and ministry.

Hence, to tie this back: effectiveness is indeed possible for you, whether you work in the business world or in ministry (or whether you stay at home with the kids), and there is a lot we can learn from the best business books out there (though, at the same time, we certainly need more written from a specifically Christian perspective).

If you are seeking the need to become more effective, especially if you work in ministry, here are three books I’d recommend for where to start:

  1. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Peter Drucker)
  2. Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends (Tim Sanders)
  3. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Keith Ferrazzi)

Real Work vs. Busy Work

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Some helpful points from Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management:

“Real work is what advances your business or your job” (69). It uses your skills to the full and often takes you out of the comfort zone. It is challenging by nature, and thus meets with some resistance in your mind.

Busy work is “what you do in order to avoid doing the real work.”

Real work involves lots of planning and thinking; for that reason, busy work often looks more like real work, because it is more immediate and you are rushing around looking busy. Sitting quietly and thinking, on the other hand, does not look like real work.

Doing work that someone else could do is also busy work.

Signs that you have fallen into the trap of busy work:

  1. Your work overwhelms you but doesn’t challenge you. “Real work is challenging but not overwhelming” (70).
  2. You are doing the same kind of work the people under you are doing. “Real work requires your individual skills and experience” (70). “If what you are doing could be done by someone who doesn’t have that skill and experience, you are working below your capacity.”
  3. There are vital actions you haven’t gotten around to. “Real work is those vital actions.”
  4. You never have time to stop and think. “Real work is thought expressing itself in action. If you are not thinking, you are unlikely to be doing any real work” (70).
  5. Your time horizon is very short. “Real work involves planning further ahead than the immediate horizon” (71).
  6. You are continually running up against problems. “Real work insists on excellent systems to support it.”

What Does it Mean to be in Control of Your Day?

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Some helpful points on what it looks like to actually be in control of your time and your day, from Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management:

  1. You are able to complete your work every day. Even though your to-do list never ends, it is possible to know exactly what you need to do in order to get your work done each day.
  2. You know what a days’ work is and thus when you’ve finished it. “Before you can say that you have completed your work for the day, you need to know what it consists of” (49).
  3. If you can’t get through a days work in a day, you can diagnose the problem and fix it.
  4. You can complete all your routine daily actions very quickly.
  5. You can complete projects in the quickest possible time. “Knowing how to get projects started and how to keep them moving is a major skill” (51).
  6. You can identify exactly what the right workload is for you. When you take on (or are given) too much work, it doesn’t all get done, or done well. The problem is that what does and doesn’t get done tends to happen at random, rather than by deliberate choice. It is much better to make conscious decisions. This is easier when you know what constitutes the right workload.
  7. You can bring new work online without disrupting existing work. To do this, you need to have mastery of the previous point—knowing what the right workload is for you.
  8. You know how to deal with genuine emergencies, without being pulled off track by things that seem like emergencies but are not.
  9. You can get moving on all the things you dream of doing “someday.”
  10. You know how to follow up properly.
  11. You can keep track of the tasks you’ve delegated.
  12. You can deal with other people’s bad time management. “Even when we’ve solved the problem of our own poor time management, we still have the problem of other people’s poor time management to contend with” (53). When things are out of order for us, we tend to respond to the things that make the loudest noise. It’s the same with others. You can utilize this principle to get your stuff accomplished with them.
  13. You can motivate yourself to power through the days’ work.

Quality is More Important than Quantity in Knowledge Work Productivity

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If there is one chief misunderstanding about productivity, it’s that productivity is mainly about getting more things done faster.

But in reality, productivity is just as much about (or, even more so about) doing things better than doing things faster.

Getting less done, but doing it of higher quality, is often more useful, significant, and hence “productive” for your organization and the world.

3 Things They Don't Teach in School that We All Pay Dearly For

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The 3 things are:

  1. Personal management: how to get things done and know what the right things are to get done
  2. Career management
  3. Leadership

As a result, most of us need to learn these on our own, on the job. If you really try to figure them out and do them well, it’s a painful process — especially if most of the people you are working with are in the same boat (which, since these things aren’t taught well in school, is usually the case).

There are good seminars and courses and training workshops on each of these areas for those in the workforce, especially if you work at a large corporation. The leadership teaching that is out there is often pretty good, because it emphasizes that leadership is about building people up just as much as making things happen. But even that is less effective without a broad set of foundational knowledge already in place that you can relate it to. If you start learning about leadership, for example, at 28, when you are put in a leadership position in your organization, you are still 14 years behind where you could have been (or 20 years behind). This makes the journey that much harder. Same with learning how to manage your career and manage yourself, even if you encounter the need to learn these much earlier (toward the end of college or shortly after).

I’m not saying that there aren’t excellent leadership opportunities available in the educational system; there are. And, that does a lot of good. (So things aren’t nearly as bad as they could be!) But I’m talking about explicit teaching on what leadership is, how to do it, and so forth, in addition to actual leadership experiences.

This has large costs to us as a society, as so many people end up spinning their wheels trying to figure out what direction to go long-term with their career, trying to figure out how to manage themselves, and learning how to lead that they could have spent actually leading and, in terms of their career management, avoiding some wrong turns.

And it’s not just the education system that has dropped the ball here. Churches have too. Churches are mandated by God to be led well and to develop leaders (that’s the meaning of Isaiah 32:1-8, if you understand it correctly, among other passages). Because of the priesthood of all believers, this means teaching all believers how to lead well, not just those in ministry. Yet, strangely, much of the time the church opposes leadership development because of the notion that it is somehow worldly or unspiritual.

This is a long-term problem. Obviously I have lots of thoughts on how this could be fixed, but this is enough for now.

Three Things About Knowledge Work They Never Told You in School

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Actually, schools tend to teach almost nothing on how to do knowledge work — that is, on the actual process for high performance workflow management (as opposed to the specific skill sets for various jobs, such as creating financial statements, etc., etc., which is taught in abundance).

Here are three things that you especially never hear, but are true:

  1. You will have to spend more time than expected doing seemingly strange and mundane tasks like organizing your computer files (or trying to figure out how you want them organized!) and figuring out where to capture and store all the various ideas you have.
  2. If people make fun of you for this (like my pastor has!; good-naturedly), ignore them. These are essential components for knowledge work, and your actual ideas, plans, and work products are better if you can keep yourself organized.
  3. This is because, somehow, in the process of organizing your ideas and knowledge work inputs and outputs, real work gets done beyond just the organizing (though that is important in itself).

Would Jesus Keep a To-Do List?

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I don’t think he would have (or did) because, knowing all things and being completely filled with the Spirit, he would not need any external reminders. It is literally impossible (both now, and when he was on earth) for Jesus to forget any obligation that he has. (And he does have obligations — that is, things he needs to get done — but they are only the arrangements he freely enters into, which are founded in the promises he has made in the Scriptures.)

But, I’ve never thought that “what would Jesus do” is necessarily the best question. It is a helpful question. But since we are not Jesus (for example, we are not omniscient), the more precise question is “what would Jesus have me do?”

And I think he would say this about to-do lists: “If you can keep all your commitments and get done what you are called to do without writing anything down, no problem. But if you have more to do than your memory is able to hold, one of the other reasons I’ve given you a mind is so that you can figure out a better way to keep track of everything than just keeping it in your head. So go, do what you need to do to remember what you need to remember in order to get done what you need to get done.”

Something like that.

And the Greatest Enemy of Creativity and Innovation Is…

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Efficiency.

Patrick Lencioni makes the case very well in his article, The Enemy of Creativity and Innovation. Here’s a great part:

I’ve become convinced that the only way to be really creative and innovative in life is to be joyfully inefficient….

Efficiency requires that we subdue our passion and allow it to be constrained by principles of logic and convention. Innovation and creativity require us to toss aside logic and convention, even without the near-term promise of a payoff. Embracing both at the same time seems to me to be a recipe for stress, dissonance and mediocrity, and yet, that is exactly what so many organizations—or better yet—leaders, do.

They exhort their employees to utilize their resources wisely and to avoid waste and redundancy, which makes perfect sense. They also exhort them to be ever-vigilant about finding new and better products or processes, which also makes sense. And yet, combining these two perfectly sensible exhortations makes no sense at all, and only encourages rational, responsible people to find a middle ground, something that is decidedly neither efficient nor innovative.

This is why I don’t talk about efficiency a ton. It matters and has its place. But my goal is effectiveness, and often times the greatest path to effectiveness is quite inefficient.

More on this in my book.

Don't Forget!

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Jesus:

When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. (Luke 14:12-14).

This applies to more than just dinners and banquets. In all that you do, in all areas of life, we are to give special attention to helping those who cannot do anything for us in return.

It is interesting that in Matthew 7, the people who expected to enter the kingdom but were turned away had done many “mighty works” in Jesus’ name (Matthew 7:21-23), whereas in Matthew 25 the righteous who enter the kingdom are described as those who met the concrete  needs of “the least of these” (Matthew 25:35-40).

It is not the way you treat the great that shows the state of your heart before God, though it is of course important to treat everyone with respect. What truly shows the state of your heart before God is how you treat those who are in no place to do anything for you, if you do it for Jesus’ sake.

These are tough words, if you think about it. So don’t forget. Live your life in such a way that it is filled with all sorts of actions and activities and other good works that you will not be and cannot be repaid for here on earth. And, if you do this from faith and by the Spirit, “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

6 Characteristics of Knowledge Work

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Here are 6 great points I recently came across, summarizing Peter Drucker on what makes knowledge work different from (and more challenging than) manual work:

  1. “Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
  2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
  3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of knowledge workers.
  4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
  5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not – at least not primarily – a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
  6. Finally, knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘cost’. It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.”

Here’s the key point, and the key challenge: Knowledge workers must manage themselves. The manager can only be a source of help, not a boss.

This creates an incredible opportunity and challenge for us as knowledge workers. The challenge is that it means that we need to know how to manage ourselves now more than ever, which does not necessarily come naturally (which is one reason I wrote my book). But the opportunity is that knowledge work by definition presents a great opportunity to unleash your creativity and innovation and unique interests.

This also presents a challenge for organizations, however. Many organizations that consist of knowledge workers still manage their people as if they are doing manual work. This is why you still see tightly controlled leadership and management practices.

The news flash is that these approaches kill knowledge work. Organizations cannot take their management cues from how management was done in the industrial era (I’m not saying even manual work should have been managed in that way, but it’s even worse with knowledge work). Every organization needs to be built on the recognition that their people, especially their knowledge workers (which is most of the workforce today), must be given ownership in their tasks and be allowed to manage themselves.

(By the way, if you are reading this blog, you are a knowledge worker; also, even if your “paid” job consists in manual work, we are all knowledge workers in our personal and home lives.)