The Effective Executive — A Top of the Page Review

March 2023

I recently recommended this book to a friend who’s struggling to transition into her new leadership role. Having made the recommendation, I decided to revisit the text myself.

Like my friend, my first encounter with this book was as a frazzled executive. I was caught in the hustle and grind of a growing organization and felt overwhelmed and ineffective. Back then it helped me reset my understanding of my role within the organization and set boundaries around my time.

Drucker, Peter F. 1967. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. New York: Harper Collins Books.

Quick Summary

The Effective Executive can be summed up as:

⭐️ The job of an executive is to be effective.

⭐️ Effectiveness can be learned.

The author argues that effectiveness is a collection of practices that become habits. These practices can be learned, essentially translating effectiveness into a matter of self-discipline. He defines effectiveness as doing the right things to create the right outcomes. He identifies five essential practices for executives to develop effectiveness.

1. Know how they spend their time
2. Focus on outward contributions to prioritize results over work
3. Build on strengths
4. Concentrate on fewer things to produce better results
5. Make effective decisions

According the the book, executives are not exclusive to the C-suite. They are the people whose work requires decisions that direct the whole of the organization in some capacity. From this perspective, executives include all knowledge based workers: professionals, managers, and subject matter experts.

Key Takeaways

Leadership

The most powerful idea in this book is that executives must quit operating. Their focus should be not on doing the work but on gaining the desired results of the work. If the desired results are not occurring, the executive is not being effective — no matter how many items they are checking off their list. Underlying this perspective is the assumption that busyness is not productivity, an idea I explored in The Remote Manager.

The antidote to ineffective leadership is to do fewer things. More specifically, only doing one thing at a time until that thing is done and generating the desired outcomes. (And empowering decision makers in your team to follow your lead.)

People Management

A major takeaway from The Effective Executive is in how people managers must attend to the needs of their knowledge workers/decision makers. Productivity requires significant time investment from senior leaders falling along two lines.

The first line of time investment is in protecting the knowledge workers’ time. Knowledge work requires fairly large chunks of time to generate enough value to produce meaningful results. These large chunks of time are rarely the kind of measurable outputs that are often mistaken for productivity. A software engineer is not successful based on the number of lines of code he writes. He is successful when the code he writes produces the desired result. To accomplish the desired result, he must have time to think deeply about how to write the code, time to experiment with different permutations, and time to document his decision making for those who will later work with his code to produce new results.

Protecting the time of knowledge workers requires senior leaders to question how they measure productivity and the demands that they put on knowledge workers to account for their time. Without the protection of their time, time scarcity drives knowledge workers to work longer and longer hours zapping their strength and leading to burn out, alienation, frustration, and “silent despair”.

The second line of time investment is the effort to establish and maintain relationships with knowledge workers. The author warns that knowledge workers need more time from their supervisors and their peers than “manual” workers do. Effective communication, he contends, happens only within these human relationships.

Effectiveness for people managers means that the right people have the right information at the right time to produce the right results. Senior leaders must spend substantial time explaining desired outcomes to knowledge workers so that these executives are able to make the appropriate decisions during their work. That kind of confirmation can only happen within close working relationships informed by deep knowledge of the personalities, experiences, and strengths of each individual involved. There is no shortcut. If the information is not understood properly, the people manager has failed.

Process Improvement

Reading between the lines of this book delivers some great takeaways about system design within the business. Here are a few of my favorites.

Recurring crises are a sign of poor management. Executives have a responsibility to learn from every crisis and address the underlying causes. If a crisis occurs a second time, the executive alone owns the responsibility because they failed to effectively identify what part of the system or process needed to be changed to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Recurring crises are a waste of time, a cardinal sin for an executive since time is a nonrenewable resource. An effective executive never squanders time — theirs or anyone else’s.

Problem solving does not produce results. It only prevents damage. Effective executives look at problems as opportunities — not threats. Every problem offers the unique opportunity to think differently about business, process, or people. So they use problems as an opportunity to get better at what they do, to improve their process or systems, and to grow their people.

Executives are responsible for safeguarding the change management process. It is ultimately their job to confirm that decisions are effectively carried out. To do that, the author recommends very specific actions. First, decisions require an owner, a deadline, the buy-in of those impacted, and a communication plan to those indirectly impacted. Second, decisions must be translated into action plans. A good action plan is a statement of intentions, anticipates flexibility, has measurement checkpoints and controls time usage.

Memorable Quotes

1️⃣

“Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time.”

2️⃣

“A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.”

3️⃣

“A decision has not been made until people know:

• the name of the person accountable for carrying it out;
• the deadline;
• the names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it — or at least not be strongly opposed to it; and
• the names of the people who have to be informed of the decision, even if they are not directly affected by it.”

4️⃣

“As executives work toward becoming effective, they raise the performance level of the whole organization…They have better people because they motivate to self-development through their standards, through their habits, through their climate. And these, in turn, result from systematic, focused, purposeful self-training of the individuals in becoming effective executives.”

5️⃣

“Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective…The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness.”

Final Thoughts

The Effective Executive was written more than fifty years ago, but it is still astonishingly relevant to business leaders today.

The executive depicted in this book is deeply engaged in the work of the business. His full effort is poured into determining the right work to focus on always starting with the desired outcome and working backward to identify the most important work. Always evaluating choices through the lens of what gets the whole closer to the goal.

Effectiveness is about knowing what work to do to generate the desired results. It is about staying above the fray of distraction and fractured efforts. It is about setting up your team for success so they know what to work on, when to work on it, and why they are working on it so they can make the best decisions possible to generate the desired results.

Learn more about Top of the Page

Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?