Peter Drucker’s Advice to Aspiring Leaders

Five time-proven practices from the pioneering management thinker

There aren’t a lot of business books from more than a half-century ago that have stood the test of time, but Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, issued in a spiffy 50th Anniversary edition in 2017, is one of the select few. Back in 1967, when many of today’s business readers weren’t yet a gleam in their parents’ eyes, Drucker, whom Tom Peters said invented modern management, declared, “The executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply saying that he is expected to be effective.”

Drucker is as relevant today as he was in the last century because he approached the study of management like an exercise in anatomy. His clarity of thought and language was a scalpel, which he used to lay bare every aspect of his chosen subject and reveal its essence. In The Effective Executive, Drucker applied that scalpel to leadership.

Drucker was of two minds as to whether leaders are made or born. In The Practice of Management, another classic business book, which was published more than a decade earlier in 1954, he treated it as a matter of natural aptitude and ingrained attitude: “Leadership is of the utmost importance. Indeed there is no substitute for it. But leadership cannot be created or promoted. It cannot be taught or learned.”

By the time, Drucker wrote The Effective Executive, however, he seems to have changed his mind. In it, he described five practices that can make you a more effective leader:

1. Manage your time

“Time is the scarcest resource,” wrote Drucker, “and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” Successful execs know how they spend their days, and they dismiss or delegate any activity that doesn’t require their direct attention.

To identify the unnecessary time-sucks in your day, Drucker suggested jotting down everything you do in real time. Even better, these days you could get a time management app. Then, examine your activity entries and, for each one, ask yourself, “What would happen if this were not done at all?” If the answer is nothing (and it often will be, according to Drucker), stop doing it. If the task needs to be done, ask yourself if it could be done by somebody else. If so, delegate it. Repeat every few months to make sure you’re still spending your time wisely.

2. Focus on contribution

Effective executives hold themselves “accountable for the performance of the whole,” wrote Drucker. By that he meant that they aren’t solely focused on their own performance or careers. Instead, the most effective leaders are team players who work hard to realize the strategic goals of their organizations.

To direct your focus to what you can do to maximize your contribution to your company, Drucker had some pithy advice. He said to start by “asking other people in the organization, superiors, subordinates, but above all, colleagues in other areas: ‘What contribution from me do you require to make your contribution to the organization?’”

3. Build on strengths

Drucker preached a strengths-first approach to management decades before it became a corporate buzzword. Effective executives drive team productivity and results, he wrote, by building on “available strengths — the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strength.”

Train yourself to focus on strengths instead of weaknesses by concentrating on what employees can do rather than what they can’t do, advises Drucker. Seek out only the best-qualified people, instead of those who play well with others or who appear to have no flaws (they invariably do). And don’t forget to apply this practice to yourself — identify your own strengths and use them to improve your performance.

4. Prioritize and concentrate

Long before we were all tethered to our smartphones, Drucker was warning leaders about the dangers of multitasking. He said that effective executives focus all their faculties on one achievement at a time. Why? “The more one can concentrate time, effort, and resources,” Drucker wrote, “the greater the number and diversity of tasks one can actually perform.”

To make the most of your concentrated effort, first prioritize your tasks. Prioritization is key, said Drucker, because if you’re only working on one thing, you must make sure it’s the right thing. “Effective executives do first things first,” he wrote, “and they do one thing at a time.”

5. Make decisions systematically

Finally, Drucker said that effective leaders make sound decisions — that means no on-the-fly calls or going with your gut. Sound decisions, he said, come from using a repeatable, consistent process with clearly defined elements executed in a distinct sequence.

How should you approach decision making? Drucker offered these tips:

• Determine what kind of decision is required. If the issue is ongoing, you’ll need to develop a policy; if it’s a one-off situation, make the call and move on.
• Define the decision’s “boundary conditions” — that is, its objectives, minimum goals, and the conditions it must meet — before you make it.
• Shoot for the ideal outcome to start. Save the inevitable compromises for later, when it’s time to implement the decision.
• Define the actions necessary to implement the decision in the decision.
• Don’t chisel your decisions in stone. Allow for post-implementation feedback and adapt the decision when needed.