Effectiveness Can Be Learned (1, The Effective Executive)

1:  Effectiveness Can Be Learned

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

The motivation of the knowledge worker depends on his being effective, on his being able to achieve. If effectiveness is acking in his work, his commitment to work and to contribution will soon wither, and he will become a time-server going through the motions from 9 to 5.

The knowledge worker produces knowledge, ideas, information.

WHO IS AN EXECUTIVE?

Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.

There are many managers who are not executives. Many people, In other words, are superiors of other people - and often of fairly large numbers of other people - and still do not seriously affect the ability of the organization to perform.

Whether a knowledge worker is an executive does not depend on whether he manages people or not.

REALITIES THAT THE EXECUTIVE HAS TO FACE

1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else.
2. Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work.
3. The third reality pushing the executive toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization.
4. Finally, the executive is within an organization.

There are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside.

What happens inside any organization is effort and cost.

The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment.

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends.

These four realities the executive cannot change. They are necessary conditions of his existence. But he must therefore assume that he will be ineffectual unless he makes special efforts to learn to be effective.

THE PROMISE OF EFFECTIVENESS

We will have to learn to build organizations in such a manner that any man who has strength in one important area is capable of putting it to work.

BUT CAN EFFECTIVENESS BE LEARNED?

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit.

These are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive:

1. Know where their time goes.
2. Focus on outward contribution.
3. build on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates.
4. Concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.
5. Make effective decisions.

-- From "The Effective Executive"