Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Peter Drucker

Sucking up Isn’t a Requirement for Success

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Consider the all-too-familiar boss’s pet employee at an office. He uses flattery, goes out of his way to help the boss, curries personal favors, and constantly tows the boss’s line no matter how unreasonable it is. He never corrects the boss when necessary. He either sugarcoats or withholds information that the boss would rather not hear. Over time, he has perfected the art of stroking his boss’s exaggerated sense of self-worth.

How about leaders who go overboard on their intention to exceed customer expectations and turn out to be “customer compelled?” They bend over backward to fulfill every whim and fancy of their customers to the likely peril of their own organization’s values and priorities.

Sucking up or brown-nosing is widespread approach to win a boss’s approval solely with one’s own self-interest in mind. Consider the consequences of sucking up:

  • An employee that sucks up to his boss loses the respect of his peers and employees. They assume positive discrimination and favoritism because of his ingratiatory behavior. The suck-up recursively promotes sucking up in his organization—he encourages others to establish themselves in his good graces.
  • Suck-ups quickly get into a pattern of slavishly reacting to every impulse of the boss. Without realizing, they become vulnerable to obligations to support their boss. Neither can they set limits on favors, nor do they stand up for themselves or their employees.

Be Resourceful, Don’t Suck Up

“One does not make the strengths of the boss productive by toadying to him. One does it by starting out with what is right and presenting it in a form which is accessible to the superior.”
* Peter Drucker, in The Effective Executive

Contrary to popular opinion, a vast majority of promotions are not handed out to employees who are most willing to suck up. Research and empirical evidence proves that employees who are honest, sincere, open, straightforward, and helpful earn management’s respect and attention over time. They move up fast because of their demonstrated ability to make the right choices. In addition, most people can innately distinguish the brown-nosers and differentiate genuine compliments from insincere flattery.

Do not get me wrong. There is enormous value in being helpful to the boss. After all, making yourself resourceful can go a long way in staying in the boss’s good graces. It can open professional opportunities and increase your access to new ideas, initiatives, and restricted information. However, there is an obvious boundary between doing favors and sucking up. Running an urgent errand when the boss is busy preparing for an important meeting or watching over his pet when he is travelling are well within reason. Compromising your values and priorities just to get on the boss’s side will not get you anywhere in the long term. Try these suggestions:

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How to Think and Perform like a CEO: Link the External World with the Internal Organization

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A.G. Lafley on the Unique Work of CEOs

In this article (PDF of full article) in the May 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Proctor & Gamble’s Chairman and outgoing CEO, A.G. Lafley reflects on the unique responsibilities of CEOs. What makes this article engaging is that A.G. Lafley uses the context of his commendable achievements at the helm of Proctor & Gamble to elaborate on the teachings of management guru Peter Drucker.

“The CEO is the link between the inside and outside. He alone experiences the meaningful outside at an enterprise level and is responsible for understanding it, interpreting it, advocating for it, and presenting it so that the company can respond in a way that enables sustainable sales, profit and total shareholder return (TSR) growth.”

Drawing from Peter Drucker’s teachings, A.G. Lafley identifies the four fundamental tasks of a CEO. Here is a summary:

  1. Defining and interpreting the meaningful ‘outside.’ Identifying which external stakeholders matter the most. Recognizing where results are most meaningful. Clarifying and communicating the priority of external stakeholders.
  2. Identifying and focusing on the competitive spaces where the organization can win. Inquiring, “What is our business? What should it be? What is not our business? And what should it not be?”
  3. Balancing the present and the future. Determining the optimum balance between yield from present activities and investment in a highly uncertain future. This involves, (1) defining realistic growth goals, (2) creating a flexible budgeting process, and (3) allocating human resources in a way that identifies and develops good people for today and tomorrow.
  4. Shaping the values and standards of the organization. Winning with those who matter most and against the very best.

Think like a CEO, Focus on Organizational Performance

I believe that everybody is a CEO. Whatever your span of responsibilities—supervisory, managerial or leadership—you are accountable to the external stakeholders. These stakeholders measure you purely by your ability to identify opportunities and get things done through the resources you have. Here are five essential initiatives to help you think and act like a CEO.

  1. Understand the context of your organization or project. Change your perception away from the minutiae of your organization and seek to understand what your organization means in the broader context and how it fits into the external world. Draw from this external perspective to establish the right directions and align the work of your entire organization with these organizational goals. Differentiate between short-term and long-term opportunities.
  2. Identify the primary external customers—these could be higher-level managers, other groups within your company or a consumer who uses your products. Use this customer standpoint to make every strategic decision and choose the right actions. Connect each initiative to its beneficial results to your customers.
  3. Communicate your direction and priorities to your organization. Help your employees determine where to focus their own efforts and how they eventually fit in the broader context of the external world.
  4. Focus on execution and achieving results. Introduce a culture of accountability. Ensure that each employee actually does live up to the values and goals of the organization.
  5. Coach your employees and develop them. Understand and align their personal values and aspirations to those of the organization, to the extent possible. Per Peter Drucker, “make sure that the performing people are allocated to opportunities rather than only to ‘problems.’ … Make sure that people are placed where their strengths can become effective.” Plan for succession.

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[Time Management #2] Time Logging: Log Where Your Time Actually Goes

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Preamble

This article is the second in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Yesterday’s article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.

Log How You Spend Your Time

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”
—Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

Before you begin managing your time effectively, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.

Below is a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. If you follow a specific routine everyday, you may be able to approximate your time analysis by doing this exercise for a couple of weekdays and a Saturday or a Sunday. Alternatively, you may choose to do this only during your time at work. Again, more data leads to a more comprehensive analysis; hence, try to log an entire week.

Log where time actually goes---Time Log Template

  1. Create a simple chart that consists of four columns as in the above illustration. Column 1 contains labels for time intervals, in 10- or 15-minute increments. Column 2 records your activity. Column 3 identifies the project or purpose that activity served. Column 4 rates the effectiveness of time spent. Itemizing all these details is the key to identifying time wasted and time effectively used.
  2. Make as many photocopies of this chart as required for a whole week.
  3. Carry your time log charts around with you wherever you go. Record every activity—significant or insignificant, large or small—during the entire week. Include time spent at your morning ablutions, travel time, time spent chitchatting around the water cooler, time spent helping your daughter with homework, telephone time, time spent on the internet—your sleeping time too.

Time Log Forms

Here are two PDF forms you could download and use:

You need not necessarily stop every 10th or 15th minute to record your activity. You can fill up the relevant rows once every hour or so. If you spend two hours on an airplane, you can mark 12 rows (of 10 minutes each) with a single comment. You need not be very precise: if you spend 7 minutes on the phone with a customer, you can record spending an entire 10 minutes.

Here is what your log should look like.

Log where time actually goes---Time Log Example

Benefits of Time Logging

The immediate benefit of time logging is that it induces a sense of significance of your time. It compels you into the right mindset to consider habits you need to develop, avoid or change and start using your hours and minutes more effectively.

The more significant advantage is that your time logs will serve as a foundation for structuring your time according to your priorities and thus enable effective time management.

Tomorrow’s article will focus on time-analysis to help you review results from your time logs and prepare you for budgeting time according to your priorities.

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Four Questions for Employee Performance Appraisals

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Peter Drucker is widely regarded as the “Father of Modern Management,” and one of the most influential management philosophers of the modern era. In “The Effective Executive,” Peter Drucker advocates that a manager focus on an employee’s strengths when appraising his/her performance.

Four Questions for Performance Appraisals

Effective executives usually work out their own unique form of performance appraisal. It starts out with a statement of the major contributions expected from a person in his past and present positions and a record of his performance against these goals. Then it asks four questions:

  1. What has he [or she] done well?
  2. What, therefore, is he likely to be able to do well?
  3. What does he have to learn or to acquire to be able to get the full benefit from his strength?
  4. If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing to have him or her work under this person? If yes, why? If no, why?

Call for Action

Strong performance motivates outstanding performers. Therefore, managers must make it a priority to understand each employee’s motivation and strengths and provide objective, fair and consistent appreciation to keep him/her fully engaged.

Managers, however, often fail to realize the prospect of enhancing employee performance by targeting their efforts on each employee’s strengths. They often resort to deliberating over an employee’s shortcomings, and, thus attempt to develop abilities not inline with the employee’s strengths.

Address the above four questions when preparing the performance appraisal of an employee. These questions enable you, the manager, to reinforce the strengths of the employee and guide a career that focusses on his/her strengths.

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The Legacy of Peter Drucker, the Original Management Guru

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Yesterday was the first anniversary of the death of Peter Ferdinand Drucker, “the father of modern management.”

Drucker is arguably the most influential management philosopher of the modern era. He is the author of about forty books and innumerable essays on managerial skills, management concepts and social analyses. As a consultant, author and speaker for over sixty years, Drucker influenced the thinking of many executives in businesses, not-for-profits and faith-based organizations. Read his detailed biographies here, here and here.

Drucker wrote about many concepts and practices decades before the trends were discernable: knowledge workers, empowering employees, decentralization, management by objectives, focus on results instead of actions, the responsibility of the corporation in society, knowledge-based society, rise of multinational businesses, etc.

Drucker’s writings are devoid of buzzwords and management jargon and easily resonate with his readers. Today, we accept Drucker’s thoughts as conventional wisdom. Consequently, scores of business school courses require reading of his books.

My first exposure to Drucker’s thoughts was when I read his manual “The Effective Executive” during my undergraduate studies. Over the last few years, I have read and re-read many of his books and essays. Drucker’s unique style of expression and simple, clear language have left a deep impression on my pursuits, thoughts and actions. Below is one of my favorite Peter Drucker instructions. See my separate blog post on his inspirational quotations.

Successful leaders don’t start out asking, “What do I want to do?” They ask, “What needs to be done?” Then they ask, “Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?” They don’t tackle things they aren’t good at.

On a question about his legacy, Drucker once said that he has “helped a few good people be effective in doing the right things.” Just a few? Drucker’s farsighted insights and timeless thoughts will influence management thought for generations to come.

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Inspirational Quotations by Peter Drucker

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Yesterday was the first anniversary of the death of Peter Ferdinand Drucker, “the father of modern management.” Here is a selection of inspirational quotations from one of the most influential management philosophers of modern era. For more details, please see my article “The Legacy of Peter Drucker“.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)