What makes an Effective Executive?

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness in a man’s own work: its content, its levels, its standards and its impacts: in his relations with others – his superiors, his associates, his subordinates: in his use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports.

Majority of executives tend to focus downwards. They are occupied with efforts rather than results. They worry about what the organization and their superiors “owe” them and should do for them and they are conscious above all, of the authority, they “should have”. As a result, they render themselves ineffectual.

The Head of one of the large management consulting firms, always starts an assignment with a new client, by spending a few days, visiting senior executives of the client organization one by one. After he has chatted with them about the assignment and the client organization, its history and its people, he asks (though rarely of course, in these words): And what do you do that justifies your being on the payroll?” Majority of them, he reports answer: “I run the accounting department,” or “I am in charge of the sales force.” Indeed, not uncommonly the answer is, I have 850people working under me.

Only a few say, “It’s my job to give our managers the information they need, to make their decisions,” or “I am responsible for finding out what product the Customers will want tomorrow,” or “I have to think through and prepare the decisions the president will have to face tomorrow.”

The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority, is a subordinate, no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “Top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department and towards the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results. He is likely to have to think through what relationship his skills, his specialty, his function, or his department have with the entire. organization and its purpose. He therefore will also come to think in terms of the customer, the client or the patient, who is the ultimate reason for whatever the organization produces, whether it be economic goods, governmental policies, or health services. As a result, what he does and how he does it, will be materially different.

“Extract –The Effective Executive by Peter F Drucker”