2008 BOOK-OF-THE-YEAR:
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization
See Issue 331 for the latest edition of this classic book by Peter Drucker.
Issue No. 87 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting delivers a new resource on the five most important questions you will ever ask about your organization. Idea: review one question each week—and then go deeper at a staff retreat. And this reminder: to review the books I’ve recommended in back issues, visit the archives here. Plus, check out my new Management Buckets website with dozens of new resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
The Five Drucker Questions
A helpful new tool for the five “Drucker questions” was published by Leader to Leader Institute and Jossey-Bass last month. The first edition of Peter Drucker’s self-assessment tool for organizations arrived in 1993 and introduced these five key questions: 1) What is our mission? 2) Who is our customer? 3) What does the customer value? 4) What are our results? and 5) What is our plan?
This supplementary tool (just 101 easy-reading pages) includes expanded observations from Drucker along with color commentary from six distinguished management gurus, including Jim Collins, Philip Kotler, James Kouzes, Judith Rodin (Rockefeller Foundation president), V. Kasturi Rangan (Harvard Business School), and Frances Hesselbein (chairman of Leader to Leader Institute and former CEO, Girl Scouts of the USA).
Click on this title to order from Amazon: The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization. Referring to Question #5 on planning, Drucker comments, “Planning is not an event. It is the continuous process of strengthening what works and abandoning what does not, of making risk-taking decisions with the greatest knowledge of their potential effect, of setting objectives, appraising performance and results through systematic feedback, and making ongoing adjustments as conditions change.”
If you’ve ordered my new book, be sure to read the first four chapters that expand on the five Drucker questions: the Results Bucket, the Customer Bucket, the Strategy Bucket and the Drucker Bucket.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1. Peter Drucker says that one benefit of a self-assessment process is that you can evaluate how you match opportunities with your competence and commitment. How are you doing on this now?
2. The time to do a self-assessment, says Drucker, is when you are successful, not when your leading indicators are lagging. Is it time for a Drucker Questions self-assessment at our organization?
Bucket #16 of 20: The Delegation Bucket - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
Over a 20-week period, I’m featuring one of the 20 buckets (core competencies) each week from my new book, Mastering the Management Buckets (now available). Here’s the core competency in Bucket #16, The Delegation Bucket:
“We are experts at appropriate delegation. We invite team members to accept assignments based on their strengths. We value organized delegation and believe in the Point Person Principle. We track our to-do lists and we add to our don’t-do lists.”
Peter Drucker wrote, “No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.”
Superman is not a good delegator. (Imagine how dull the movies would be if he enlisted the ordinary citizens of Metropolis or Gotham City to handle each crisis!) Despite the fact that Superman is, in fact, superhuman, while the vast majority of us are not, the Superman Syndrome is alive and well in North America. Many CEOs, pastors, senior leaders, managers and volunteers often tackle their daily work as if they were Superman. As they fly across the screen, rooting out evil, they look back at the applauding crowd. When the affirmation feels so good, why delegate?
Think about these symptoms of the “dysfunctional delegation disease.” Do you have any? Do the people on your team have the disease? Check all that apply:
1. If the job is going to get done right, it’s faster to do it myself.
2. I’m the only one that knows how to do this job—that’s why they hired me.
3. If I delegate too much, maybe I won’t be needed.
4. Okay, I admit it . . . I’m a perfectionist. This project is too important to leave to novices.
5. I inherited my team—and, frankly, they’re ineffective—so it’s up to me.
6. I get more affirmation at work than I do at home. I love work!
7. My boss (or board) says I don’t delegate enough. Ha! If they only knew how hard I’m working. I’ll show ‘em.
Host a “3-D” coffee break and download Worksheet #16.1: "Dysfunctional Delegation Diseases." Take this Delegation Gut-Check Assessment and diagnose the severity of your delegation diseases. Are you a Code Green, Code Yellow or Code Red? Check out the resources in The Delegation Bucket at ManagementBuckets.com.
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