Last week, I introduced Peter Drucker (“the most enduring management thinker of our time”) and the five questions he would ask any organization leader if he was to sit down with him today.
Those questions are:
– What is our mission?
– Who is our customer?
– What does the customer value?
– What are our results?
– What is our plan?
These questions are the self-assessment process for accessing what you are doing, why you are doing it and what you must do to improve an organization’s performance.
“Planning is not an event. It is the continuous process of strengthening what works and abandoning what does not.” – Drucker
Planning is not making future decisions. Planning helps leaders make good decisions about what must be done today to achieve results for our customers. A customer is someone you must satisfy to achieve your results. Customers include your core customers, supporting customers, employees, board members, shareholders (donors in non-profits) and the communities you operate in.
“The time to do planning is when you are successful. If you wait until things start to go down, then it’s very difficult.” – Drucker
Encourage Constructive Dissent
I love that Drucker talks about the power of dissent. He states that all first-rate decision-makers he has observed (and just think about the level of talent he has observed!) follow a simple rule:
If you have a quick consensus on an important matter, don’t make the decision.
The organization’s decisions are important and risky, and they should be controversial. Here is a great quote that goes back to Aristotle and later became the axiom of the early church.
In essentials unity, in action freedom, and in all things trust.
Trust requires that dissent come out in the open. Organizations move at the speed of the trust that exists within them. Without trust, every single thing slows down.
Clarity, self-assessment and healthy dissension all increase trust – which improves organizational performance.
Even great leaders struggle to make time to encourage and participate in healthy dissension, but the best leaders do.
Dissension gets all the objections on the table, incorporates those objections into the decision and negates the need to “sell” a decision because those who need to be sold had a hand in creating the solution. All of their objections have been heard and responded to before a decision was reached.
Self-Assessment and dissension are powerful tools that all leaders should use regularly.
“Self-assessment can and should convert good intentions and knowledge into effective action – not next year but tomorrow morning.” – Drucker
Curt Fowler is president of Fowler & Company and director at Fowler, Holley, Rambo & Stalvey. He is dedicated to helping leaders build great organizations and better lives for themselves and the people they lead.
Curt and the team at FHRS help leaders build great companies through Fractional CFO, strategy, tax and accounting services.
