PETER DRUCKER ON LEARNING TO WORK WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT
Use this to remind you that you will never have the perfect team or system.
The godfather of management science, Peter Drucker (1919–2005) was a very practical man. He didn’t dream up theories or ideas based on what he thought should happen or what could happen in business. His ideas were based on what did happen in business.
As a football fan, I’ve lost count of the times that a manager has subtly blamed his squad of players for the team’s poor performance. Phrases such as ‘We need two or three new players in the next transfer window’ are code for ‘Don’t blame me for the last six defeats, I didn’t sign these donkeys.’
But Drucker knew it was a manager’s job to manage with the resources that s/he had available to them:
The task is to manage what there is and work to create what could or should be.
Peter Drucker
WHAT TO DO
- If you are short of the tools, machines, systems and materials to do your job, you must renegotiate your targets and objectives or else find a way to beg, borrow or steal what you require. But really you should never have agreed to the targets and objectives in the first place.
- More likely, your problems will be with staff and the skills they do and don’t have. Start by examining the targets and objectives that you and your staff have been set.
- Identify the skills required to achieve the targets and objectives to a good standard.
- Analyse the skills that your staff currently possess.
- Compare the skills sets of your staff with the skills required to achieve your objectives and identify any shortfalls.
- Consider to what extent formal or informal training might eliminate or reduce some of the shortfalls and arrange any training that is required. Obviously, training will have to be delivered quickly and be capable of having a near instantaneous effect. We’re not talking about long training programmes or professional courses here. You’ll be looking at short-term sessions delivered in-house, perhaps by you or other staff, which will plug skill gaps in the short term or by the suppliers of systems and machines that you have recently purchased.
- Redistribute work in order to play to the strengths of individual members of staff.
- Assuming that you can’t appoint a new member of staff, check whether anyone has a member of staff that they are willing to lend to you in the short term. But beware of managers offloading their greatest unresolved problem.
- As people leave, use the ‘skills required analysis’ that you completed as the basis for drawing up a new job description and/or person specification. With 20 per cent staff turnover now fairly normal, you should be able to resolve most, if not all, your problems within two or three years.
QUESTIONS TO ASK
- When did I last undertake an analysis of the skills required by my staff and compare that to the skills they have?
- When did I last reorganise/redistribute work responsibilities within the team in order to play to people’s strengths?