Everyone who reads this blog, knows that I am a huge Drucker fan. This quote from The Effective Executive here (affiliate link), published in 1967, sums up how good consultancies run.
Consultants are knowledge workers
The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. – Peter Drucker
An effective consulting team or group is made up of competent, thoughtful people who trust each other and help clients win. It is a loose affiliation of free agents who “jam” and make executives and clients’ lives easier.
They are not a Dilbert hierarchy of mangers watching, tracking, measuring, project managing other people. It is not full of status reports, and dashboards of progress. It is not SG&A or overhead. As Drucker said, [consultants] can only be helped.
As a consultant, my questions to you:
- How have you helped your fellow team mates today?
- What are you doing to build your practice?
- Have you codified the learnings from your last project, so it helps others?
- Are you giving the client the best work by leveraging your team?
- During your day, what % of time was spent 1) solving client problems? 2) helping others 3) doing admin?
As a manager, my questions to you:
- Are you coaching your team, or micro-managing them?
- Are you showing your team what good managers look like?
- Are you giving away credit, and taking more of the blame?
- Are you protecting people weaker than yourself?
- Are you extending grace to junior consultants who make mistakes?
- Are you giving truth and feedback / pushback to seniors, on behalf of the team?
Fast forward 7 years, now in 2021
The original post was written in 2014 – same year that Google acquired Deep Mind, out of the UK. Machine learning is quickly making the boring – even more boring. Robotic process automation is taking the repetitive, learning tasks out of human hands forever. So Drucker’s arguments about tapping into the potentials of humans – helping them do great, creative work, is ever more important. Because all the boring $^-+ will be done by the specific artificial intelligence.
Related Posts:
- Peter Drucker said, “Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer the meetings the better”
- What Peter Drucker says about Effective Executives
- Links