Making Strength Productive
PETER F. DRUCKER
"The test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance"
The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths—the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.
Staffing from Strength
The area in which the executive first encounters the challenge of strength is in staffing. The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength.
President Lincoln when told that General Grant, his new commander-in-chief, was fond of the bottle said: “If I knew his brand, I’d send a barrel or so to some other generals.” After a childhood on the Kentucky and Illinois frontier, Lincoln assuredly knew all about the bottle and its dangers. But of all the Union generals, Grant alone had proven consistently capable of planning and leading winning campaigns. Grant’s appointment was the turning point of the Civil War. It was an effective appointment because Lincoln chose his general for his tested ability to win battles and not for his sobriety, that is, for the absence of a weakness.
Lincoln learned this the hard way however. Before he chose Grant, he had appointed in succession three or four Generals whose main qualifications were their lack of major weaknesses. As a result, the North, despite its tremendous superiority in men and materiel, had not made any headway for three long years from 1861 to 1864. In sharp contrast, Lee, in command of the Confederate forces, had staffed from strength. Every one of Lee’s generals, from Stonewall Jackson on, was a man of obvious and monumental weaknesses. But these failings Lee considered—rightly—to be irrelevant. Each of them had, however, one area of real strength—and it was this strength, and only this strength, that Lee utilized and made effective. As a result, the “well-rounded” men Lincoln had appointed were beaten time and again by Lee’s “single-purpose tools,” the men of narrow but very great strength.
Whoever tries to place a man or staff an organization to avoid weakness will end up at best with mediocrity. The idea that there are “well-rounded” people, people who have only strengths and no weaknesses (whether the term used is the “whole man,” the “mature personality,” the “well-adjusted personality,” or the “generalist”) is a prescription for mediocrity if not for incompetence. Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of human knowledge, experience, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to be rated a total failure. There is no such thing as a “good man.” Good for what? is the question.
The executive who is concerned with what a man cannot do rather than with what he can do, and who therefore tries to avoid weakness rather than make strength effective is a weak man him-self. He probably sees strength in others as a threat to himself. But no executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective. There is no prouder boast, but also no better prescription, for executive effectiveness than the words Andrew Carnegie, the father of the U.S. steel industry, chose for his own tombstone: “Here lies a man who knew how to bring into his service men better than he was himself.” But of course every one of these men was “better” because Carnegie looked for his strength and put it to work. Each of these steel executives was a “better man” in one specific area and for one specific job. Carnegie, however, was the effective executive among them.
Another story about General Robert E. Lee illustrates the meaning of making strength productive. One of his generals, the story goes, had disregarded orders and had thereby completely upset Lee’s plans—and not for the first time either. Lee, who normally controlled his temper, blew up in a towering rage. When he had simmered down, one of his aides asked respectfully, “Why don’t you relieve him of his com-mand?” Lee, it is said, turned around in complete amazement, looked at the aide, and said, “What an absurd question—he performs.”
Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors. They know that it does not matter how many tantrums a prima donna throws as long as she brings in the customers. The opera manager is paid after all for putting up with the prima donna’s tantrums if that is her way to achieve excellence in performance. It does not matter whether a first-rate teacher or a brilliant scholar is pleasant to the dean or amiable in the faculty meeting. The dean is paid for enabling the first-rate teacher or the first-rate scholar to do his work effectively—and if this involves unpleasantness in the administrative routine, it is still cheap at the price.
Effective executives never ask “How does he get along with me?” Their question is “What does he contribute?” Their question is never “What can a man not do?” Their question is always “What can he do uncommonly well?” In staffing they look for excellence in one major area, and not for performance that gets by all around.
To look for one area of strength and to attempt to put it to work is dictated by the nature of man. In fact, all the talk of “the whole man” or the “mature personality” hides a profound con-tempt for man’s most specific gift: his ability to put all his resources behind one activity, one field of endeavor, one area of accomplishment. It is, in other words, contempt for excellence. Human excellence can only be achieved in one area, or at the most in very few.
People with many interests do exist—and this is usually what we mean when we talk of a “universal genius.” People with outstanding accomplishments in many areas are unknown. Even Leonardo performed only in the area of design despite his manifold interests; if Goethe’s poetry had been lost and all that were known of his work were his dabblings in optics and philosophy, he would not even rate a footnote in the most learned encyclopedia. What is true for the giants holds doubly for the rest of us. Unless, therefore, an executive looks for strength and works at making strength productive, he will only get the impact of what a man cannot do, of his lacks, his weaknesses, his impediments to performance and effectiveness. To staff from what there is not and to focus on weakness is wasteful—a misuse, if not abuse, of the human resource.
To focus on strength is to make demands for performance. The man who does not first ask, “What can a man do?” is bound to accept far less than the associate can really contribute. He excuses the associate’s nonperformance in advance. He is destructive but not critical, let alone realistic. The really “demanding boss”—and one way or another all makers of men are demanding bosses—always starts out with what a man should be able to do well—and then demands that he really do it.
To try to build against weakness frustrates the purpose of organization. Organization is the specific instrument to make human strengths redound to performance while human weak-ness is neutralized and largely rendered harmless. The very strong neither need nor desire organization. They are much better off working on their own. The rest of us, however, the great majority, do not have so much strength that by itself it would become effective despite our limitations. “One cannot hire a hand—the whole man always comes with it,” says a proverb of the human relations people. Similarly, one cannot by oneself be only strong; the weaknesses are always with us.
Adapted from “The Effective Executive”, P.74-103
