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Effective Leadership

by Andrew Peters  
6/04/2010 / Leadership

"Efficiency is Doing Things Right; Effectiveness is Doing the Right Things" - Peter F. Drucker


Productivity concerns both effectiveness (the attainment of goals) and efficiency (resource costs, including those human resource costs affecting quality of life). The danger we have as leaders is to focus too much of our time on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. Often this drives our organisations into maintenance mode, where all our energy is spent on maintaining our organisation at its previous success level; for fear that it will fall into decline if we change anything too drastically. The problem with maintenance mode is that it leads quickly into survival or death mode.

Peter Corney in "The Local Church and Mission" notes three modes in which organisations operate:

Mission Mode -- embraces creative, spirit-led change;
Maintenance Mode -- avoids change;
Survival Mode -- forced to accept negative change.

Effectiveness on the other hand leads us to reach beyond the existing success levels to achieve new goals and success. Peter Drucker says,

"Effectiveness is the foundation of success -- efficiency is a minimum condition for survival after success has been achieved. Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things."

Drucker notes that intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources in our organisations or churches, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained, not their attainment. As leaders, we need to be able to diagnose those right things that if attended to in the life of the church or organisation will produce success for our organisation or fruit for the Kingdom of God. We need to give them priority over everything else. The same principle applies with successful pastors reminding us repeatedly, they simply did what the Holy Spirit told them to do. Through the inspiration of the Spirit of God, they found the "right things" for their church and they did them.

We need to learn from successful churches and leaders, but be aware that what worked well for them in their situation, might not work well in ours. That is why it is crucial to seek God's purpose and direction for our own church. One of the key elements of good leadership is the ability to discern those right things and then to influence the people of God to do and achieve those things.

Ps Andrew Peters has over 30 years of experience in leading churches and both for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. Check out his new series on Leadership Dynamics: http://www.outreachenterprises.com.au/leadership-dynamics-part-one.html

(c) 2010 Andrew Peters

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