Following up on yesterday's post about Peter Drucker's principles of effective executives, I asked former CEO of MySQL Mårten Mickos to discuss the principles that we has used in building an effective executive team. After all no single executive can be successful on their own; to build a high-performance culture requires a discipline that extends across the entire leadership.
The single most useful management advice I have ever received or studied was the eight practices of effective executives defined by Peter Drucker. His insights (in general) are so profound that in my mind he deserves a place among the world's absolutely most significant thinkers on leadership and management over the last 1,000 years.
[ See also: "Peter Drucker on the effective executive" and "Marten Mickos: Contrarian interview" | Keep up with the latest open source news with InfoWorld's open source newsletter and topic center. ]
Inspired by Drucker's clear and concise eight practices for executives, I tried to write down a corresponding set of eight practices for executive teams. My experience or insight is a fraction of a fraction of what Drucker possessed already in his youth, so I realize my practices may not deserve to be placed next to the ones of Drucker. But being a great fan of his, I nevertheless take the liberty of doing so, hoping readers will forgive me.
What I have learned about teams and managing teams, I have learned from those I have had the privilege to work in a team with. All my insights are from them. At the same time, all the inaccuracies or failures to capture the situation completely in my below eight practices are of my own device. Below is my attempt at describing eight practices for effective executive teams:
What makes an effective executive team
Great executive teams may be aggressive or conservative, intuitive or calculating, conflicted or harmonious. But every effective executive team follows eight practices:
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