Management guru Drucker starts this article by asking, what are your strengths? Managing yourself depends on knowing yourself, so that you can build performance on the characteristics that support your achievement. Most people assume that they know what they're good at and what they're not good at and that these constitute their strengths and weaknesses. Drucker takes a more empirical approach, saying that the only way to know your strengths is by feedback analysis - noticing the consequences of your decisions and actions. You can also ask for objective feedback from others.
Concentrate on your strengths, Drucker advises, because you cannot build performance on weakness or trying to build up weakness to a level of mediocrity. Instead, rigorously ultivate your strengths by increasing knowledge and ensuring that you are operating in a context where your strengths can create results.
Ask yourself the right questions
Drucker says that it is essential to understand yourself by considering what it is that makes you successful when you achieve good results. Questions he suggests you need answers to include:
- how do I learn? (e.g. by doing, watching others, reading, talking it through, etc.)
- when do I perform best?
- am I more a loner or a team player?
- how much detail do I need to perform at my best?
- how do I deal with stress?
- do I work best in a small or a big organisational environment?
- what do I want to contribute?
What are your values?
By this, Drucker does not mean ethics - which, he says are universal and best known by what he calls 'the mirror test' - what kind of person do you want to see in the mirror every morning? Values are more about what is important to you and how you think. Interestingly, your strengths and values may be in conflict. For example, we have all read of investment fund managers and city workers who were successful at what they did yet gave it up because they did not feel at ease within the culture they were operating in. Managing yourself successfully entails understanding what is important to you and making sure that your working environment and activity are broadly aligned with your values.
Responsibility for relationships
Managing yourself means taking responsibility for your relationships with others. Everybody has their own strengths, values and ways of working, just as you do. To be effective, you need to understand and include these in other people so that you can all benefit. Drucker also says we have a duty to ensure that we ask what people need in order to operate to their best potential. This in turn means that we can manage our way of working to accommodate others rather than running into difficulty and conflict, which damages everybody's performance.
So managing yourself entails understanding yourself and how you work/learn, using and optimising your strengths, recognising your values and taking responsibility for relationships with those you work with.
And coaching, of course, is a valuable way to help you to do all of these.
"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction."Malcolm Gladwell