Managing oneself: what to contribute?
Successful careers are not the products of luck or planning; they are built by people who are able to seize those opportunities that match their own strengths.
Now that you have identified your strengths and work style you can begin to look for the right opportunities. These are the assignments that will enable you to use your strength, match your work style, and fit within your personal value system. They are also the assignments that help you to make the right contribution. But you first have to decide what your contribution should be.
Figuring out the right contribution helps you move from knowledge to action. What do you think you should contribute? In other word how can you make a difference within your organization? Answering these questions helps you to analyze opportunities in search for the right few. When such opportunities do come along, it’s best to accept them if they suit you and how you work. It requires you to think through the requirements of a specific situation, your greatest potential contribution, and the results that must be achieved. It is through such processes that successful careers are built. They are not the products of luck or planning; they are built by people who are able to seize those opportunities that match their own strengths, work styles, and values.
Managing oneself: work relationships
Organizations are built on trust, and trust is built on communication and mutual understanding.
Just as it is important for you to know your own strengths, work styles, and values, it is also important that you learn the strengths, work styles, and values of the people around you. Each person is an individual, and there are likely to be great differences between yourself and others. But such differences do not matter. What does matter is whether everyone performs. Consistent group performance can be achieved only if each person within the group is able to perform as an individual. And to help make this happen, you must build on other people’s strengths, other people’s work styles, and other people’s values.
Once you have identified your strengths, work style, and values, as well as what your contribution should be, you must then consider who else needs to know about it. Everyone who depends on you and on whom you depend needs to know this information about how you work. Since communication is a two-way process, you should feel comfortable asking your coworkers to think through and define their own strengths, work styles, and values.
Managing the boss
There is nothing quite as conducive to success as a successful and rapidly promoted superior.
Almost everybody has at least one boss. And the trend is for knowledge workers to have an increasing number of bosses, an increasing number of people on whose approval and appraisal they depend, and whose support they need.
There are keys to success in managing bosses. First, put down on a piece of paper a “boss list,” everyone to whom you are accountable, everyone who appraises you and work, everyone on whom you depend to make effective your work and that of your people. Next, go to each of the people on the boss list at least once a year and ask, “What do I and what do my people do that helps you do your job?” And, “What do we do that hampers you and makes life more difficult for you?” It is your job to enable each of your bosses to perform as unique individuals according to their working styles. Your bosses should feel comfortable that you are playing to their strengths and safeguarding them from their limitations and weaknesses.
Managing oneself: the second half
What to do with the second half of one’s life?
Knowledge workers are able physically to keep on working into old age, and well beyond any traditional retirement age. But they run a new risk: they may become mentally finished. What’s commonly called “burnout,” the most common affliction of the forty something knowledge worker, is very rarely the result of stress. Its common, all too common, cause is boredom on the job.
In one big and highly successful company top management said to me: “Our engineers are slacking off. Can you try to find out way?” And so I talked to about a dozen very competent, very successful, very well paid people in engineering. And they all said: “My job is important to the success of the company. I like it. I have done it now for about ten years and I am very good at it and I am very proud of it. But I can do it now in my sleep. It no longer challenges me. I am just plain bored. I no longer look forward to coming into the office every morning.” Yet the obvious answer, that is to rotate people, would have been the wrong answer. These people are topflight specialists. What they needed was to regain some true interest. And once they had that one of them, for instance, started to tutor high school students in math and science in math and science suddenly their work, too, became again satisfying.