The premise of Peter Drucker's article, "Managing Oneself," is that you must
understand yourself in order to maximize your contributions to the
organizations in which you are involved.
I believe the article does a good job of outlining a means of determining
your strengths, how you perform, how you work best with others, and where you
can make the greatest contributions. I
believe that organizations can utilize the outline provided by Drucker to
insure that they create a cooperative, highly effective, and productive organization. It is “only when you operate from strengths
can you achieve true excellence” (Drucker, 2005).
First, we must determine our own personal
drivers. By utilizing Feedback
Analysis, we can start to get a clear picture of our own unique strengths and
can develop action plans for improvements.
Additionally, we can determine how we perform. Specifically, are you a listener or
reader? As an example, I am a reader. I prefer to see things in writing before discussing them.
Once we understand how we perform, we can
look to the other drivers which Drucker addresses including working with
others. Do you work best with other team
members or alone? Are you a good mentor?
By understanding this distinction, we can assure that team members who work
best in groups are assigned to large, multi-discipline, projects and highly
complex, independent tasks are assigned to those who work better alone. As part of working with others, we must
understand who are the decision makers and who are the advisors, as this will
help us to propel the organization forward.
After we have determined our strengths,
performance drivers, and values, we can start to develop personal development
plans and assign projects which stretch each of us, are meaningful, make a
difference, and are visible to the organization and our peers.
Upon complete of our self-exploration, we
can then work to communicate our own personal drivers to other members of the
management team. By understanding how
each of us works, our strengths, performance and values, we can start to
customize our interactions and communications and thus improve our productivity
and efficiency. We can utilize our new learnings
to target our communications as appropriate for each team member be they
listener, reader, talker or writer, driving incredibly positive performance.
Christine (Reed) Barnhart
References
Drucker, P. F. (January 01, 2005).
Managing Oneself. Harvard Business Review, 83, 1.
