We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their employees’ careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years. To do those things well, you’ll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself — not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.
History’s great achievers — a Napoléon, a da Vinci, a Mozart — have always managed themselves. That, in large measure, is what makes them great achievers. But they are rare exceptions, so unusual both in their talents and their accomplishments as to be considered outside the boundaries of ordinary human existence. Now, most of us, even those of us with modest endowments, will have to learn to manage ourselves. We will have to learn to develop ourselves. We will have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution. And we will have to stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do.
What Are My Strengths?
Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at — and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
Throughout history, people had little need to know their strengths. A person was born into a position and a line of work. But now people have choices. We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. Practiced consistently, this method shows where your strengths lie — the most important thing to know — what deprives you of their full benefit, where you are not particularly competent, and where you cannot perform. Concentrate on your strengths; put yourself where they produce results. Improve them. Overcome intellectual arrogance that causes disabling ignorance. Remedy bad habits that inhibit effectiveness. Feedback will also reveal when the problem is a lack of manners — the lubricating oil of an organization.
Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people — especially most teachers and most organizations — concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.
How Do I Perform?
Amazingly few people know how they get things done. Indeed, most of us do not even know that different people work and perform differently. Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees nonperformance. For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?
Like one’s strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality. A person’s way of performing can be slightly modified, but it is unlikely to be completely changed — and certainly not easily. Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform.
The first thing to know is whether you are a reader or a listener. People are rarely both. Eisenhower, a reader, thrived when questions arrived in writing and failed in free-for-all press conferences built for listeners. Johnson, a listener, excelled as a senator and suffered with a staff of writers built for a reader. Few listeners can be made into competent readers — and vice versa. Second: how do you learn? Schools assume one right way; there are probably half a dozen — writing, notes, doing, talking. Most people know how they learn; few act on it, and that condemns them to nonperformance. Also ask: Do I work well with people, or am I a loner — and in what relationship? Decision maker or adviser? Stress or predictability? Big organization or small? Few people work well in all kinds of environments.
Do not try to change yourself — you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.
What Are My Values?
To be able to manage yourself, you finally have to ask, What are my values? This is not a question of ethics. With respect to ethics, the rules are the same for everybody, and the test is a simple one. I call it the “mirror test.” Ethics requires that you ask yourself, What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?
But ethics is only part of a value system. To work in an organization whose values are incompatible with one’s own condemns a person to frustration and nonperformance. Hire from inside versus bring in fresh blood; incremental improvement versus breakthroughs; short-term results versus long-term growth — these are often value conflicts, not merely economic debates. Organizations, like people, have values. Yours need not be identical, but they must be close enough to coexist.
What one does well — even very well and successfully — may not fit with one’s value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one’s life to. Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.
Where Do I Belong?
A small number of people know very early where they belong. Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong. Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong. The person who has learned that he or she does not perform well in a big organization should have learned to say no to a position in one. The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision-making assignment.
Equally important, knowing the answer to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, “Yes, I will do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This is the way it should be structured. This is the way the relationships should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.”
Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person — hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre — into an outstanding performer.
What Should I Contribute?
Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
Consider the experience of a newly appointed hospital administrator. The hospital was big and prestigious, but it had been coasting on its reputation for 30 years. The new administrator decided that his contribution should be to establish a standard of excellence in one important area within two years. He chose to focus on the emergency room. He decided that every patient who came into the ER had to be seen by a qualified nurse within 60 seconds. Within 12 months, the hospital’s emergency room had become a model for all hospitals in the United States, and within another two years, the whole hospital had been transformed.
It is rarely possible — or even particularly fruitful — to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The results should be hard to achieve — they should require “stretching.” But also, they should be within reach. Second, the results should be meaningful. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.
Responsibility for Relationships
Very few people work by themselves and achieve results by themselves. Most people work with others and are effective with other people. Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships. This has two parts.
The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. They too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers. Bosses are neither a title on the organization chart nor a “function.” They are individuals and are entitled to do their work in the way they do it best. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values.
The second part is taking responsibility for communication. Most “personality conflicts” arise because people do not know what others are doing, how they work, what they are concentrating on, or what results they expect — because they have not asked and have not been told. Say what you are good at, how you work, your values, your contribution, and the results to expect — and ask the same of others. The response is always: This is most helpful — why didn’t you tell me earlier? Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. Trust does not mean liking one another. It means understanding one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity. It is a duty.
The Second Half of Your Life
When work for most people meant manual labor, there was no need to worry about the second half of your life. Today, however, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not “finished” after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored. We hear a great deal of talk about the midlife crisis of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it. And yet they are still likely to face another 20 if not 25 years of work. That is why managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is actually to start one. The second is to develop a parallel career — usually in a nonprofit organization that takes another ten hours of work a week. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs, who keep doing what they have been doing but spend less time on it and start another activity, usually a nonprofit. There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.
There is another reason to develop a second major interest, and to develop it early. No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work. At such times, a second major interest — not just a hobby — may make all the difference. In a knowledge society, we expect everyone to be a success. This is clearly an impossibility. Wherever there is success, there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the individual to have an area in which he or she can contribute, make a difference, and be somebody.
The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put. But today the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.