A colleague recently shared an article with me from the March-April 1999 Harvard Business Review. It is titled Managing Oneself and was written by none other than Peter Drucker. As the staff at IACED member organizations are challenged daily to deliver remarkable success for Hoosier families and communities, I want to share highlights from this intriguing article on knowing yourself and its effect on organizational effectiveness. The implication of knowing yourself means when you operate from a combination of strengths and self-knowledge you achieve true excellence for yourself and others.

 

Success comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.  A way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis.  Feedback analysis is a reflective process whereby you write down the expected outcome from any key decision or action.  Nine or 12 months after the fact, compare the results with your expectations.  If you are disciplined in this feedback analysis, it will show you, in a couple of years, where your strengths lie. The implications from the findings of feedback analysis mean you can 1) concentrate on your strengths, 2) improve your strengths, and most interesting to me 3) discover your intellectual arrogance. Intellectual arrogance is defined as people -- often experts in one subject -- being contemptuous of knowledge in other areas. How often have you heard someone say, "I'm a numbers person, I don't need to know about people and relationships." Take what you learn about yourself and use your energy to improve areas of good performance to excellence. Spend less time and energy improving areas of mediocrity to marginal performance.

 

1. Do you process information most effectively by reading or hearing others discuss?
2. Do you work best as a team member or alone?
3. Do you perform best making decisions or advising others on how best to do so?
4. Which environment complements your work: stressful and fast-paced or highly predictable?

To be able to manage oneself, you have to ask: What are my values? What is most important for living a worthy life? Like people, organizations have values as a fundamental element of organizational culture and controls the way people interact with each other and connect to how they measure success. For you to be effective in an organization, your values must be compatible with the organization's values.   If the two are in conflict, your career will likely be marked by frustration and poor performance. To avoid such a fate, determine where you belong.


As an outstanding performer, what contribution should you make to your organization? There are three distinct elements:

1. What does the situation require?
2. Given my strengths, way of performing, and values, how can you make the greatest contribution to the work?
3. What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

The answers to these questions will suggest that results should be "stretch" goals (hard to achieve, but not impossible with effort), meaningful, and measurable. The work IACED members perform daily makes meaning from individual work--it is not small task to build assets for families or transform communities.

Achieving results cannot be accomplished alone. It requires taking responsibility for relationships. Like you, every other colleague is an individual--each has strengths and challenges. For you to be successful and help your organization be effective means you make use of all individual strengths.

Regards,

Andy Fraizer

Executive Director