Effective Self-Management

[Extract from Business Masterminds: Peter Drucker by Robert Heller.]

According to Peter Drucker, managing onself is a critical aspect of every manager’s job. Drucker has always paid close attention to the individual manager’s work. His most famous formulation in this regard forms the basis of the delegation without which decentralization cannot work. He suggests that every manager should periodically ask themselves the following three key questions:

What am I doing that does not need to be done at all?
What am I doing that can be done by somebody else?
What am I doing that only I can do?

This simple set of questions goes to the heart of the use of time and the employment of talents - your own and other people’s. Drucker has developed his thinking about self-management to keep in step with the rise of the knowledge worker, which imposes drastically new demands on individuals. They have to ask:

Who am I?
What are my strengths?
How do I work?
Where do I belong?
What is my contribution?

One way to answer the first three of these five questions is by means of a Feedback Analysis. Whenever one makes a key decision, and whenever one does a key action, one writes down what one expects to happen. And six months or 12 months later one then feeds back from results to expectations. And everytime you do it, you’ll be surprised. Using the results of the Feedback Analysis, managers concentrate on using and improving their revealed strengths.

Managers must also take relationship responsibility, which Drucker calls "an absolute necessity. It is a duty". He points out that "organizations are no longer built on force. They are built on trust". Personality conflicts arise mostly because "one person does not know what the other person does", or how that is done, or its contribution, or the expected result. The manager "owes relationship responsibility to everyone with whom one works, on whose work one depends, and who in turn depends on one’s work."

To receive more information about our services, please send us an email or call us at (54.11) 4896.2693 or 4784.5445. We’ll be glad to assist you.