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 words, 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.
Performance that violates your value corrupts, and it will ultimately sap and destroy your strengths.
Just as different people have different strengths and weaknesses, they also work and perform in different ways. For example, some people learn by reading, others by listening. And few readers can become successful listeners or vice versa. Learning style is just one of several factors that go into making up a person’s work style. There are other questions that must be answered. Do you work best when cooperating with others, or do you achieve results when working alone? If you work best with others, is it usually as a subordinate, peer, or supervisor? Do you need a predictable, structured work environment? Do you thrive under pressure?
You also have to consider your personal values: are they comparable to or at least compatible with your strengths? If there is any conflict between your values and strengths, always choose values. Performance that violates your values corrupts, and it will ultimately sap and destroy your strengths. These are just some of the questions that must be answered. What is important is to figure out your unique work style.
It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
You can learn to identify your strengths by using feedback analysis. This is a simple process in which you write down every one of your key decisions and key actions along with the results that you expect them to achieve. Nine to twelve months later, check the actual results against expectations. After two to three years of use, you will know your strengths by tracking those decisions and actions where actual results fell in line with or exceeded expectations. Once you have identified your strengths through feedback analysis, you can use this knowledge to improve performance and results. You can make this happen in five ways.
Second, work on improving strengths. You may need to learn new knowledge or to update old.
Third, recognize disabling habits. The worst, and most common, one is arrogance. Oftentimes poor performance results from an unwillingness to pursue knowledge outside one’s own narrow specialty.
Fourth, remedy bad habits and bad manners. All too often, a bad habit such as procrastination or bad manners makes cooperation and teamwork all but impossible.
What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
One question has to be asked to decide “What should I contribute?” “Where and how can I have results that make a difference?” The answer to this question has to balance a number of things. Results should be hard to achieve. They should require “stretching,” to use the present buzzword. But they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved—or can be achieved only under the most unlikely circumstances—is not being “ambitious.” It is being foolish. At the same time, results should be meaningful. They should make a difference. And they should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.
The decision about “What should my contribution be?” balances three elements. First comes the question: ” What does the situation require?” Then comes the question: “How could I make the greatest contribution, with my strengths, my way of performing, my values, to what needs to be done?” Finally, there is the question: “What results have to be achieved to make a difference?” This then leads to the action conclusions: what do do, where to start, how to start, what goals and deadlines to set.
Performance is not hitting the bull’s-eye with every shot—that is a circus act.
The first requirement of organizational health is a high demand on performance. Indeed, one of the major reasons for demanding that management be by objectives and that it focus on the objective requirements of the task is the need to have managers set high standards of performance for themselves. This requires that performance be understood properly. Performance is not hitting the bull’s-eye with every shot. Performance is rather the consistent ability to produce results over prolonged periods of time and in a variety of assignments. A performance record must include mistakes. It must include failures. It must reveal a person’s limitations as well as his strengths.
The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial. The better a person is, the more mistakes he will make—for the more new things he will try.
The stepladder is gone, and there’s not even the implied structure of an industry’s rope ladder. It’s more like vines, and you bring your own machete.
If a young man in a gray flannel suit represented the lifelong corporate type, what’s today’s image? Taking individual responsibility and not depending on any particular company. Equally important is managing your own career. You don’t know what you’ll be doing next, or whether you’ll work in a private office or one big amphitheater or even out of your home. You have to take responsibility for knowing yourself, so you can find the right jobs as you develop and as your family becomes a factor in your values and choices.
Remarkably few Americans are prepared to select jobs for themselves. When you ask, “Do you know what you are good at? Do you know your limitations?” they look you in the eye with a blank stare. Or they often respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer. When they prepare their resumes, they try to list positions like steps up a ladder. It is time to give up thinking of jobs or career paths as we once did and think in terms of taking on one assignment after another. We have to leap right over the search for objective criteria and get into the subjective—what I call competencies.
The executive who works at making strengths productive—his own as well as those of others—works at making organizational performance compatible with personal achievement.
Self-development of the executive toward effectiveness is the only available answer to satisfy both the objective needs of society for performance by the organization, and the needs of the person for achievement and fulfillment. It is the only way in which organization goals and individual needs can come together. Executives who work at making strengths productive—his own as well as those of others—work at making organizational performance compatible with personal achievement. They work at making their knowledge area become organizational opportunity. And by focusing on contribution, they make their own values become organization results.
Knowledge workers demand economic rewards too. Their absence is a deterrent. But their presence is not enough. They need opportunity; they need achievement; they need fulfillment; they need values. Only by making themselves into effective executives can knowledge workers obtain these satisfactions. Only executive effectiveness can enable society to harmonize its two needs: the needs of the organization to obtain from the individual the contribution it needs, and the need of the individuals to have the organization serve as their tool for the accomplishment of their purposes.
Any organization develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.
Any organization develops people; it has no choice. It either helps them grow or it stunts them. What do we know about developing people? Quite a bit. We certainly know what not to do, and those don’ts are easier to spell out than the dos.
First, one does not try to build upon people’s weakness. One can expect adults to develop manners and behavior and to learn skills and knowledge. But one has to use people’s personalities the way they are, not the way we would like them to do.
A second don’t is to take a narrow and shortsighted view of the development of people. One has to learn specific skills for a specific job. But development is more than that: it has to be for a career and for a life. The specific job must fit into this longer-term goal.
Another thing we know is not to establish crown princes. Look always at performance, not a promise. With the focus on performance and not potential, the executive can make high demands. One can always relax standards, but one can never raise them. Next, the executive must learn to place people’s strengths.
In developing people the lesson is to focus on strengths. Then make really stringent demands, and take the time and trouble (it’s hard work) to review performance. Sit down with people and say, “This is what you and I committed ourselves to a year ago. How have you done? What have you done well?”
