For many of us, the past months have been a grind.  The work environment remains uneasy as the debate about economic recovery waxes and wanes.  Employees are being asked to pitch in and assist wherever needed.  Career development often appears to have been suspended.  Questions about the leadership skills of senior managers hang in the air providing little comfort or direction for corporate warriors in their day to day battles.

In this context it is refreshing to re-visit the concept of “Managing Oneself” an idea introduced by renowned business teacher and philosopher, Peter Drucker in 1999.

He proposes that success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.  Simply put, it is up to you to carve out your place in the work world and know when to change course.  It’s up to you to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

To achieve this, you will need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself.  Drucker declares that it takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.  In identifying opportunities fro improvement, don’t waste time cultivating skill areas where you have little competence; instead concentrate on, and build on, your strengths.

To accurately identify your strengths, he suggests feedback analysis, a practice he has been successfully using for two decades.  Every time you make a key decision, write down the outcome you expect.  Re-visit this several months later and compare the actual results with your anticipated results.  From the analysis you should be able to see emerging patterns and determine

• What results am I skilled at generating?
• What abilities do I need to enhance to get the results I want?
• What unproductive habits are preventing me from creating the outcomes I desire?

An interesting point Drucker brings up is the role of manners in the workplace.  Manners are the lubricating oil of an organisation.  It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction.  This is true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects.  Manners – simple things like saying “please” and “thank you” and knowing a person’s name or asking after her family – enable two people to work together whether they like each other or not.  If analysis shows that someone’s brilliant work fails again and again as soon as co-operation from others is required, it probably indicates a lack of courtesy.

That comment highlights his next point.  Equally important as developing your strengths, is gaining an understanding of how you learn from and work with others.  Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees non-performance. Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways they best perform.

Critical questions to ask include

• Do I process information most effectively by reading it or by hearing others discuss it?
• Do I accomplish the most working with other people or by working alone?
• Do I perform best while making decisions or while advising others on key matters?
• Am I in top form when things get stressful, or do I function optimally in a highly predictable environment?

Do not try to change yourself – you are unlikely to succeed.  Work to improve the way you perform.

The third important consideration concerns your deeply held values.  What do you see as your most important responsibilities for living a worthy life?  To be able to manage yourself, you finally have to ask, what are my values?  This is not a question of ethics.  With respect for ethics, the rules are the same for everybody.  Ethics form only part of a value system, especially of an organisation’s value system.  To work in an organisation whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one’s own condemns a person to both frustration and non-performance.

Empowered by knowledge of your strengths, your values and how you perform, you can be in charge of your career.  You should be able to determine what kind of work environment “fits” your qualities the best.  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 – hard-working and competent but otherwise mediocre – into an outstanding performer.

In earlier eras, companies told employees what their contribution should be.  Today we have choices.  To decide how you can best enhance your organization’s performance, first ask what the situation requires.  Based on you strengths, work style and values, how might you make the greatest contribution to your organisation’s efforts?

Managing yourself also requires taking responsibility for relationships.  This has two parts.  The first is to accept that other people are as much individuals as you are.  This means that they too have their strengths, their ways of getting things done and their values.  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 way of doing things and their values.  The second part is communication.

Most personality conflicts arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect.  The reason that the do not know is that they have not asked and therefore have not been told.

Organisations are no longer built on force but on trust.  The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean they like one another.  It means that they understand one another.

The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious and the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve.  In effect managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a CEO.  Further the shift from manual workers who do as they are told, to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves, profoundly challenges social structure.  Knowledge workers outlive organisations and they are mobile.

Perhaps the urgent demands of the workplace and the uncertainties of the economic climate have trampled over your desire to do something about your growth and job satisfaction.  Take heart; you are not alone.  However there is one aspect of your career that you have absolute control over – planning.  Now is an excellent time to formulate a game plan for your career that is based on your strengths and the leverage that these give you in the new business landscape.