Survival in business today, regardless of the industry you are in, requires an attention to detail far beyond that of ever before in history. The ‘Threat Level’ of oncoming danger can virtually decimate a business in a matter of months. It’s for this very reason that the designing of rapidly adaptable business plans and action programs have become the very life blood of companies today.
We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity; but opportunity come responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their employees’ careers; knowledge workers must effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It is up to you to carve out of your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive, you 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 are your values, and where you can make the greatest contribution, because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.
Every knowledge worker in a modern organization is an ‘executive’ if, by virtue of his or her position or knowledge, he or she is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.
Successful executives do not start out asking, “What do I want to do?” They ask, “What needs to be done?”
One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all. Put yourself where your strengths are can produce marvelous degree of achievements.
The 21st century should be an opportunity to develop self-learning individuals who are responsible for their own development. Leadership is a journey – a lifelong learning journey. On it you should discover who you are, the world around you and the people you encounter. To discover this you have to be open to every opportunity to learn, every challenge that comes your way and see your life as giving you the opportunity to experience, reflect, learn, and act.
Putting SWEAT into our leadership means managing oneself to a higher value and greater contribution to the organization and the role in which we are engaged for.
First and foremost, concentrate on your Strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce greater results. For an activity to be strength you must be able to do it consistently. You will excel only by maximizing your strengths. Successful leaders find ways to manage around their weaknesses, thereby freeing them up to hone their strengths to a sharper point.
Secondly, Work on improving your strengths. Talents, knowledge, and skills – combine to create your enormous strengths. For example, to be able to confront strangers and to enjoy the challenge of making a connection with them is a talent, whereas the ability to sell successfully is a strength, and to persuade others to buy your product you must combined your talent with product knowledge and certain selling skills. Your talents are innate, whereas skills and knowledge can be acquired through learning and practice.
Thirdly, using your Emotional self-knowledge to manage behavior and sustain energy levels and motivation. The concept of Emotional Intelligence is essentially a framework for understanding, balancing, and connecting with – emotions and their triggers; emotions and cognitive thought; and feelings and their resulting behavior. Effectively understanding and choosing how we think, feel, and act can result in increased displays of – energy, authenticity; and integrity.
Forth, discover where your intellectual Arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people – especially people with great expertise in one area – are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge. Some first-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.
Fifth, Taking responsibility for Relationships. Most people work with others and are effective with other people. Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships. First, is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. They perversely insist on behaving like human beings. This means that they too have their strengths, have their ways of getting things done, and have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers. The second part is taking responsibility for communication. The IT project manager may know everything about the IT system, software modifications, system analyzing, but she knows nothing about the things she has never done – purchasing, shipping, trading, human resource, and the like. So the people who do these things must make sure that the IT project manager understands what they are trying to do, why they are trying to do it, how they are going to do it, and what results to expect. If the IT project manager does not understand what these high-grade knowledge specialists are doing, it is primarily their fault. They have not educated her. Conversely, it is the IT project manager’s responsibility to make sure that all of her coworkers understand how she looks at the IT system; what her goals are; how she works; and what she expects of herself and of each of them.
Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity.
In a knowledge society, we expect everyone to be a success. 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, but managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer, shifting from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society takes two things for granted: that organization outlives 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.
Your Favorite Author – Peter Ng
