Managing Yourself

Unlike Wally Bock, I never met Peter Drucker.

Yet he has made a huge difference in my life (as has Wally).  I'm discovering that although a generation of managers were raised on Drucker's wisdom and insight and benefited as a result, many who are new to supervision are unfamiliar with the depth and applicability of his work. In the March-April 1999 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Drucker did an article titled "Managing Oneself".  It's only about a dozen pages and there was a reprint in  2005.

Here is a sampling that I hope will move you to seek out more of his writing and teaching:

For the strengths-based among you:

Excellence

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.  It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.  And yet most people--especially most teachers and most organizations--concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones.  Energy, resources, and time should go instead into making a competent person into a star performer.
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Feeling unsettled about a "final" career decision?

Careers

Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.  By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths?  How do I perform?  and, What are my values?  And then they can and should decide where they belong.

Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong...

Equally important, knowing the answers to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, "Yes, I will do that.  But this is the way I should be doing it.  This is the way it should be structured.  This is the way the relationships should be.  These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am."

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.
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Midlife crisis or boredom?

Second Careers

We hear a great deal of talk about the midlife crisis of the executive.  It is mostly boredom.  At 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it.  After 20 years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are very good at their jobs.  But they are not learning or contributing or deriving challenge and satisfaction from the job... That is why managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career (typically by moving from one kind of organization to another; by developing a parellel career, often in a nonprofit; or by starting a new venture, again often a nonprofit).

No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work... At such times, a second major interest--not just a hobby--may make all the difference.

In a knowledge society we expect everybody to be a success.  This is clearly an impossibility.  For a great many people, there is at best an absence of failure.  Wherever there is success, there has to be failure.  And then it is vitally important for the individual, and equally for the individual's family, to have an area in which he or she can contribute, make a difference, and be somebody.  That means finding a second area--whether in a second career, a parallel career, or a social venture--that offers an opportunity for being a leader, for being respected, for being a success.
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Peter Drucker's starting point for successful management was successful self-management. Why not pause and have a look in the mirror before we stick our heads out of the cubicle today?

( "All Things Workplace" has been selected as one of the 10 finalists for the 2009 Best of Leadership Blogs competition hosted by the Kevin Eikenberry Group. It's an honor to be selected. If you are interested in voting for your favorite, please vote at Best Leadership Blog 2009 by July 31st.)

Comments

[Mary Jo Asmus]

Peter Drucker knew a lot about emotional intelligence (and it's application to business and leadership) long before Goleman made it popular! Thanks for the interesting post and the link to the classic article.

[Meg Bear]

Outstanding post. Lots of value packed in here. Thanks.

[Dave Rothacker]

I had the good fortune of learning more about Drucker after reading younger management gurus. I'm not sure there is anything that they speak about, that Drucker hadn't already covered. It makes me appreciate him that much more.

And I've yet to read the management and leadership author who can economize thought with such clarity in so few words.

How precious the moment, to spend an afternoon in conversation with Peter Drucker.

[Dan Erwin]

Like you, Drucker has always been a guiding light to me. I've kept all his books and articles. As a result of my business, I'm very aware of "managing oneself." However, and this is a big HOWEVER, as I began to become acquainted with Chris Argyris, he pointed out the utter uselessness of abstractions--including those of Drucker--in the development of persons and organizations. That insight has forced me to develop concrete situations with clients, concrete behaviors that have protocols and scripts built right into the process.

You may find my white paper, "how to ask questions and not be perceived as a dumb ass" indicative of that concretizing process:
http://danerwin.com/white_papers/dumb_ass.html

[peter vajda]

Related to Dan Erwin's point, Chris Argyris' book, Flawed Advice and the Management Trap, deals with the issue of needing valid and reliable models to see the underlying causes of effective and ineffective organizational and individual behavior. Argyris asesses examples of over books and articles published by the world’s most respected business gurus, and then uses his own theoretical model (theory of action) to evaluate the kind of causal analysis and recommendations for change that these publications give readers. His study includes folks like Stephen R. Covey, John Kotter, Jon Katzenback, Peter Drucker and other business-literature experts and concludes that much of the causal analysis and recommendations given by these folks is appealing, and even compelling, but most of it is not actionable. That is, even if a manager could fully implement the recommendations these experts and luminaries suggest, the resulting corrective actions would not lead to the kind of positive change and sustainable improvement that the authors claim it would.

Personally, I've always been intrigued by our culture's obsession with "experts" curious as to why, for example, if there are so many "experts", why then is there so much conflict between and among them. Kinda defeats the notion of "expert," IMHO. Maybe another reason we see less than optimal change in our workplaces and lives at work.

[Wally Bock]

I think the reason that Drucker has resonated with so many of us for so long is tied to two things. He was both a keen observer and a lucid writer.

On that score, I have to disagree with both Dan and Peter. In my experience Drucker's writing made use of many concrete examples. In fact, if you compare him with other writers about business before Tom Peters, he and Russell Ackoff stand out for that. As for actionable, I've not ever read a more actionable book than The Effective Executive.

One of the things about Drucker that I always found fascinating was that he didn't have "theory" or a "program." Instead he offered observations and recommendations. A couple of generations of managers have used them to improve their effectiveness. I think that's a better measure of impact or usability than whether or not they fit into some theoretical framework.