Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics)

by Peter F. Drucker

To manage yourself effectively, you also have to ask, Do I work well with people, or am I a loner?

you then must ask, In what relationship?

Some people work best as su...

Requiring strong, clarifying leadership to set the direction

Some people work best as team members. Others work best alone. Some are exceptionally talented as coaches and mentors; others are simply incompetent as mentors.

Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser?

The top spot requires a decision maker. Strong decision makers often put somebody they trust into the number two spot as their adviser—

Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?

Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?

The conclusion bears repeating: Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed.

But work hard to improve the way you perform.

WHAT ARE MY VALUES?

This is not a question of ethics.

With respect to ethics,

the test is a sim...

That is the mirror test. Ethics requires that you ask yourself, What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?

ethics is only part of a value system—

They bespeak different views of the relationship between organizations and people; different views of the responsibility of an organization to its people and their development; and different views of a person’s most important contribution to an enterprise.

to obtain results by making constant, small improvements or by achieving occasional, highly expensive, and risky “breakthroughs”

Whether a business should be run for short-term results or with a focus on the long term is likewise a question of values.

“Unless you first come to church, you will never find the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“Until you first look for the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven, you don’t belong in church.”

Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person’s values must be compatible...

there is sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and his or her strengths.

In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one’s life to

Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.

WHERE DO I BELONG?

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 deci...

Or rather, they should be able to decide where th...

The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision-making assignment.

I disagree. I think decision making, or rather managing the uncertainty of committing to a decision, is a skill that can be learned. The magnitude of the outcome of the decision in a given position though may be may your fit, depending on your inherent attitudes.

Equally important, knowing the answer 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.

WHAT SHOULD I CONTRIBUTE?

To answer it, they must address three distinct elements:

What does the situation require?

Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contributi...

What results have to be achieved to make...

Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half ?

The answer must balance several things.

First, the results should be hard to achieve—they should re...

also, they should be wit...

the results should be meaningful.

results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.

From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what g...

taking responsibility for relationships. This has two parts.

The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are.

To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers.

Even if the next boss is a listener, the person goes on writing reports that, invariably, produce no results.

could have been avoided if the employee had only looked at the new boss and analyzed how this boss performs.