Category: Management

Categories
Management Self-development

Managing Oneself

Cover of 'Managing Oneself' by Peter Drucker

Self-awareness is increasingly identified as a critical leadership quality and a worthwhile pursuit for any professional. This little book is a great place to start.

Peter Drucker’s classic ‘Managing Oneself’ has been an indispensable reference over the years. The book (more of an essay really) promotes self-awareness and offers a simple framework for self-reflection:

• What are your strengths? Your weaknesses?
• How do you communicate?
• How do you learn?
• How do you work with others?
• What are your values?
• Where can you make the greatest contribution?

It may not hit the heights of Covey’s ‘7 Habits…’, but I see it as a perfect, compact companion.

Categories
Community Management Teams

A model for self-reflection

Model showing skills, support, and resistance applied to a situation, resulting in growth.

I was fortunate to speak this week at the latest event from Ladies that UX Belfast, ‘The Winding Road to Design’.

My theme was growth through self-awareness, which featured a model for self-reflection adapted from the ‘Making-of’ model by Mikael Krogerus & Roman Tschappeler To reflect on any given situation (a project, an objective), think about:

  • What strengths did you bring? What qualities or experience did you draw on?
  • What support did you have? Was a particular person(s) involved? Particular resources?
  • What resistance did you meet? What challenges or obstacles were put in front of you?
  • How did you grow or develop? Was it incremental, or substantial?
  • For successful situations: what can you reproduce to achieve a similar result next time? What patterns do you see in successes you have had?
  • For unsuccessful situations: what factors need to change in order to achieve a different outcome? What have you been lacking, and how can you introduce what is needed?

Thank you to Ladies That UX Belfast for inviting me to speak, to all who attended and listened, and to co-speakers Anna Murray and Conaill Hyndman.