GROWTH
4 Lessons From Peter Drucker on Managing Yourself
Lessons from the book ‘Managing Oneself’
When Peter Drucker (1909–2005), was invited to General Motors in 1943 — the largest corporation in the world at the time — he conducted a 2 year social-scientific study that laid the foundations of management as we know it today.
The study led to his book, ‘Concept of the Corporation’, the first ever to analyse how power structures, information flows, decision making and managerial autonomy contributed to a company’s success.
Widely considered The Father of Management, Drucker’s work and ideas have soaked into the fabric of business corporations revolutionising the way CEOs run and organise their companies today.
He was famous for coining the term ‘knowledge worker’, referring to employees who were hired on their skill and expertise. Drucker was well known for his predictions and he foresaw how the world would shift from brawn based manual labour to intellectual innovation and creativity.
“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves — their strengths, their values, and how they both perform.” Peter F. Drucker
In the age of the knowledge worker Drucker proposes timeless insights to ‘Managing Oneself’:
Strengths
There’s an adage that I repeat time and time again, it is possible to be the best you could possibly be through learning and practice. You need to master your strengths in order to level up in your game.
To master your strengths means to thoroughly know yourself.
The last thing you want to do is assume what you’re good at, that sort of arrogance will eventually floor you. That line of thinking can also lead you to dismiss other skills and disciplines that can aid you in your journey.
Drucker suggests that to discover your strengths you should conduct what he calls ‘feedback analysis’:
Every time you make a key decision to act or pursue a goal, write down what you expect the result to be from your actions. After 9–12 months have passed, assess the results and compare them to your expectations.
By doing this over and over you realise what your strengths and shortcomings are. This is the long game you must play to master your talents.
Key takeaway: It is far easier to level up in your strengths than it is to focus too much on your weaknesses. By improving your newly identified strengths you can go from amateur to pro through a shorter learning curve.
Improve the way you already perform best
I used to always compare the way I learnt things to other people. I’d see how they consume material and think it’d work the same for me, and if it didn’t it meant I wasn’t that smart. I could not have been further from the truth.
Through rigorous self-assessment, you must find out how you learn best. What does that environment look like? What cues do you need? How much time do you require to study?
These are the questions you need to ask yourself to figure which learning methods work for you. Why is this so critical?
When you know how it is best you learn, you will be unstoppable.
It’s like learning how to drive a car, you spend hours learning how the gears work with the clutch, practising manoeuvres, the constant anxiety of cars beside you, the fear of stalling goes away after countless errors — eventually finding the biting point and switching lanes become second nature. You’re driving is smooth and nothing can stop you from accelerating forward.
It doesn’t matter how you learn to drive, in the end, you’re going from point A to point B. Learning how you learn is the skill that will have you cruising through life.
What Do You Value?
Does the work you do inspire you? Do the people around you invoke disgust? It’s not always a case if you’re the right person for the job, more time it’s if the work is right for you.
When the organisation’s values are at odds with what you value you it’s like nails dragging across a chalkboard. The pure disharmony in ideals can make the greatest performers look like amateurs.
Do not let this happen to you.
The only way you can realise your potential is if you’re in an environment that is pushing for your flourishing. Whether it’s a business, a team or a spiritual organisation if the culture does not nourish what you inherently believe is important you are both doing a disservice to each other.
Your Second Career
Drucker explains that there comes a point in your life when you begin to stagnate. What some will call a ‘midlife crisis’ is a title for not feeling fulfilled due to not being able to contribute and thrive in their careers. This feeling of impending boredom can be solved by what Drucker calls starting your ‘second career’.
This could involve a career change: going from a large corporate to a start-up, changing job roles or even moving to a different business line altogether. It’s the challenge and inherent risk in the change which drives you to feel a new lease of life in the work you do.
This is the challenge that you need.
There is an alternative to this: developing a career in parallel to your current one.
Tried and tested by many before, this could mean doing work in a field unrelated to your current profession. Working at a non-profit, a think tank or even leading courses are the lesser-known methods of challenging your aptitude.
It forces you to engage with skills that you don’t use in your regular line of work, it makes you think in new and innovative ways — you become a multidisciplinary individual.
By putting yourself in such contrasting environments you’re drawing on skills and cultivating capabilities you weren’t aware existed. You are not only managing yourself, you are leading yourself.
