Ten³

Business e-Coach: Yourself   Your Business    Management    Innovation    Venture Financing    Tech Transfer    Green Productivity

Home    Search    Site Map    Slide Shows    MBS    Case Studies    Model Agreements    Links    Contact us

Knowing Yourself

Know your innate qualities - ask yourself: "Whether I produce results as a decision-maker or an adviser?" If you are not a decision-maker, don't take decision-making assignments.

Understand your learning style: how you absorb information better - through reading or through listening? Knowing your style is the first thing to know about how you perform. Once you understand which is your naturally dominant learning style you are in a position to improve the way you perform. "Don't try to change yourself - it is unlikely to be successful. But work, and hard, to improve the way you perform. And try not to do work of any kind in a way you do not perform or perform badly", says Peter Drucker.

The awareness of how we do what we do is the key to self-management and influence. Study what works for you and for others by practicing NLP solutions in order to realize your true potential.

Developing Yourself

Developing people starts with the self. Aim to be the kind of manager who gets the best from staff, and who does the best for them.

Consider your values as well as your strengths, weaknesses, and personality. Carry out a Strength-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analysis on yourself. One of the essential values is honesty. If you are honest with yourself, you will treat other people honestly too. Never work with an organization whose values are unacceptable to you.

Do the feedback analysis to show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Based on this information, form an action plan. Concentrate on your strengths and waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. Ask everyone who works with you to form and adopt an action plan.

Test your knowledge to develop your abilities for managing and being managed by considering the following questions:

• Do I know what everybody else does?

• Do I know how they perform?

• Do I know what they contribute and what results are expected?

• Do I trust the people I work with?

• Do I treat each of them as individuals?

• Do I know their strengths?

Work towards a positive answer to each of them. Use "the mirror test" and make sure you pass it. It consists of one question: "What kind of persons do I want to see when I shave myself, or put on my lipstick, in the morning?"

Bottom-Up Learning

For a manager, acceptance of the status quo is deadly. You must demand honest and continuous feedback from your constituencies. Subject yourself to the 360 degree evaluation process: ask not only your supervisors, but also your employees, customers, and peers to rate your management performance. Promise anonymity to encourage honest opinions.

Building Your Cross-Functional Excellence (more)

The goal of functional specialists is to optimize individual performance within narrow corridors of their functional expertise. The task of effective senior managers is to seek to balance the skills and capabilities of individual players. They must require that their functional specialists forego the quest for personal best in concert with the team effort. To raise to the ranks of senior manager, you must forego the quest for personal functional perfection and take the transformation from a team member of to the planner, coach, and facilitator of team performance⁴.

Developing Others

Developing people is achieved by careful, planned and motivational delegation of responsibility and duty. Trust and know your colleagues. "Organizations are no longer built on force. They are built on trust." Rather than relying on your powers, provide a spur, use the powers within people.

You also have a "relationship responsibility" for those with whom you work. It is an absolute necessity and it is a duty. Personality conflicts arise mostly because "one person does not know what the other person does", or how that is done, or its contribution, or the expected results. Make sure everybody understands what your business is really about and what is their role and the role of their colleagues in it.

One of the "hot" areas of personal, professional, and business development is coaching. The coaching is all about helping others to identify and define their specific goals, and then organize themselves to attain these goals. Coaching deals with building an individual's personal skills, from setting the goals, to communication to management style to decision making and problem solving. Coaches draw upon a client's inner knowledge, resources and creativity to help him or her be more effective.