Knowing yourself will give you valuable insights into your aptitude for managing others. It allows you to understand how you’re perceived by others, why they respond to you in the way they do, and how to get the best from them.

Developing self-awareness

Awareness of your emotions, personality, what you enjoy and dislike, what motivates you, and what comes easily or poses challenges is a key precursor to developing effective managerial ability. Quite simply, if you can’t manage yourself, you will not be able to manage anyone else.

Keeping moving

The best way to enhance your selfawareness is to learn in a systematic way from your own experiences. Start by reflecting on situations in your working life, your actions in response to them, and the outcomes of these events. Schedule a regular time to do this, either at the beginning or end of a workday, when you are not in the thick of the action. Give yourself space to reflect, and make sure you can be alone and uninterrupted for a significant period of time. Try to gain a better understanding of what happened and think about how you can learn from each situation.

Take time to reflect on situations in your working life, your actions in response to them, and the outcomes of these events

Analyzing your performance

Assessing your progress toward your goals can help you gain a fuller understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Then, every three or four months, compare the actual results with your expectations. If you practice this method consistently, it will help you discover what you are doing, or failing to do, that deprives you of the full benefits of your strengths, and will demonstrate areas in which you are not particularly competent and cannot perform adequately.

Tip

MAKE NOTES Use your journal to “think on paper” about what you have read about management in this or other books, or your experiences in management training programs.

In focus

It is important to have a person in your life who gives you honest, gut-level feedback, to help you gain perspective on your experiences and learn from them. This should be someone you trust enough to go to when you have real problems and ask, “Am I off base here? Am I crazy?” This person could be a partner, a mentor, a best friend, a coworker, a therapist, or a personal coach. Today, many organizations are providing their managers with 360-degree feedback, allowing them to receive insights on their strengths and weaknesses from other members of staff.

Keeping a journal

Keeping a journal is a good way to help you learn from experience. Journals are similar to diaries, but include entries that address critical aspects of your managerial experiences and reflect on interactions with bosses, employees, and team-mates. If you want to solicit feedback, post your journal as an online blog.

Journal entries could describe:

• A good (or bad) way someone handled a situation
• A problem in the making
• The different ways people react to situations
• Comments about insightful or interesting quotations
• Anecdotes, newspaper articles, or even humorous cartoons
• Your thoughts on people in the news, or in books or movies