March 6
Your Personal Self-Audit
Topics: Why self-assessment? The four components of life/work effectiveness. How to conduct a personal self-audit. Identifying your D.A.T.A. Leveraging your D.A.T.A. Operating from a position of strength vs. weakness. How to relate to those whose strengths and weaknesses differ from yours.
Even though this course is titled "Interpersonal Relations and Motivation", there's really a third major component to this course. The reason: relationships between people, and the motivations that flow directly or indirectly from that, always take place in an environment, a social context. If workplace relationships and motivations are under consideration, the social context is the new world of work... and believe me, the world of work has changed more dramatically in the past 15 to 25 years than in the century and a half prior to that. It isn't your parents' workplace any more... and understanding how the "rules of the game" have changed is very important.
Here are a few wake-up statistics for you:
In a world like this, how do you survive and thrive? By taking responsibility for your own life/work (even the best employer is not your mommy). And in order to do that, you have to know yourself: not in the informal anecdotal sense of "always having been you", but in a deep, thoroughgoing way. That means a systematic personal self-audit, tonight's topic.
(Note: timing -- how long things will take in the actual classroom setting -- is always every teacher's nightmare! If time permits, I'll probably draw in a few topics from March 20 here, most notably William Strauss and Neil Howe's model of generational changes in the workplace. For those notes, click here.)
Career self-management maven William Bridges outlines four key components of a self-audit or self-assessment... four things you need to know about yourself in order to successfully manage your life and your career. They form the convenient acronym D.A.T.A., because the idea is to collect lots of relevant data about yourself. Here's what the letters stand for:
Tonight, we'll be looking at each of these four components in detail.
Desires (also known as Interests or Motivators)
Many people get stuck in identifying their desires because they fail to recognize that work can, and should, be fun. (I was once confronted by a heckler, at a talk I was giving on this subject, who stood up and declaimed loudly, "If it was supposed to be fun, they wouldn't call it work!" He was loud, but wrong all the same.) In an ideal situation, work and play should be indistinguishable or at least seamlessly linked; the main difference between work and play should be that work comes with direct deposit. That's an ideal, of course; but if you don't love at least 70% of what you do on the job, you're probably on the wrong profession. Why condemn yourself to a lifetime of boredom, frustration, and marking time? The average American spends some 100,000 hours of his or her life on the job (the second biggest slice of your mortal life, second only to sleeping; if you sleep on the job, the categories overlap somewhat). That's a long time to spend doing something you hate.
Why, then, do so many people find it hard to identify their true desires? In part, because we've been taught not to think that way.
Some
people are so focused on what others want for them or expect from them that they
have lost touch with what they personally want for themselves. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to serve others (in
fact, it may be one of the main purposes of life!), but serving others is
not at all the same as pleasing them. The problem with living to meet others’ expectations is
that you can’t ever quite succeed at it.
It’s like trying to hit a moving target.
In addition, different people have different expectations, so what
pleases one person may offend, annoy, or threaten another.
If you work too hard at pleasing everybody, you end up pleasing nobody
(including yourself).
Don’t
worry, I'm not going to advocate selfishness or the abandonment of
responsibility; I believe strongly that a life lived for others (rightly
understood) is the best kind of life. But
you can’t pour water out of an empty glass.
You can’t keep on giving to others if your own needs are chronically
unmet. So do yourself a favor and
set the needs and wishes and expectations of others aside for awhile, and ask
yourself, If everybody else in my life told me that they didn’t care
what I wanted as long as I was personally satisfied, what would I really want,
just for me? If the answer is
still focused on giving to others, fine. Those
are your real values. But make sure
you’re making a list of your own expectations, not just those of other people.
(If your primary feeling is one of obligation – not of a deeper sense
of fulfillment and satisfaction – you may need to dig deeper.
Authentic service to others feels rewarding.)
Others
have a hard time dealing with the matter of desires because they are so
focused on the realistic, practical side of life that they don't let themselves
dream. You may be worried about
money (financial fears are often very realistic and very inescapable).
Or you may be skeptical about your own capabilities.
Both are (sometimes) rational and understandable concerns. But
being too focused on practical matters at this stage can do you serious harm:
it can place mental blinders around your eyes and keep you from seeing
possibilities that, in the long run, can be both fulfilling and practical.
So, do yourself a favor and set the practical concerns – about how you’re going to pay the bills, about how you could possibly convince an employer to hire someone like you, about your lack of credentials (or those excessive credentials that tag you with labels like “overeducated” and “overspecialized”), about your health, about your family, about the impossibility of relocation or travel or retraining – off to the side for now. Dream, let your imagination soar, think outside the box. If these kinds of activities are very difficult for you, you may want to partner with someone for whom innovation and creativity are strong suits. If you do, when they mention an idea that seems wild and crazy, stifle the impulse to say, “Yeah, but…” If their idea sounds fun or fulfilling or rewarding to you, add it to your list of discovered desires.
One
last word about motivators. Management expert Edgar Schein believes that there are
eight basic motivators around which people build their careers and base their
career decisions. (A note to employers: if you pay a person in the wrong "psychological
currency" for them, you may be very surprised when they quit a job
precipitously, for "no apparent reason". After all, you were
rewarding them handsomely -- just not in the way they wanted. Since we all
take ourselves as benchmarks of normality, it's easy to reward others in the
ways we ourselves would like to be rewarded, but that doesn't always work
well.) For the record, Schein's eight motivational categories are security
and stability, technical competence, managerial status, autonomy,
entrepreneurship, service and altruism, pure challenge, and lifestyle
balance. Which sounds most like what you crave as a reward for your hard
work?
Abilities (also known as Skills or Competencies)
Tom Jackson, a nationally regarded career expert, likes to ask audiences, "Why do jobs exist?" Often he gets nothing more than a sea of blank stares in return. The answer, of course, is that jobs exist because unsolved problems, and unmet needs, exist. A job is nothing more than a formal invitation, or formal opportunity, to solve a certain class of problems. A world without problems would be a world without jobs.
Abilities, competencies, or skills come in because they represent the means by which people solve problems, or the tools they apply to problems and needs in order to address them. Hence, they are, again in Jackson's phrase, "the coin of the job realm". Skills come in two subvarieties, technical skills and transferable skills.
Technical skills are those that are learned -- either formally or informally, whether in school or on the job. They must be acquired in some way, either by being passed on from expert to novice or from teacher to student, or through a time-consuming and costly process of trial and error. More importantly, they are what career counselors call "domain-specific". That is, they represent a form of highly job-specific or content-specific knowledge that may have little or no usefulness or applicability outside the framework of that job. An example might be knowing how to perform neurosurgery -- a very useful skill if you happen to want to get a job as a neurosurgeon, but not much use in any other context.
Transferable skills, though they can be modified or improved by means of experience or practice, can be thought of as natural gifts, innate abilities, or built-in aptitudes. The seeds from which adult-level transferable skills eventually sprout are usually quite evident as early as age five or six, and as a result, many people can get a good handle on what their best transferable skills by asking themselves what they did well in grade school: were you the natural leader? the good listener? the class clown? the athletic one? the smart one? the popular one? These kinds of general skills are called "transferable" because they can easily be repackaged to fit a new and different work environment; people carry these skills with them as they change from one job title or one job context to another. For instance, I've had five "real" jobs in my professional life; in only one of the five did my job title say "teacher" or "trainer", but in all of them, I've made good use of my transferable skill of teaching and training, that is, imparting information to others by means of the spoken word.
Here are three important pieces of information to keep in mind about these two kinds of skills.
First, while many people place their emphasis on technical skills, in my view that is a significant mistake. Except in the most narrowly technical fields, these skills comprise no more than 25% of the competencies required for success on the job. What's more, unlike transferable skills, they can easily be acquired by a person who has the right natural aptitude and an appropriate general background. Transferable skills, on the other hand, are more hard-wired, natural strengths. They can be developed, but only to a point. (Or, as Peter Drucker puts it, "It's much easier to go from competence to excellence than it is to go from mediocrity to competence." Always build on your strengths, not your weaknesses; and on your portable strengths, not your domain-specific ones.)
Second, a person's career path may largely be a function of whether s/he emphasizes the development and use of technical or of transferable skills. According to Harry S. Dent, Jr., the single most important career decision a person can make is to decide whether or not to become a specialist or a generalist. Specialists, who emphasize the technical skill side of the coin, make a living by becoming expert at the 80% of domain-specific knowledge that most others can't be bothered to learn or don't care to know. Because they may spend much of their time talking with other specialists, the danger for them is in becoming too narrow -- which can mean they lose touch with the ability to communicate effectively with nonspecialist types, or can specialize so narrowly that they become irrelevant or obsolete, learning more and more about less and less until finally they know everything about nothing. Generalists, on the other hand, who emphasize the transferable skill side of the coin, make a living by communicating effectively across functional lines (both inside and outside of the boundaries of the employing organization) and by wearing different hats. The danger for them is in becoming too shallow -- a jack (or jill) of all trades, but a master of none -- and confusing likeability (or relational skill in general) for competence.
Third, knowing the four subtypes of transferable skills is a useful way to size up yourself or someone else. The four categories are skills with Things, skills with Ideas, skills with People, and skills with Data (or Details). Note the two dimensions or two polarities involved: a preference for impersonal versus personal roles and tasks that may define whether one works best with things or with people, and a preference for abstract versus concrete roles and tasks that may define whether one works best with ideas or with details. Most people, just listening to that description, can identify their strongest area of the four and their weakest area. Can you?
Temperament (also known as Style or Personality)
We learned about the five major ways people differ (the Big Five) during the last class session... were you awake? I don't feel the need to repeat this information again here. You should know how to use the Back arrow on your Web browser, or how to find the appropriate hyperlink at the bottom of this page, to get back to those notes if you need to. If you don't know how to do either, please seek professional help immediately. Operators are standing by (we can't afford chairs for them).
Assets (also known as Resources or Leveraging Points)
What are assets? They're anything other than the above (other than desires, abilities, and temperament) that give you a "leg up" in your life/work self-management ventures. Assets can be anything at all -- you never know what is going to be an asset down the road. Just to give you a few examples, they can include:
Think big, think outside the box, when pondering your assets. As psychologist John Krumboltz reminds us, while the myth in our culture is that we can predict and plan everything, the reality is otherwise. (Hey, even the weather can't successfully be predicted a week in advance! Or as one wit puts it, "Meteorology: the only profession in which you can be wrong all the time and still have job security.") Many of the events that shape our lives are so-called "chance" or happenstance encounters (I prefer the word "serendipitous", since I don't believe that anything is really a random or chance event): those things that come our way out of the blue and can shape our lives, if we have the foresight and proactivity to take advantage of them.
In class, you'll be provided with some specific tools for assessing your D.A.T.A.