Managing People – Know Yourself!

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle

I’ve been writing a lot recently about the personal development mindset.  A key part of the mindset is self-belief.  But before you can believe in yourself, you need to understand yourself; particularly your strengths, your weaknesses and your personality.  This is particularly important if you want to be successful at managing others!

I have important news for you – there are no perfect managers.  Managers have strengths and all of them have weaknesses too.  You are no different to the rest.  There will be things that you are good at and there will be other things that you might prefer not to talk about, or even to admit to yourself.  And every one of us has our own quirks of personality.  Believe me, you need to understand yours!  If you want to succeed as a manager, you need to be honest and, not least, with yourself.

Being a good manager doesn’t mean you need to be perfect or to know everything.  But, you do need to be good at covering the gaps; that only works if you know where the gaps are.  Then you have options.

You can:

• Put together a team that includes people who are what you are not and can do what you cannot. Sometimes this can be a challenge – often our first instinct is to recruit people just like us! If you are putting together a team for an important, business critical, task,  you need to have all the bases covered,
• Outsource/buy in the ability you need, when you need it, for example, HR advice when faced with a large-scale organizational change.
• Adapt the task so that it uses the skills and experience you have available. This may be negotiable more often than you think.  But without an honest appraisal of your own strengths and the strengths of the team, that would not be possible.

If you would like to understand yourself better then “Personality: What makes you the way you are” by Daniel Nettle comes well recommended.  Also, there are lots of free personality tests on line – HumanMetrics provides one of the more widely used ones.

If you would like to work with a coach on strengthening your understanding of yourself, my email address is below and I’d be very happy to work with you by Skype or email.

Wendy Mason is a Life and Career Coach. She helps people have the confidence they need to be successful at work and to change career while maintaining a good work/life balance. You can email her at wendymason
@wisewolfcoaching.com

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