Learn to Manage Yourself

Before we can manage others, we first of all need to be able to manage ourselves. At its simplest, this means that we need to be sufficiently well organised to plan and implement the tasks and activities associated with being an effective manager. But it also means we need to understand some of what makes us tick as an individual.

The need to be well organised sounds very obvious and very straightforward, but in practice of course it is anything but. In today’s busy, fast-changing world, managers need to be effective at managing and organising the demands on their available time. And to do so in a way that ensures they spend time with their people. It isn’t always easy, but it’s important. To manage effectively and improve somebody’s performance you need to spend time with them: discussing their performance, the problems they face, coaching them, observing them in action and giving feedback.

A good manager will be well organised and have a sound sense of priorities. There are always lots of ‘day-to-day’ things to get on with, some of which will be more immediate, more attractive and less challenging. Possibly the hardest part for some people to understand is that the most pressing task is not necessarily the one with the biggest pay-back in the long term. The good news is that effective time management is a behaviour that can be learned.

However, ‘managing yourself’ goes deeper than effective planning and time management. It includes understanding and managing our own motivational state.

It is remarkable how differently two individuals can react to the same set of circumstances. One person will see themselves as a ‘victim’, trapped and driven by events beyond their control, with no alternative to the course of action that has been forced upon them. Another will consider they are in control, and see options and choices for the action they will take. The only difference between these two people is their attitude to the circumstances
they face.

Understanding this fact, and learning how to manage the way we react with certain people and in certain situations, can be a life changing experience for many people. It offers a degree of choice, and therefore control, that previously they never knew existed

Similarly, we are all driven by our values and our beliefs. Very often there will be limits on what we are able to achieve because deep down we have a belief that inhibits us from achieving more. Or we may act in ways that are not entirely logical because we have an un-stated reason for our true behaviour, based on an un-stated, perhaps even unacknowledged, belief.

For example, a manager may seem to have bought in to the fact that her role is to improve the performance of her people. But in practice she seems to fall short of giving them 100 per cent and has a tendency to tell them only what they need to know. This is because she harbours the belief, based on a deep-seated feeling that she isn’t very effective, that if she improves her people they will outshine her and may even be promoted instead of her.

For a manager to understand her limiting beliefs is to be halfway to dealing with them. In the example given, the manager might begin to see that her failure to develop her people fully will turn her fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, that her own actions are supporting her belief that she isn’t a very good manager!

Some of these limiting beliefs are deep-rooted and may be connected with half-forgotten incidents in our early lives. Nonetheless, skilled facilitators can help people uncover those beliefs and begin to deal with them.

To know ‘you’ is to begin to manage yourself better. And to manage yourself better means you are better able to manage others. One of the very first self-development books put it this way, ‘First remove the plank from your own eye, then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye’.

John Hunter

John Hunter is a director of Intouch Consulting Ltd. Intouch helps organisations create high performance cultures. This article has been based on one of their series of Best Practice reports ‘Maximising Personal Impact’. To obtain a free copy of the report email mail@intouchconsulting.co.uk or visit their web site at www.intouchconsulting.co.uk