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What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a nutshell
Good MBA programmes rely on students who are both bright and self-aware and I have the same philosophy for this book. I will ask you to reflect on your work and life experience and be honest about what you know and what you don’t know (including what you pretend not to know) about yourself. This is part of personal development but it is also linked to having management impact in an organisation.
In this chapter you will:
- define reflection and reflective practice
- think about different aspects of your personality
- look at your strengths and focus on setting development goals
- begin to think about your purpose
The keys to personal development
This chapter is unashamedly about you. Before you go further, write down your answers to these questions for reflection.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
| 1 | When was the last time you were able to stop, think and reflect on your career? Thinking and action go together; what did you do next? | |
| 2 | We don’t usually think about what’s important in life until we face a crisis or a serious dilemma. Write some notes about: | |
| (a) | the high-point in your life so far and | |
| (b) | the lowest point. | |
‘Know thyself’ is an ancient instruction. It is both a call for introspective honesty and humility, and a means to know where you belong in society. Personal development involves both your internal and external worlds. Self-awareness is the starting point for learning, so being aware of your personal values, beliefs, capabilities and motivations is a route to emotional maturity in your thinking.
When I begin a personal development journey with a group of MBAs, I want them to do four things:
- Understand the concepts of reflection and reflective practice.
- Adopt a mindset of curiosity.
- Use this curiosity to ask questions.
- Get into the habit of writing things down.
Taken together, these are a route to action. Time is precious. You’re busy and may believe you can’t afford to stop and think about what you do. I think that’s why you can’t afford not to.
Reflection
If you are a mid-career manager, you’re probably already too busy to think, let alone reflect. Most managers know reflection, if they know it at all, as part of a problem-solving process. Something goes wrong; time is spent collectively or alone reviewing what happened in the hope that identifying the cause will improve the process. But this is limited – reflection is much more than that. I’m as enthusiastic about reflection as Ben Zander (in the TED video mentioned at the end of the previous chapter) is about classical music. So before we go on, here are some truths about reflection:
- It is always about ‘unfinished business’; the stuff that just won’t go away.
- You can’t reflect on something if you haven’t noticed it. But reflection is about what is absent. This is a bit of a paradox.
- There are many ways to reflect. Not all of them are comfortable.
- The point of reflection is, in the end, to get unstuck. British philosopher Alan Watts once said, ‘We are on a journey to where we are’, and I think this is what reflection does for us.
Managers use reflection to three ends. The first category is what I would call technical, or working out what went wrong in order to fix it (as, for example, in a ‘lessons learned’ or project wash-up). The second category, and the most common in management development, is aligned. This is the careful process of looking at what you need to change or do differently in order to align yourself to the overall goals of your organisation. Finally, there is critical, which is much rarer because it involves questioning assumptions behind your goals, and sometimes comes in response to a major change or trauma where your world has been turned upside down. Most of the reflection you are asked to do in this book will be of the aligned type – you are seeking new ways of steering, not rocking, the boat. If you get further than this, then that’s a bonus.
Reflective practice
We like to think of management as a highly ordered and predictable professional activity. But if you think about how your normal working day in management actually goes, the chances are that you don’t inhabit a Zen-like, unruffled state of expertise. Rather, you live in a world of constant interruption, surprise and frustration.
In his book The Reflective Practitioner, American academic Donald Schön noted that professionals who train for years in the neat and ordered world of theory actually do their jobs in the ‘swampy lowlands’ of everyday experience.1 Management happens at the intersection of theory and practice, although most managers learn the skill of ‘thinking on their feet’ before they become experts in theory. Intuition will work for you up to a point, but becoming expert in identifying underlying assumptions (which often includes the power relations and politics of the office) requires something extra. Reflection is the most important way to think through all the wider concerns than simply the problem in hand.
Curiosity and self-awareness
If you want to apply what is in this book, your curiosity first needs to be woken up. Look back at your answer to the first couple of questions for reflection in Chapter 1. Was curiosity one of the reasons you picked up The Every Day MBA? Let’s get curious now about four areas of personal development that MBAs often think of at the start of a programme:
Personality: Who am I? What is important to me?
Proficiency: What am I good at? What do I need to develop? What are my goals?
Purpose: What is my contribution to the world?
Practice: What action should I take? What’s stopping me?
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Personality: Who am I?
‘What makes me the way I am?’ ‘Is my character from nature or nurture?’ ‘Is my personality fixed, or can it be changed?’ I have learned over the years working alongside even mature MBAs that these are difficult questions to ask. In fact, the big one – ‘Who am I?’ – is never fully answered.
There are literally hundreds of tools, psychometric tests and questionnaires out there to test a host of theories about personality, and I’ll list some below. I believe that personality tests can be useful, but they have limits because any test is only as good as the theory behind it. The vast diversity of questionnaires and models is actually based on only a few core theories of character and personality and the majority of tests are uncritical (and sometimes unaware) of the assumptions made by their underlying theory. One of the main ideas in this book is that you need to develop your ability to think critically, something that becomes more important the higher you get in management. For that reason, I think you should try to find as many ways as possible to investigate your personality.
Values, beliefs and psychometric tests
Values address the ‘why’ in our lives. Established early in our development, they are principles that are basic to identity and ethical action. Management education often treats them as measurable and rationally worked out by individuals, though a more holistic approach says that values are messy, collective and pre-date language. Our personal values are often apparent only in times of stress, trauma or change and much of the time we tend not to think about them. Until a crisis hits, values remain as unspoken and unquestioned assumptions. Yet it is from our values that we develop beliefs.
Beliefs address the ‘how’ and are guides for how we conduct ourselves from day to day. They are the short cuts we use to make choices in behaviours (the ‘what’ are the behaviours everybody else actually sees). Beliefs are rules, not opinions. In fact, most of our beliefs are habitual and rarely questioned. Beliefs hold us in place and are the bridge between our actions and our values. If you want to change, learn and grow, you will need to identify which beliefs are self-limiting – and replace them.
Psychometrics is the attempt to measure a person’s personality or character. For nearly 100 years, individuals and organisations have used a range of psychometric questionnaires to assess personality and it’s likely that you have come across several such instruments in your career. They work by converting a statistical analysis of your responses into a best-guess report on attitudes, aptitudes, traits, characteristics or preferences.
One type of psychometric test measures aptitudes, skills or preferences for behaviour. Understanding what you are good at (or not good at) is a starting point for improving your skills. This popular focus on strengths in management learning is part of the positive psychology movement, which says that you should find out what you are good at ... and do more of it. Tom Rath’s best-selling book StrengthsFinder 2.0 is an example of this concept.2
Behaviours and attitudes can change, but personality traits are fixed. Not surprisingly, many of the tests for this aspect of personality were developed from the psychoanalytical tradition. They promise better-informed ways of understanding the self in relation to other types. The best known is the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an American personality test loosely based on the work of Carl Jung. It is widely used to clarify orientation to the world across four dimensions through innate preferences in how you take in and process information. The four sets of preferences result in 16 personality types. MBTI is similar to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (accessible online for free). The Five Factor Model uses the acronym OCEAN as a way of remembering what are also called the ‘Big Five’ personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The result is a very broad way of identifying self-reported traits with behaviours. In a similar way, measures of personal values and belief systems, such as Hogan’s Motives, Values and Preferences Inventory (MVPI), encourage you to name your value set from a long list.
Any of these may be a good starting place to think about what’s important for you, but psychometrics are seductive, so it’s worth remembering a couple of caveats so that you avoid the trap of pigeon-holing:
- They are not magic. When you fill out a questionnaire about yourself, it’s likely that it will tell you what you already know.
- If the theory behind them is not correct, then the results will be of limited practical value for your personal development in the long run.
It’s better to use test scores alongside a range of other sources of information, and to discuss your thoughts with colleagues and friends in order to arrive at an informed view of yourself.
Proficiency: What am I good at?
The statistical measurement of mental intelligence was not an issue until the beginning of the twentieth century. Interest in IQ, or intelligence quotient, was fed by society’s needs to find ways to assess and grade children in education and adults in work. Our love of educational testing has not diminished. In recent years the popularity of Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence (EI) has also become popular. EI broadly covers self and social awareness, self-management and interpersonal skills and was inspired by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. EI is now becoming mainstream for many in learning, and is often combined with growing interest in the neuroscience of learning. Advances in our understanding of what the brain does when we learn have enabled us to map some of the process involved, though this is not quite the same as explaining the meaning of personality.
Nevertheless, ‘What am I good at?’ is a fundamental question for every manager to ask.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
| 1 | When you were young, what were you good at? What are you good at now? |
| 2 | At work, what are you rewarded for? What are you good at but not rewarded for in your work life? |
| Take a look at your answer to the first question above. Was it easy or difficult to come up with things you excel in? What about weaknesses, are they important also? What criteria do you use to measure success? | |
The dominant indicator of personal effectiveness used by organisations is the concept of competency. Competencies are effective behaviours that drive outcomes. The idea is that if certain skills can be developed, this will result in a high level of performance against the goals and targets set by your workplace. It may also be a sustainable advantage in the job market. In fact, competency-based practice is so widespread it would be difficult to find many companies that don’t plan, measure and evaluate managerial performance this way. Making a link between skills, effective behaviours and outcomes is one way to find developmental gaps, but it is not the whole story (if only it were that simple). Not everything in management can be reduced to a measurable competency so easily.
If you are intending to get on in your career, explore new directions or even look for a way out, then a thorough re-evaluation of personality type and perception is a start. My experience with MBAs has shown me that a more thought-provoking question to ask is: Where are you in your life cycle? This is because the answer must involve you looking at yourself in relation to the world to understand your identity and purpose.
Purpose: What is my contribution?
Personal development is the process of advancing identity and self-knowledge, of developing talents, potential and employability across our lifespan. It involves us acknowledging where we are in the present, and sometimes letting go of things from our past. In Chapter 1 you were asked to reflect on why you had picked up this book. Did you identify a sense of challenge at work or a need to move on in your career? Would it have made sense for you to think about these things five or ten years ago? Why not leave it until later in your career? Why now?
ACTIVITY FOR REFLECTION
Life chapters
| This is a great exercise to do in order to identify patterns in your life and perhaps signals of what to let go. |
| Imagine your life as if it were a book, with each stage or part its own chapter. First try to draw a timeline to identify these stages and key events or turning points. Then write a title and short summary for each chapter and include, if you can, transitions from one chapter to the next. Your ‘book’ is unfinished, but you may now be able to identify patterns and recurring themes. |
What it means to be an adult is not a simple question. Danish-American psychiatrist Erik Erikson viewed life as a cycle from birth to death with eight stages of development. As we go through life, biology, cognitive development and – crucially – the social environment combine to trigger various struggles. Erikson called them ‘crises’, which we must deal with in order to understand a particular core value. The best known of Erikson’s psychosocial transitions is probably the ‘identity crisis’ of adolescence. Less well known are the three further stages of adulthood (see Figure 2.1). It is those adult periods that cover your career.
We leave adolescence and enter young adulthood, where our concern is learning what (and who) we care for. This is a formative period in our lives, one where we build relationships and families. Erikson believed that from our mid-30s to our early 60s we move to mature adulthood, where we are inevitably drawn outward to the question of our productivity and how we shape the world around us. At this stage, we face a crisis between ‘generativity’, or the extension of love into the future, and ‘stagnation’, which is this energy selfishly turned in to please only ourselves. Are we able to balance this societal role and this concern with how the world is for future generations and still leave time and space for ourselves? This is the personal context for management. If you can work through this, understanding both sides of the conflict, it can make it incredibly productive.
FIGURE 2.1 Erikson’s psychosocial life cycle model of development
Source: Adapted from Erikson, E. (1994) Identity and the Life Cycle, W.W. Norton & Co. Ltd. Reproduced with permission.
CASE STUDY
The Gates Foundation – generativity and the life cycle
In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft. Nearly 40 years on, the computer software giant was the world’s largest software maker by revenue and one of the world’s most valuable companies.
While his company continues to maintain long-term prosperity, it may ultimately be that a legacy will be felt more through the work of the Gates Foundation than in software development. Set up by Bill and his wife Melinda in 1997, the Foundation has been boosted by sizable donations from US investor Warren Buffett from 2006 onwards, and in June 2014 had an asset trust endowment of $38 billion. It has made almost $30 billion in grants since its inception. In the US the foundation works to improve school education and elsewhere the main types of projects supported are in global health (vaccination, immunisation and disease eradication) and global development (education, agriculture, family planning and sanitation). In fact, Bill Gates expects to give away 95 per cent of his net worth during his lifetime.
The couple first discussed the idea and purpose of the Foundation during a holiday to Africa in 1993, when he was 38 and she was 28. In March 2014 Bill and Melinda were interviewed at a TED conference about their work and the early days of the Foundation.3 At one point, Bill says, ‘We had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase, the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy’, to which Melinda adds, ‘Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60, so he hasn’t quite hit 60 yet, so some things change along the way.’
Gates brings to the work of the Foundation many of the qualities that drove innovation in Microsoft, in particular a view of learning as a continuous activity. Unusually Bill and Melinda decided they do not want their Foundation to exist in perpetuity and it will wind down and spend all its assets within 20 years of their deaths. ‘We can try and solve the problems of today,’ believes Bill. ‘The next generation will have to decide what the problems are they want to tackle.’4
Bill Gates, of course, has means at his disposal to amplify the possibilities of generativity. But in smaller ways, we all begin to face questions in this period of our lives after we have met the challenges of the first phase of adulthood. It’s easy to see how the life-cycle concept maps onto the challenges of moving from middle to senior management (you can compare this with Jim Collins’ thoughts on leadership in Chapter 10).
Practice: What action should I take?
What are your goals? A lot of people have a hunch that something needs to change but cannot accurately say what that is, and we often set goals for ourselves that are vague or not compelling. As we established in the previous chapter, management is a purposive activity; it has an end in mind. So it helps to have developmental goals that are expressed in positive language. For example, writing down SMART goals, an idea developed from the work of Peter Drucker, is a good exercise for this. SMART stands for:
Specific: Is it snappy and positive (and a move towards something)?
Measurable: What evidence will indicate you have reached it?
Achievable: Have you got, or can you get, the resources you need?
Relevant: Is the goal in harmony with the bigger picture? Consider the impact of your goal on your family, work and community. Consider, too, what would happen if you didn’t reach it.
Time bound: By when? Without a timeframe, your goal remains a nicely worded dream.
ACTIVITIES FOR REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
| 1 | Write down, in as much detail as you can: | |
| (a) | One short-term work or career goal. | |
| (b) | One medium-term work or career goal. | |
| (c) | One long-term career goal. | |
| 2 | Share and discuss these goals with another person. For each, also tell another person the first concrete action you will take towards each (telling someone else increases the likelihood of it happening). | |
Work–life balance is about having a say in when, where and how you work, and recognising that it is healthy to try to achieve a fulfilling life both inside and outside work. Having your view accepted and respected by others (organisations, families and society as a whole) is important in avoiding too much stress or burn-out.
How to get more balanced
While there are no hard and fast rules about how a person should divide up their lives, most of us will recognise a few major categories such as health, levels of attainment at work or in our career, relationships with those closest to us, and an inner world of self-actualisation and purpose. Our lives are full of tensions, dilemmas and choices, both at work and at home.
A great way of seeing how things are balanced in your life is in a wheel of life, a diagnostic tool developed for coaching. Constructing your own wheel is a great way to identify and perhaps surprise yourself about where you need to put your energies. Figure 2.2 shows a blank version. You can re-create your own with labels such as ‘physical environment’, ‘family and friends’, ‘career’, ‘money’, ‘health’, ‘recreation’, ‘significant other/spouse’, ‘spirituality’, the choice is yours. To create your own wheel of life, first select eight aspects of your life that are important to you and use each to label a segment. Decide, on a scale of 1–10, how satisfied you are at the moment with each. Then colour in your own chart and (preferably in conversation with someone else) identify which one needs action now. It might not be the one with the lowest score.
FIGURE 2.2 Blank version of the wheel of life
ACTIVITIES FOR REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
| 1 | Have a go at creating your own wheel of life. |
| 2 | Do you have access to a professional or business coach at work? What are the pros and cons of working with one? |
The wheel is one of the most versatile prompts for noticing what’s absent. You can even create variants that go deeper. How about a ‘wheel of personal goals’, or ‘wheel of stress’, or even a ‘wheel of priorities’? No wonder coaches love using it with clients.
Coaching is still developing as a profession and is also now seen as a skill that managers need to have. Top executive coach Alison Hardingham, in her book The Coach’s Coach, has this definition, as someone who:
helps another person or group of people articulate and achieve their goals, through conversation with them. Coaching happens whenever that happens; and it happens all the time, not just in meetings with people who carry the title of ‘coach’.5
Managers should not be in a formal coaching relationship with their subordinates, but a coaching mindset energises and refocuses and can be used in many different contexts. Managers often comment that their general approach to building and developing relationships improves as they coach and are coached by others. At the heart of the coaching is the ability to build rapport with another person. One useful framework for this is the GROW model developed by John Whitmore.6 This is a structured process for setting and clarifying development goals:
Goal: Dig or mine for topics and objectives that will challenge and engage you, and that will deliver real value for you, your organisation or the community you live in. Identify two or three primary goals and add a ‘shine’ to each – shape each one with a wording that makes it feel real and exciting. Your goals should inspire you and they should produce an emotional response in you.
Reality: Where are you now? What is the gap between this and where your goal sits? What is pushing you towards your goals? What is stopping you? Your reality changes all the time. As you move towards your goal, your reality moves as well.
Options: These are alternatives, choices. Not choices for alternative goals but choices on what actions you can take to move towards your goals.
Will: The final step is to commit to action. Any procrastination or lack of motivation should be noted (it may be there for a reason). The GROW model is not linear.
Finding tools to use in your career development
Early in your career there is a strong case for a competency-based view of skills acquisition, and for using personality assessment tools in a methodical and measurable way. But experience has taught me that these are less useful the more you progress and the older you get. Your skills and competencies become more fluid with experience.
One good stepping stone between the two comes from Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.7 This is a great set of questions to challenge yourself to take control of your personal development. Covey wants you to go from being dependent on others for your learning to independence (taking responsibility for yourself) through to interdependence (integrating with your context). This follows the same development in thinking as The Every Day MBA.
You need to shift focus from you just as a separate individual to you as an integrated part of a complex system.
Putting it together: approaching management with an open mind
Management in the middle levels of organisations demands and rewards the efficient use of limited resources to meet short-term targets. Organisations will, on the whole, promote skills for problem solving and closure. This is stressful, if only because technology, internationalisation and economic recessions have a tendency to produce more work, not less. To be a better manager or leader you need breakthrough management practice, which requires two things:
- Self-awareness, self-knowledge and reflective practice.
- Understanding of the complexity and uncertainty of the business environment and all the things that can affect the short-term goals.
That is what MBA thinking develops. In the remainder of the book, we start to explore how this world operates. You will continue to be asked questions designed to improve your reflective practice. In addition, at the end of each chapter there will be one or two personal development questions for you to consider.
Further reading
| A classic text: | How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (2006), Vermillion. First published in 1937, this book certainly counts as a classic and is still relevant. |
| Going deeper: | Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking by Susan Cain (2013), Penguin Books. Cain’s book is a refreshing examination of a side of leadership and management we often don’t hear about. |
| Watch this: | Video extract of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl being interviewed in 1977 about his beliefs about the search for meaning: www.youtube.com/watch? v=YpN2D_tGsiY |
Notes
1 Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action, Jossey-Bass.
2 Rath, T. (2007) StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup Press.
3 www.ted.com/talks/bill_and_melinda_gates_why_giving_away_our_wealth_has_been_the_most_satisfying_thing_we_ve_done, TED Conferences LLC. Quote reproduced with permission.
4 www.gatesfoundation.org, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Quote reproduced with permission.
5 Hardingham, A. (2004) The Coach’s Coach: Personal development for personal developers, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
6 Whitmore, J. (2009) Coaching for Performance: GROWing human potential and purpose – the principles and practice of coaching and leadership, 4th Edition, Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
7 Covey, S. (2007) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Simon & Schuster.