Reflection on Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker

Do I Agree or Disagree with the Viewpoint Presented? I agree with the viewpoint presented in Managing Oneself. In the world we live in today, many people focus on their weaknesses and end up mediocre because of it. This was also emphasized in one of the classes I took, where the focus was on honing in on our strengths, the skills and abilities that make us great, and becoming excellent at those, rather than choosing to work on the things we are weak at and becoming mediocre there instead. The book begins by asking the reader to find out what their strengths are, and to find out how they perform. Am I a reader or a listener? How do I learn? Do I learn better by listening to people, as when a teacher is speaking in class, or do I learn better by reading? The book also talks about the importance of values, what you value in life and what you think is important, and where you belong based on your values, how you learn, and your strengths. It asks what you should contribute and how you should handle responsibility for your relationships. The book also goes into the second half of life and careers. It uses the example of an executive who has been working for twenty years at the top of their field. They are very good at what they do, but they get bored because there is nothing new for them to learn anymore, and the work no longer feels like it is making an impact, even if it actually is. The book talks about the importance of volunteering and finding other things to do to avoid that boredom, and preparing for the second half of your career before you get to that point. The second part of the book goes into what makes an effective executive, and it lays out eight practices: asking what needs to be done, asking what is right for the enterprise, developing action plans, taking responsibility for decisions, taking responsibility for communicating, focusing on opportunities rather than problems, running productive meetings, and thinking and saying we rather than I. Another premise the book makes, which matters here, is that people who work in knowledge-based industries are effectively the executive officers of themselves, so these practices apply to anyone, not just people with the title of executive. One method from the book that I did not touch on earlier but think is worth including is feedback analysis. Drucker writes,

Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen.

The idea is that you then go back later and compare what actually happened against what you expected, and that comparison is what shows you where your real strengths are and where your assumptions were off.

Relating This Back to My Own Experience

The story I want to relate this back to is how I transformed the way I work and the way I relate to people. At the beginning of my career, after university, I worked in a software engineering role very autonomously. I was much of a loner. I preferred not to interact with the rest of the team, preferred to take things into my own hands and get them done on my own. One of the issues that came from this was visibility. The people higher up in the company could see the work I was doing, but I was basically missing in the sense that I was not acting as part of the corporate team. I received feedback that this working style was terrible, and for about two years after that, I worked on my communication and my work ethic. On communication, I used to avoid interacting with my team, especially if I could get something done without them. Over that journey, I slowly opened up to getting other people’s opinions, trying to drag people into whatever work I was doing, to get their thoughts before and after a task, so that I was carrying everyone along instead of working in isolation. On work ethic, tied closely to communication, I tried to push toward more productive meetings. I hated meetings a lot, and I still do not love them, but if a meeting is short, precise, and productive, I will show up for that. I push my meetings to be that way even with people who are not used to working like that, communicating to them why it matters, coming with agendas and plans so we stay effective and get straight to the point, with action items coming out of it. Action items is a word I only really learned the importance of within the last year. Every meeting needs to produce action items, things that need to get done afterwards, or the meeting was not productive at all. I also became more open about my own weaknesses. Front-end software development was one of them. I did not like it and did not do it well, and I made that clear rather than pretending otherwise. Presentations were another one, though I am not sure if that was a real weakness or just an excuse to avoid doing them. I am much better at that now, better at speaking in public, better at leading people. I have had the opportunity to lead people and am still leading people, though I have not fully honed my ability to delegate, since I still tend to drift back to doing things myself, especially when the team is not moving as fast as I want. On how I perform, I write things down when it comes to tasks at work, but I would place myself more as a listener than a writer, since I am usually slower to speak things up when I am listening. I also know that I work better with self-structure rather than chaos. That said, under stress I can still do what I need to do, I just try to avoid getting into situations where I have to operate under stress in the first place if I can help it. As for values, the work I did over roughly the past year was really more about going in to learn how a particular industry operates, and at points that went against what I would call my dreams, because it did not feel like what I was supposed to be doing and I was not fulfilled. I tried not to treat something being difficult as automatically going against my values, though, since a lot of that really depends on perspective.

Situations I Would Have Approached Differently

Yes, there are situations I would approach differently now. In roles where I had to make decisions and lead people, one of the things I struggled with was deadlines, expectations, and communication, which ties directly into what makes an effective executive. I usually start talking about tasks using we, but I tend to slip into I once it comes down to actually taking action. I have also been in situations where I was effectively the smartest person in the room and could run circles around some team members. That becomes a problem because you move quickly, you do not set expectations properly, there are no clear deadlines, and communication suffers as a result.

Takeaways I Can Use Moving Forward

Some of these I already started applying, as I described above, but there is more I plan to work on going forward. Productive meetings matter a lot to me. I prefer meetings that are thirty minutes, concise, straight to the point, and end with action items, and I genuinely enjoy that structure because it fits how I already do not like meetings but still need to be productive in them. Another takeaway is the idea of focusing on opportunities rather than problems. That involves a mindset shift toward being proactive rather than reactive. I had already been building toward this without having a specific term for it, and this reading gave me the language for it. Going forward, I plan to actually write down my strengths and weaknesses, rather than keeping it in my head, so I know what to lean on depending on the situation. I also want to pay closer attention to how I perform in different circumstances. I lean toward being a listener rather than a reader based on what I know about myself, but I have not fully confirmed that and want to actually figure out where I stand rather than assume it. I also want to get clearer on what I should be contributing. What is my goal? Where do I see myself? What do I want to bring to the table? And finally, responsibility for relationships stood out to me: the idea of actually understanding how other people get things done, observing and understanding their strengths and weaknesses, knowing how to handle different behaviours, and communicating appropriately with the different kinds of people I work with. That is something I know I still need to work on. Feedback analysis is one thing I plan to actually put into practice. Writing down what I expect to happen before a key decision or action, and then going back to check it against what actually happened, is a simple habit but one I have not been doing in any structured way. It fits directly with the self-structure I already know I work best under.