How to be your own manager - 10 key points

Knowing yourself - from your strengths and key values, to the conditions you need in order to give your best performance, can substantially increase your chances of success at work. 

Traditionally, we’ve had little or no need to be our own bosses - after all, most of us were born into our stations in life, or relied on a company manager to plot out our career paths, and tell us how to do our jobs on a day to day basis. Today, however, it’s becoming increasingly common for us to take control of our careers and become our own bosses, if we want to get ahead at work. This might involve anything from finding the right opportunities to make the greatest contributions, or staying engaged and motivated over the course of a career that could span half a century. 

So how best can we learn to manage ourselves, and how will that ensure we get ahead in the workplace?

1. Find your strengths with ‘feedback analysis’

Many of us can identify our weak areas - in fact, job interviews often task us with discussing what we’re not good at, and how we plan to mitigate this. What we’re not so good at, however, is knowing (or admitting to) our strengths. This is a shame, as this knowledge will help us place ourselves in roles where we can fully excel, and rise quickly through the ranks into positions of power, and responsibility. 

One way of finding out what you’re good at is by carrying out a process known as ‘feedback analysis’, writing down what we expect the outcome to be whenever we make a key decision, and comparing the results with our expectations in 12 months' time.

This practice, when done over a fairly short period of two to three years, allows us to begin uncovering what we’re actually good at, by uncovering trends and correlations in predictions. It also helps us increase our confidence in our own decisions, and show tangible proof of the areas where we’re strongest. Feedback analysis also helps us be honest about areas where we’re not strong, and begin to say not to opportunities that involve this, so we’re constantly playing to our strengths, and showing off our best qualities. 

2. Play to your strengths, and strengthen your weaknesses 

Once you know where your real passions and talents lie, you’ll be able to showcase these at every opportunity, and spend time strengthening and sharpening them. And once you’ve uncovered your blind spots, you’ll also be able to acquire the knowledge required to fill these. Many of us believe that talent is innate, and that we’re born with many of the skills that will be called to use throughout our careers. In fact, many talents can be acquired, and strengthened, with conscious effort - for example, some of us may be natural mathematicians, but all of us can learn how to do algebra or trigonometry.

3. Remedy your bad habits 

As well as helping you pick out, and maximise on your core strengths, feedback analysis will also quickly show up your bad habits - these could range from making great plans but failing to follow through with them, to focusing too much on creativity, while neglecting the practicalities required to put great ideas into practise. 

Comparing how you think something will play out against how it occurs in real life will also help you see, very clearly, where and how your expectations fell short of reality, and will allow you to reflect on what you could have done better, or done at all. It’s not often that we are given the opportunity to consciously consider where we excelled in a specific situation, and where we fell down, and viewing our mistakes and misconceptions in such a stark manner can really help us recognise and remedy the ones we repeat again and again - patterns will always energy, and if we pay attention to these, we can make tangible changes in how we approach tasks and projects at work, taking full control and managing ourselves to excel through learning. 

Knowing our bad habits or ‘blind spots’ also means that we can be honest and upfront, with both ourselves and potential employers, about areas in which we have no discernible talent or skills, and can choose not to take on roles in these areas until we have done some work on them. 

4. Choose where to focus your energy, and effort

It takes far more energy to go from being incompetent at something to becoming mediocre at it than it does to go from  something we are already very good at to be coming truly excellent. In general, therefore, it makes little sense to waste too much effort on improving areas of low competence, and far more sense to focus on what we’re already good at, so that we can move up the ladder quickly, and really offer value to employers or clients by becoming the very best at what we do well, giving something that few others can offer.

When examining their career progression, too many people concentrate on taking on brand new skills, or getting to grips with things they’re really awful at, in order to become passable at them. Striving for excellence in areas where you’re already performing well, however, can take you from a competent performer to a superstart, and launch your career to a different level.  

5. Identify your optimum working conditions 

People need different things, and different levels of support, to achieve their full potential - but so many of us don’t know the conditions in which we get our best work done, and therefore don’t try to create them, missing out on a golden opportunity to be the very best they can be.

How do I perform? may be a more important question than ‘what are my strengths’, because performance is unique - it’s based on personality, and it can be modified by many things within a person’s environment.

Focus on your ‘way’ of working, how best you get things done, rather than the results you achieve, and you’ll uncover useful information about your optimum working conditions that can be put into practice to get better results in your job. Knowing your core personality traits can help, so ask yourself if you learn best by taking information in by reading it, writing it, or listening to it. This might lead you to consider whether you perform best alone when left to focus on a task, or whether you need other people to bounce ideas and energy off. Trying to learn or do your job in a way that doesn’t suit you will never yield good results. Instead, find your natural strengths when examining how you get the job done, and play to these, in order to progress. 

6. Don’t strive for change, strive for improvement 

You know best whether you are a decision-maker, or an adviser, or whether you perform well under pressure, or need a calm, quiet environment to do your best work. When asking key questions about your own workplace preferences, you should keep in mind that few people work well in all kinds of environments. Everyone’s needs are unique, and specific, and instead of trying to change how you perform best, you should seek to make improvements to your performance by optimising your environment to give you the best possible conditions for success - conditions that are unique to you.

If you need peace and quiet to focus on a task, for instance, don’t seek to expose yourself to clamour and chaos in order to change your working style. Instead, speak with your boss and colleagues about the environment you need to give your best performance and how this can be recreated. 

7. Know your values

To best understand how to manage yourself, you must examine your values. This means taking a closer look at who and what you see when you look in the mirror, now how you think you would behave in a given situation (which is, instead, a question of ethics). 

When we work in organisations, or with people that don’t share our value systems, we often find ourselves frustrated, and fail to live up to our true potential. Even when we’re in a role that plays to our strengths, if this role isn’t aligned with our value system, we will find that our success comes with a bad taste. An example of this might be an individual whose values focus on treating people well in the long term to get the best out of them, working for a company that chooses, instead, to focus on taking on staff in the short term and working them hard, before discarding them when they’re burned out. This person might perform well at recruiting staff, if this is where their strength lies, but wouldn’t be comfortable with the way they were asked to approach their role, and would ultimately be unsatisfied within their position.

Remember, organisations - like people - have values, and to be effective within one, yours must be compatible with theirs. They don’t need to be exactly the same, but must be close enough to exist harmoniously. Knowing your values will help you to find roles that align your values with a company’s values, getting the best out of you, and ensuring that your career is able to develop in the long term. 

8. Figure out where you belong 

Only a small percentage of us know where we belong from an early age…how many people do you know who knew, with absolute certainty, that they’d be a doctor, or a musician, or chef by the age of five, and went on to realise that dream?

Most of us take time to find the right career, well into our late teens, twenties, and beyond, and many of us also switch career paths once or twice in our lives, something that is increasingly becoming accepted. 

Managing your career successfully, however, does mean taking control of what you want to achieve, what your values are, and where your strengths lie. All of this will help you figure out - ultimately - where you belong, and allow you to start planning out how you’ll get there. Part of managing your career is also determining where you don’t belong. Perhaps you wouldn’t feel comfortable in a large, faceless corporation, and prefer to work for an intimate family business. Or perhaps you need to shy away from decision making roles, because you dislike the responsibility, and do better in a less pressured position. 

Knowing where you belong means knowing where you should be, but also recognising what you should be doing there, how your role should be structured, and what your relationships within the role should be like. This level of information, knowing who you are and what can be expected from you, makes you a wonderful person to employ. This is because you can be upfront and honest with a prospective boss about what they’ll be getting if they hire you, and what they won’t. Self awareness is truly invaluable. 

Knowing where you belong can transform an ordinary person, hardworking and competent but mediocre, into an outstanding performer. It can also help you pinpoint your innate value, what you can truly contribute, and sell this to the right people, on your own terms. 

9. Take responsibility for workplace relationships

Few of us work by ourselves, and most roles involve good interpersonal and communication skills, in order to deliver the best results. This is true whether you work as part of an organisation, or are self employed.

Managing yourself therefore means taking responsibility for the relationships you develop at work. This means accepting that people are individuals with their own strengths, values, and ways of getting stuff done, and that you must get to know these, and adapt to them, in order to find harmony. Understanding the people you work with, and drawing on their strengths, is vital to your success.

This also means that you must take responsibility for successful communication, asking the right questions, and genuinely listening to people’s responses, rather than bulldozing other people’s opinions, and hearing what you want to hear, in order to serve your own purposes. Knowing what your colleagues are doing, thinking, and feeling takes time and effort, but is a vital part of your own success, as nobody can exist in a vacuum, nor do their best work without considering the input of others. 

10. Long-term career planning 

As many of us now have careers that extend beyond the traditional ‘40 years hard graft down the mill’, we can become fatigued and frustrated after several decades in the same role or industry. 

Part of managing our careers successfully means knowing that you may experience periods of boredom or frustration, and that you will need to take action to shake things up or move things around, so that you can continue doing work that pays well, whilst also being aligned with your values. 

For some of us, this means taking on a side project, either paid or unpaid, that keeps us fulfilled and happy. For others, this might mean moving to a smaller organisation or charity from a corporate setting, or starting our own business, so that we are able to work more flexibly, and take more control. Some people retrain after many years, or return to their original passion, and all of this takes self-awareness and careful planning, in order to keep challenging ourselves, and responding to changing family circumstances. 

The challenges of managing yourself are many, and require many new skills and ways of thinking, as well as for you to think and behave like the CEO of your own career. Taking control of your own professional life, however, also has great benefits including that it affords you with greater freedom and mobility, rather than ever feeling stuck or trapped in a role.