SKILL NUMBER 4: ACHIEVING HIGH PERFORMANCE

THE BOOK OF MANAGEMENT

THE TEN ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR ACHIEVING HIGH PERFORMANCE

SKILL NUMBER 4: ACHIEVING HIGH PERFORMANCE (pg. 214 -281)

 

High performance is attained through a combination of

• Understanding yourself and your strengths and limitations
• Knowing what you want to achieve
• Ensuring you are in an environment where you enjoy working and have some freedom to achieve what you want

The route to improvements in achieving high performance:

• Get to know yourself
• Develop skills and knowledge
• Be more effective at work
• Develop kills of management and leadership, and broaden your horizons

 

KNOW YOURSELF

1. Finding out what others think of you is an important element of self-exploration.  Other people’s views are important because they shape the way they behave towards you.  The knowledge will enable you to change the signals you send out.  Value and reflect on the positive points that emerge, and use them in your planning for the future.

2. Look systematically at your career and life goals.  Visualization is a technique that can help clarify your goals.

3. Understand and play to your strengths; and develop the appropriate skills and acquire the necessary knowledge and experience.  Gain the skills through additional training or by realigning your role.  A simple way to assess yourself is to carry out a SWOT analysis which can provide a picture of development you need to excel in.

4. Differentiate yourself from others.  Your ‘brand’ is something you are comfortable with.  It should reflect your value and be uniquely yours.  While appearance is important, how you behave becomes far more important as time progresses.  Pay attention to every element of the image you project.

5. Planning is vital.  All of the things you want to achieve in life require effort and preparation.  A plan will provide references.  Elements of a good plan:

·         Vision statement

·         Set of objectives

·         ‘success map’

·         Success indicator

 

IMPROVING SKILLS

1. Time management
• Track and record time expenditure
• Prioritize tasks
• Structure your days
• Build thinking time into your schedule
• Eliminate interruptions at key times
2. Participate in meetings
• Preparation is essential
• Find opportunities to speak
• Don’t speak too much: it’s better to be known as someone who makes good points than as someone who speaks all the time
3. Chairing a meeting
• Excellent way to gain visibility
• Develop a range of procedural skills
• Determine purpose of meeting
• Decide who should attend
• Agenda is essential to ensure the meeting is focus
• Ensure the meeting achieve its aim
4. Negotiating skills
• Bargaining to reach mutually agreed outcome
• Formulate clear understanding:

·   What to achieve

·   What you are prepared to concede

·   How to go about the process

• Breakdown thoughts into 3 areas:

·   The must-haves

·   The ideal

·   The give-aways

• Do an analysis as it helps:

·   Identifying the must-haves, ideal, and give-away

·   Gives the negotiating power

• Look out for body language
• Try to engage more without being confrontational
4. Dealing with difficult people
• Difficult people could be:

·   Someone who is truly obstructive or

·   An individual who sees the world differently from you

• Understand the person
• You can’t change a person by being difficult yourself
• Truly difficult people are difficult with everyone
5. Presentation skills
• There are 2 aspects:

·   Psychological side (overcoming fear)

·   Process side (learning the technique)

• Plan the content in detail
• The voice is better remembered than the words
• Build rapport (eye contact, smile etc)

 

BE MORE EFFECTIVE

1. Read and remember
• Look at headings and diagrams
• Read faster

·   Focus eye on sentence instead of word

·   Scan through the whole document

• Use mind map to record information
1. Be creative
• Some techniques to stimulate creativity

·   Brainstorming

·   Asking the right questions

·   Benchmarking

3. Be confident
• Confidence is precious
• Building confidence needs:

·   Paying attention to what you’re thinking

·   Concentrate on positive thoughts

·   Build a bank of achievements and positive comments

• Build a confident image
3. Making decisions
• Making good decisions is essentials
• Every decisions closes off some opportunities and opens others
• Life is full of difficult choices
• Requires thought, information gathering, creation and gathering of alternatives
• Group decisions-making can be very powerful, it creates ownership
• Successful decision making depends on identification of the best possible set of alternatives to evaluate
• Use decision tree diagram
• There is evidence suggesting that emotional choices are sometimes involve in making decisions
• Decision making is not wholly rational
• Communicate decisions
4. Learn to say ‘no’
• Being successful is as much about what you decide not to do as what you decide to do
• Balance your working life and your family life
• When saying ‘no’ is appropriate, do so quickly and politely
5. Communicating
• Communication is about sharing and receiving information through varieties of channels
• Communication is a two way process
• Get to know the audience
• Tips:

·   Prepare what to say

·   Organize thoughts and thinking

·   Structure the message

• Visuals are often cleared than words
6. Listening effectively
• Listening is not the same as hearing
• Listening requires concentration
• Simply listen and empathize
• When someone tells something in confidence, keep that confidence

 

BECOMING SUCCESSFUL

1. Moving into leadership
• Ability to create and communicate a purpose
• The personal touch to deal with people
• To be a great leader:

·   Ensure that work is capably organized and managed

·   Ensure that strategy is developed, delivered and communicated

·   Ensure that tough decisions are taken at the right time and implemented sympathetically

• Surround yourself with good people with the right skills
• Characteristics:

·   Have integrity

·   Display standards and values that makes people trust

·   Show enthusiasm

·   Have warm personality

·   Interact well with others

·   Tough but fair

·   With high standards and expectations

·   Deal with people fairly and openly

• 3 main aims

·   Create a vision for the organization

·   Ensure team cohesiveness

·   Satisfy the needs of individuals within the teams

2. Succeeding as manager
• Role is to implement organization’s strategy
• Need to be leaders to some extent
• Focus on:

·   Delivery of tasks

·   Efficient use and coordination of resources

·   Developing capabilities of people in team / organization

• Delegate: giving responsibilities to others

·   Good way to develop people

·   Delegate when the objectives are:

·         Clear, specific and measurable

·         Targeted and achievable

·         Worthwhile and realistic

·         Written and recorded

·         Consistent with organization’s goal

·         Set participatively

3. Build networking
• Establishing groups of contacts that will add value
• Give a competitive edge
• Gives access to wealth of knowledge and expertise
• Allows to gain competitive information
• Build reputation
• Building relationships
4. Have a mentor
• A mentor can help

·   Work through problems

·   Give advice

·   May open up your career

• Set up a more informal mentoring relationship
• Attributes of a good mentor

·   Respect and trusted

·   Role model

·   Listens and probing

·   Genuinely interested

5. Move on
• 5 qualities for moving on

·   Qualifications

·   Experience

·   Skills

·   Positions

·   Success

6. Review your plans
• Development encompasses more than your position and progress

 

Short notes from:

THE BOOK OF MANAGEMENT

The Ten Essential Skills For Achieving High Performance

Darling Kindersley Limited (DKL), Penguin Group (UK)