Managing Oneself: A Drucker Lesson

The June 1 entry on The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done deals with managing yourself and your career. He points out that most knowledge workers, which includes HR professionals, will have 50 year careers (or longer) while the average life span of the typical company is only 30 years. So even if you were to be with one company for that long it means that you will have to have another employer for 20 years. And in reality most of us change companies more often than that. As Drucker puts it "... this means that most knowledge workers will have to MANAGE THEMSELVES. They have to place themselves where they will can make teh greatest contributions; they will have to learn to develop themselves. They will have to learn how and when to change what they do, how they do it, and when they do it." In SHRM's lingo this is what is known as Career Planning.

Drucker recommends you ask yourself the following questions:

• Who am I?
• What are my strengths?
• How to I work to achieve results?
• What are my values?
• Where do I belong?
• Where do I not belong?

He also recommends you measure your own performance. Record what results you expect and compare to your actual results.

Since alot of you may have been through just such an analysis in the past two years what would you add to Drucker's list? What have you done with career planning and how well did it work?