Peter Drucker wrote a classic article for the Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself.  In this Performance Principles, I relate how Dwight Eisenhower failed to manage himself effectively and went from being known as a brilliant person in press conferences to being a klutz.

The Payoff – we have to know ourselves and manage ourselves in order to be effective.  As Nathaniel Branden, who has written about 20 books on self esteem, has said – no one is coming to help us.  We have to take responsibility for managing ourselves if we expect to be successful.

People who get ahead take 100% responsibility for their own lives and careers.  This does not mean that you can win by yourself.  No man (or woman) is an island.  However, each one of us has to grow up and realize that life is difficult.  Business is filled with problems.  The people who get ahead think ahead, manage themselves well, play to their own strengths and (critically) manage their own weaknesses.

As Carmichael says, this is an example of a guy who doesn’t understand that you have to have some easy days (and some days off) in order to push yourself to the edge on your tough workout days.  Most bike racers have difficulty accepting this and so, as the saying goes, their easy days are too hard and their hard days are not hard enough. Because they refuse to pace themselves, they also are unable to push themselves to the edge when they should.

During this last year, my “hard days” got harder because I was writing a book – but my easy days got harder too.  I simply ran out of time to get everything done.  Then I realized that I had to stop trying to control everything that was going on.  I was getting overwhelmed. Instead, I had to schedule in some easy days to let me recover and help me keep working hard and smart.

Performance Principle:  We all have to figure out how to work hard without burning out.  Here are a couple of practical steps that have helped me do this during the past year.

First, I am doing my best to bring closure to each day.  When I walk out of my office at the end of the day, I am working hard to have completed at least the most important tasks of the day so that I can have a sense of closure.

Second, I am working hard to keep my weekends work-free (or at least my Sundays, I am writing this on a Saturday morning).

Third, I have started to schedule an occasional strategy day out of the office.  I did this a couple of weeks ago, and it was amazing.  I had a breakfast meeting out of the office, and I just did not go back.  I took my laptop, went to a coffee shop, and thought, strategized and planned.  I couldn’t get my wireless connection to work, so I didn’t even have wireless access – and it made the day better, not worse.  Fewer distractions and no email helped me create a to-do list and set my priorities.  I did that planning three weeks ago and I have been more productive since because I have a plan to follow.

So, think about some ways to schedule some easy days into your schedule that will make you stronger and more endurable for the work you have to get done.

Fast forward five or six years. Eisenhower is now the 34th President of the United States. Both his predecessors Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman loved responding to live questions from the press without preparation. Instead of changing the format of these press conferences to play to his strengths (he was a reader, not a listener), Eisenhower tried to provide answers without requiring pre-submitted questions. As a result, the same reporters who lauded him just years before now considered him incompetent.

Performance Principle: We have to manage ourselves; no one else is going to do it for us. For example, I have learned over time that I learn by talking. Literally, unless the words come out of my mouth, I don’t really know what I think. Furthermore, I make better decisions if I talk things through with others before I act. The combination of “learning by talking” and getting the feedback of someone I trust yields consistently better results for me.

Learn how you learn. Pay attention to the setting, situations, and environments in which you thrive and spend more time there. Identify the circumstances that play to your weaknesses – and re-engineer them. You have to set yourself up to succeed.

If you have not read this classic article by Drucker, you should. You have to pay for the download but it’s worth it.

Thanks,

Eric

The fact is, he and his partners worked for 10 long years to start and build this business.  For most of that time, they worked like dogs and got very little credit or attention.  He told me once that, “There are some things that I had to do to build this business that I will never, never do again.”  These were not illegal or unethical things.  They were incredibly demanding times of all work, not sleep, and complete risk.

Performance Principle:  It takes a long time to be an overnight success.  Accept the fact that there are no shortcuts.

Researchers have identified what they call the ten-year rule when it comes to becoming a world-class performer.  As Fortune magazine said, “Even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.”  (“What it takes to be great,” Fortune, October 30, 2006).

If you are toiling away at an area where you don’t have any talent, no amount of time will be enough to make you a success.  But if you have ability, then here are some principles to keep in mind for becoming a master of your own craft:

• Master the basics. Every craft – business, medicine, art – has its technical skills and mastering those technical skills can be tiresome.  But you have to master the basics if you want to be world class.
• Cultivate relationships. Technical ability is rarely sufficient to get you to the top.  Be intentionally about developing relationships and staying in touch with people throughout your career.  Keep your Outlook or other contact management software up-to-date.  Look for opportunities to connect and reconnect with others in and out of your field.  These relationships are just as much the currency of success as are your technical abilities.
• Use compounding interest to your benefit. If you can improve your results by 10% per month, in 7 months you will be 100% better than you were when you started.  Don’t be afraid to make small improvements and allow those improvements to build on one another.  Before you know it you will be an expert.
• Enjoy the work itself.  Many of us are motivated by the financial rewards, power, and respect that achievement brings.  That’s fine when kept in perspective, but to sustain a long-term commitment to our work, we have to find some rewards in the work itself.  At the end our careers and lives, the only one who is going to really care about what you accomplished at work is you.
• Get the word out. All of us are in the marketing business.  It’s not enough to be good at something.  You have to be able to communicate the problems that you solve through your expertise, and to build a brand for yourself and your abilities that creates credibility and draws people to you.  If this smacks of self promotion, take a moment to consider how many truly talented people there are whose skills and abilities are underutilized because they could not figure out how to build a following.
• Don’t ever quit. As Ross Perot purportedly said, “Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success.”

Most of the realtors immediately plunged into a long description of the flaws and imperfections of our home and provided detailed descriptions of what they would fix. One realtor, however, would have none of this. Her only response was, “You have a lovely home.” She absolutely refused to be critical of our house until we agreed to list our house with her. We didn’t choose her as our realtor (we chose a realtor who was referred by someone we trusted, the ultimate sales tool) However we were struck by the fact that this woman was a sales pro. She had a process that she used to persuade homeowners to list their homes with her, and one part of that process was to never provide criticism or consulting until after people signed a contract with her.

Performance Principle: Save your consulting for after the contact is signed. Don’t try to begin new business relationships by telling people all the things they are doing wrong. Instead, clarify specifically how you can help them and what this is worth in dollars and cents. And save your feedback and criticism for the client until the contract is signed.

Here are some points to remember and steps to take to improve your consultative selling process:

1. People assume you know what you are talking about. Experts of all stripes believe that they must convince people of their expertise. Prospective clients generally assume that you know what you are talking about unless you convince them otherwise. So stop giving away your expertise in a low-percentage ploy to increase your credibility.

2. Clarify objectives and value, don’t discuss methodology. Instead of spending your time describing how you will solve someone’s problem, focus on clarifying what problems you will solve and how much value this will create. The quality of your questions will go a long way to revealing your expertise without getting you bogged down in discussing technicalities which no one finds valuable.

3. Define specific key results. Clients often talk in overarching terms about their objectives. This helps you to understand the big picture from their perspective, but you have to get more specific as well. You must define specific key results that will indicate if your work together is being successful. These should be specific, measurable results that are tied to your work (our customer acquisition numbers increase by 20%; we operate 5 new programs in the first half of 2009).

4. “Dollarize” problems for clients. Translate every key result that you discuss with a client into dollars. If you are going to help a company overhaul its IT infrastructure, how much money will that make or save for your client? If you are helping a professional services firm implement a new sales tracking system, what is that worth to the client? If you can’t connect the dots between your actions and these hard dollars, you are not going to getting hired.

5. Ask people to work with you. You have to invite prospective clients to work with you. After clarifying key results and “dollarizing” problems, I say something like this: “Joe, I invite you to work with me on this, I think we can make a lot of progress together.” Short, sweet and effective.

6. After the invitation, stop talking. After inviting a prospective client to work with you, you have to stop talking – a feat many of us find difficult. Give the other person an opportunity to agree to become your client.

Until next month,

Eric

During the construction of that first school, Mortenson had to get figure out how to get things done with people in this culture. The village chief pulled him aside one day and told him “If you want to thrive here, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with us, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family and for our family we are prepared to do anything, even die” (from Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin).

Performance Principle: Relationships are an investment. Investing in relationships can often seem like a waste of time. However, if you are intentional about investing in relationships, you will ultimately accomplish much more than you ever would or could alone. Here are six steps you can take to build relationships effectively:

1. Ask and listen, don’t talk and tell. In other words, shut up and listen. People are a lot more interested in hearing themselves talk than in hearing what you have to say. I have had people comment that they had a great conversation with me and I barely said a word! There are very few good listeners in the world. Become one of them.

2. Get out of the office. Relationships are developed on the golf course, at your kid’s soccer game, or at dinner – not at the office. Spending time with people socially accelerates the velocity with which trusting relationships are developed. Be intentional about investing time with people outside of 8-5.

3. Be a referral source. Don’t wait for others to refer to you, be a source of referrals for them. Referrals deepen relationships. People are busy, but they will always take time for you if you are a source of business.

4. Reconnect. Don’t neglect relationships from the past. Take the time to reach out to people you know from former jobs or school days gone past. People who know you from the past can be some of the most valuable and meaningful relationships that you have.

5. Stay until the quesadillas are scorched. When you go to a networking event, stay until the bitter end. Don’t leave until you see the last quesadilla scorching on the bottom of the chafing dish. It is invariably in the last half hour of these events that I have the one conversation that makes it all worthwhile.