Chapter 20 - Softskills¶

7. Personal Success¶

Analysis of strengths and weaknesses¶

You can only improve your abilities, if you are aware of you weaknesses. If you know you can do some things well, you won't mind discovering that you also have deficiencies. A good method of identifying deficits and skills is a strengths and weaknesses analysis. For this, you need a piece of paper, a pen and a good dose of honesty. A matrix is suitable for this purpose:

As soon as you've found out where your weaknesses are located you can work on them or use them as a strength. Only if you know both your strengths and weaknesses, you'll know how to handle and benefit from them - either by improving or by using those abilities.

Management of personal resources¶

A project manager has both tangible and intangible personal resources. Tangible - or material - resources include:

1. Physical constitution
2. Social environment
3. Physical fitness
4. Tools and assets (e.g. money, home, clothing)

The above resources are listed in reverse order of the extent to which they can be changed. You have least influence over your physical constitution, greater influence over your social environment and physical fitness and the most influence over your tools and assets. Intangible - or immaterial - resources include:

1. Time
2. Personality
3. Disposition (the way in which a person presents himself, appearance, stance)
4. Social competence
5. Methodical competence
6. Professional competence

You can also influence these factors to varying degrees. You have least influence over time because it cannot be manipulated (e.g. stopped or turned back). You can only use the time you have to the best possible advantage by managing it efficiently. In general, people are born with the personality they have. However, they can work on their disposition and indeed change it. Social competence, on the other hand, can be continually improved - and the best results will be achieved with the assistance of an expert. Compensating for a lack of professional competence should not be a problem, provided that the person in question is willing to make the effort.

Targets for personal success¶

As mentioned above identifying personal strengths and weaknesses is the basis for personal success. After the identification process of these, you need to overcome your own limits in order to succeed. Afterwards you only need to keep in mind, that success is feasible for everybody - there are only two questions left to consider:

1. What are my goals?
2. How can I realise them consistently?

The more detailed your goals are formulated and the more consistently you realise them, the higher is your personal success:

The principle of the Stoa¶

As a project manager you have to be aware of your perception of different situations in order to pick the right tools from the project management toolbox and use them in conjunction. And sometimes philosophical insights can also be useful for you. In this way some philosophical inspirations from the Stoa can help you. The lived Stoic principles (Stoics were Lucius Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, among others) can help to form a new kind of leadership in the project and thus contribute to personal success.

Summary¶

To summarise the keywords of that chapter, here is a quick overview:

Test yourself!¶