[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ANAGING ONESELF: WHAT TO CONTRIBUTE?
SUCCESSFUL CAREERS ARE NOT THE PRODUCTS OF LUCK OR PLANNING; THEY ARE BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO ARE ABLE TO SEIZE THOSE OPPORTUNITIES THAT MATCH THEIR OWN STRENGTHS.
Now that you have identified your strengths and work style you can begin to look for the right opportunities. These are the assignments that will enable you to use your strength, match your work style, and fit within your personal value system. They are also the assignments that help you to make the right contribution. But you first have to decide what your contribution should be.
Figuring out the right contribution helps you move from knowledge to action. What do you think you should contribute? In other word,how can you make a difference within your organization? Answering these questions helps you to analyze opportunities in search for the right few. When such opportunities do come along, it’s best to accept them if they suit you and how you work. It requires you to think through the requirements of a specific situation, your greatest potential contribution, and the results that must be achieved. It is through such processes that successful careers are built. They are not the products of luck or planning; they are built by people who are able to seize those opportunities that match their own strengths, work styles, and values.
ACTION POINT: Seek the opportunities that allow you to apply your strengths and match your work style and values.
[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ANAGING ONESELF: WORK RELATIONSHIPS
ORGANIZATIONS ARE BUILT ON TRUST, AND TRUST IS BUILT ON COMMUNICATION AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING.
Just as it is important for you to know your own strengths, work styles, and values, it is also important that you learn the strengths, work styles, and values of the people around you. Each person is an individual, and there are likely to be great differences between yourself and others. But such differences do not matter. What does matter is whether everyone performs. Consistent group performance can be achieved only if each person within the group is able to perform as an individual. And to help make this happen, you must build on other people’s strengths, other people’s work styles, and other people’s values.
Once you have identified your strengths, work style, and values, as well as what your contribution should be, you must then consider who else needs to know about it. Everyone who depends on you and on whom you depend needs to know this information about how you work. Since communication is a two-way process, you should feel comfortable asking your coworkers to think through and define their own strengths, work styles, and values.
ACTION POINT: List the people who depend upon your contributions and the specific contribution each person requires. List those people on whom you depend and the contributions you require from each person. Inform both groups and be sure each person is served properly, including you.
“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
Frank McCourt
“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!”
Charlotte Brontë
“What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”
Charles Bukowski
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.”
John Green
“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
Immanuel Kant
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“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
Aristotle
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
Hélder Câmara
“If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”
John Steinbeck
“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”
Mother Teresa
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”
Coco Chanel
“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
Charles Bukowski
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
Herman Melville
“Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
Victor Hugo