If you're reading blogs from headhunters and recruiters (and are neither), I would think it's safe to assume that you're a person who's serious about your career. Someone who thinks carefully and strategically about managing where you're heading in your professional life.
Well, here's something that could be useful in self-management. When evaluating yourself, either at your particular job or where you are in your career, many people tend to focus on the negative - weak areas where you need improvement. Because many people place expectations on themselves to be good in all areas of their job/industry, people are missing out on a great opportunity of truly improving themselves - Not by trying to raise their level of competency in a weak area, but by playing to their strengths and really using it to leverage themselves into a better position. Sure, Michael Jordan gave it a go with baseball, but we all know where his strengths lie - and he played up to them extremely well.
In the HBR article "How to Play to Your Strengths", researchers offer the Reflected Best Self (RSB) exercise to help focus on positive evaluation, enabling you to "tap into talents you may or may not be aware of and so increase your career potential." By doing this, you can gain a clearer direction of where you want to go in the next step or phase of your career, whether it's at your current job or for the next one.
Here's the exercise:
- Talk to family, friends, colleagues - the key is a variety of people both inside and outside work - and ask them to comment on what your strengths are and for specific examples of when your strengths were beneficial and meaningful
- Look for patterns and common themes in the feedback, organize them to gain a clear picture of your strengths
- Write a self-portrait describing and summarizing all the information you've discovered
- Design or redesign your personal job description to build on what you're good at
Action Point:
Decide whether you want to discover for yourself
who you are at the top of your game or if you'd rather leave it to a
scheduled employee review.
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