Understanding Yourself in the Workplace

by Jackie Damrau, Contributing Editor

How many of us have been caught off-guard by performance evaluations, by 360 reviews, or by someone's perceptions of who we think we are? In Leilani Poland's article "The Value of Understanding Self in the Workplace," which appeared in The Resource Connection's e-newsletter (www.resourceconnection.com), she lists six steps to understanding yourself. These six steps are awareness, discovery, insight, choice work, action plan, and evaluation.

This review highlights Poland's article. I encourage you to visit the website and download the full article, which is worth reading every so often. Do a self-evaluation to ensure that you understand your strengths and weaknesses.

First, the article asks you how aware you are of your strengths and your weaknesses. Poland offers the following four questions to reflect upon before she walks you through the six steps:

• What are your primary strengths and most significant weaknesses at work?
• What feedback, if any, have you repeatedly been given that might indicate an "unrecognized or ignored weakness" needing attention?
• What tools or assessments have you taken over the past five years that offered feedback about your strengths and weaknesses?
• What patterns have emerged about your strengths and weaknesses based upon feedback you have received repeatedly from others as well as any assessments taken?

Poland feels that when you answer these four questions, you will have a better idea about yourself that will then help you make better career choices. She says: "The biggest value of knowing your self, both the good and the bad, is the ability to manage self and still achieve all that you want to achieve in your career. There are no perfect people." This is very true.

Let's take a brief look at Poland's six steps and the tips that she gives in doing our own self-evaluation.

Step 1. Awareness. Think of awareness as a journey that begins with openly and willingly seeing and hearing things about yourself, your work performance, or your behavior. To effectively build our awareness, we should not be offended by what we hear or see, but reflect upon it for 24–48 hours before we either reject it or accept it.

Step 2: Discovery. This step involves "seeking out as much information and feedback about yourself from as many different directions and people as possible." Poland suggests 1) using feedback from others, and 2) using learning tools, profiles, and assessments for your self-discovery.

When considering option 1, you will need to prepare to hear the favorable, unfavorable, positive, and negative things that people will tell you. You might want to ask four people that know you very well for their honest feedback in a one-on-one discussion. Before you meet with these four people, first ask yourself:

• How do I think others see my strengths and my weaknesses, at this time?
• Is there anything I think I might hear that would surprise me or be most difficult for me to accept?
• How will I handle difficult, hard to hear feedback?

Should you choose option 2, ensure that the tools, profiles, and assessments bear some validity and that the credentials of the person or source are reputable. The Internet has many self-assessments that may or may not be accurate.

Step 3: Insight. Personal insight helps you begin to understand your own behavioral patterns. Poland encourages you to answer these questions about yourself:

• Top 3: What strengths and weaknesses have you learned about yourself that you already knew?
• New: What new strengths and weaknesses have you identified?
• Utilized: How have you successfully utilized your strengths within your career to date?
• Improvement: How successful have you been at improving your acknowledged weaknesses to date?
• Learned: What have you learned about yourself that is most difficult to acknowledge or believe? How does this impact your career/work performance?
• Road Block: What strength or weakness is currently creating a roadblock, thus preventing you from achieving what you want in your career?

Step 4: Choice Work. You now have tough decisions based on your findings in the last three steps. Where you will invest your time and what will you address first about your behavior. Choose one issue to address and prepare an action plan (Step 5) to tackle that one issue, and then begin on the next one.

Step 5: Action Plan. In this section, Poland cited the Chinese proverb "The palest ink is better than the best memory." This proverb emphasizes the need to create a written action plan to help you address the one issue chosen in step 4. Poland provides a 4-page "Development Plan for Understanding Self" that I encourage you to download from www.resourceconnection.com.

Step 6: Evaluation/Feedback. The last step involves asking for feedback from the same four people that you used in step 2. You will also want to do your own self-evaluation to determine if you have improved upon your weaknesses.

Our weaknesses will never become our strengths, but we can improve upon our weaknesses by knowing they exist.