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PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EFFECTIVENESS SELF AUDIT
This module will look at these 3 areas:
(a) A look at ineffective habits
(b) Identifying things that make you happy; things that are challenging; and areas for development
(c) The level of control you have over your challenges
One way of assessing your current effectiveness is through this checklist. If you can tick more than 10 of these boxes, you may well be experiencing some temporary challenges to your effectiveness. Look at the boxes you tick and see whether the impact is being felt largely by you as an individual physically, in your working life, or in other areas of your life. This can help you decide where to target future development.
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Self-assessment activity 1 of 3: Ineffectiveness self-assessment checklist Peter Fuda (Fuda, 2014) has identified a set of symptoms and habits of personal ineffectiveness. Which ones do you think are illustrative of you at this time? o Feeling like a victim o Feeling flat, lacking vitality o Externalising failures, blaming others o Complaining about being overworked, o Tense, stressed or moody o Reacting to what’s urgent, not attending to what’s important o Doing everything as if it all mattered equally o Busy but no real sense of achievement of satisfaction o Having the same thoughts repeatedly o Waking in the middle of the night with things on your mind o Feeling like technology is running your life o Using email to manage tasks o Feeling like your diary is out of control o Not feeling on top of your to-do list o Being the go-to person, the fixer o Personally, exhausted while subordinates are under utilised o Going from meeting to meeting, doing the real work after hours o Little time for thinking and planning o Experiencing regular interruptions o Taking calls and/or checking emails while in meetings o Being physically present in meetings but mentally absent o Responding to emails as they come in o Always seeming to be in a hurry o ‘Me time’ is always the first to go o Accumulating excess annual leave o Inability to relax, bored when not working o Feeling disconnected from the most important relationships o Not learning and growing o Poor quality sleep, too little sleep or waking tired o Inadequate exercise o Poor diet o Health issues |
Having identified that perhaps your sense of effectiveness may be less than it has been previously, the following activity may help you identify more clearly what the issues are and ways in which you can begin to address them.
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Self-assessment activity 2 of 3: Questions to identify happiness, challenges and development This activity can help you to self-audit, or if done with someone else, can be a useful foundation for identifying current difficulties and areas for development. Please set aside some time and space where you can work through this activity without distractions. Focusing on yourself for maybe half an hour is the first step to improving the situation. Answer the following five questions as fully and honestly as you can. You can write down your answers or speak them into a voice recorder. Nobody needs to know what you say except you.
Question 1: What do you really want out of your life that is realistically within your grasp? Think about dreams you have already met, dreams that are still outstanding that you would like to realise, and dreams that you are happy to not meet. Question 2: What values drive you?
d. List your values and reflect on how far you think they can be realised in your usual working day.
Question 3: What do you spend most of your time doing? Imagine a typical week which has 168 hours in it. What percentage of the time do you spend…
How many of these hours would you say you spend happily and how many are frustrating, or difficult? Question 4: If you were going to start your dream job in 3 months’ time, how would you spend the rest of your time during your notice period (personal and professional)?
This activity really helps us to identify what is making us feel good and what is not. Whilst many of us are not in a position to stop working, for example, we can begin to think about the time we allocate to the different parts of our lives, and how that might change. Question 5: Finally, ask friends, family and close colleagues for their views.
They might not always know the full answers, but their views can be useful to add to your own. |
After considering these questions and your answers to them you will hopefully have a little more insight into how effective you are currently feeling, what is important to you and where you might want to focus your efforts to further develop.
Our effectiveness rises and falls across our lives, across a year, and even within a week. That is natural, but when we feel that it has been below the usual rate for some time, we can benefit from attending to it. We hope that the rest of the module will help you to do that.
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Self-assessment activity 3 of 3: Control / Influence / Adapt When considering the challenges that you face, particularly if you are overwhelmed, it is important to recognise that your energy is not limitless. Some challenges could be commanding a lot of your energy when you are never really going to make progress. HR specialist Neil Thompson and social-work lecturer Sue Thompson in their 2008 book The Critically Reflective Practitioner created an approach to allow you to consider how to respond to the challenges you face, called the Control-Influence-Adapt model.
Control – what can be controlled in this situation? Influence – where can I influence in this situation? Adapt – where do I have to accept and adapt this situation?
Look at your list of challenges from the previous activity and consider what aspects of them you can control, what can be influenced and where you need to accept and adapt. |
Read more here: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/overwhelmed-work.htm
Goals
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Activity 1 of 1: Finally, having identified where you feel you could develop your effectiveness, it is useful to draw up a list of goals. These help us to see what we want to get out of life, personally and professionally. Before you start identifying specific goals, look back at your values from question 2. Values are the basis of how we approach our lives. They can help you define and refine your goals. You might like to give some extra definition to the values you listed in question 2 and why they are important to you. Some simple examples are:
For example. if career advancement is important to you, start by defining what that advancement looks like. Then ask yourself, are there any areas of your current working practice that can be amended to fit that value more appropriately? What will you keep or stop doing and what might you add or change? |
When feeling stressed or unhappy at work, it is often as a result of our values being compromised. In a pressured environment it may not be possible to please every single person all the time, so think about whom you can best help and where that choice most accords with your values.
Often when people see their work as ‘who they are’ and not ‘what they do’ they have strong values which integrate both the professional and the personal. These are also the kinds of people who want to give more than is humanly possible and who may wish to review their personal and professional effectiveness techniques from time to time.
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Self-audit Reflection: Looking at your responses to the exercises above:
This can be done individually or in small groups. If in small groups, please share thoughts. |