Personal effectiveness is the degree to which you are using your potential. There are many skills that go in to being highly effective. Some of these skills will develop naturally over time, but there are a few things you can focus on to increase your personal effectiveness, even in your early career.
What is personal effectiveness?
Put simply, personal effectiveness is how good you are at your job. It doesn’t just relate to the actual task in hand, though. It relates to how you fit in to the bigger picture, too.
The most effective people are also team players, good communicators and competent problem solvers. Less competitive people can have lower self-awareness, poor time management or lack creativity.
How do you measure personal effectiveness?
There are a few ways you can measure your personal effectiveness.
- Perform a self-assessment. Analyse your own performance and ask yourself relevant questions that will help you evaluate your effectiveness at work.
- Have a feedback session with your manager. Or, if you are a manager, have a feedback session with your team. Find out what they think you do well and the areas you could improve in.
- Use 360 degree feedback. Taking it a step further, get honest feedback from everyone around you, above and below – this might even include clients!
7 Skills For Personal Effectiveness
Once you have analysed your effectiveness, it is critical to identify where you could improve. No one is perfect! There will always be something you could do to get better. The difference between growth and stagnation is choosing to reflect and change.
Here are the seven most important skills to master in your early career for personal effectiveness. Read more about each one to find out how you can develop:
Time Management
Time management is critical in any role. Whether you are on a shop floor or the CEO, your time is a precious resource and will be in high demand. It’s vital to your performance that you manage your time effectively.
How can you do that? It all starts with prioritisation. Working out which task is most pressing is the key to using your time properly. Usually, the highest priority task is the one with the shortest deadline. This is, unfortunately, where other people’s poor time management can trip you up – you might find that you are given several ‘high priority’ jobs to do that could have been taken care of already. Remember: if everything is an emergency, then nothing is an emergency.
Communication
Your communication skills can make or break your effectiveness. You might be excellent at your specific job role, but if you struggle to communicate with your wider team it can cause friction in the workflow.
There are a few simple things you can do to ensure that all of your conversations are productive. Firstly, always actively listen to what the other person is saying. This way, they feel valued and you won’t miss any details. You can also ask relevant questions. This is particularly helpful if the other person isn’t articulating themselves very well. There is nothing wrong with asking questions with curiosity, rather than judgement, to get the information you need. Finally, always remember to keep your communication appropriate for the receiver. How you speak to your friends is different to how you might speak to your boss. Just remember to be polite and professional to get the best out of your interactions.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) relates to how you navigate the emotions of yourself and others. It takes a lot of empathy to be emotionally intelligent. When you are able to recognise different emotions in others, and treat them with understanding, it will benefit your professional relationships.
Of course, to understand emotions in others, you first need to understand them in yourself. This involves a lot of reflection and checking-in with yourself. Noticing how and why you feel different things will help you perceive the same characteristics in other people, whether they are your peers, direct reports or leaders. In doing so, you can strengthen your relationships and become a more effective member of the team.
Goal Setting
Goal setting can increase your effectiveness by giving you a target to work towards. Think about it, with no goals, what are you striving to achieve? A lack of goals can result in wasted time, misused resources and no sense of purpose.
In order to boost your personal effectiveness, you need to set goals. You could do this by yourself or with your manager at a performance review. This way, their expectations of you are clear and you have defined targets to work to. This ensures that your efforts have a sense of direction, helping you be more effective.
Problem Solving
Problems happen – it’s a fact of life. How you respond to and overcome those problems is what sets you apart. If you’re the sort of person who panics at the first sign of trouble, you’re not being the most effective you could be.
Improving your problem-solving skills can make you a more agile employee. In fact, good problem solving involves a lot of the skills we have already talked about. Communication, time management and creativity are all important to solving problems effectively. You also need to be able to analyse an issue to get to the root cause and think critically about why it happened, how to overcome it and how to prevent it from happening again. This way, you are increasing your effectiveness.
Personal Development
Personal development is the quest to constantly improve. By regularly checking your skills and finding ways to grow, you are continuously learning and getting better. This is so important to your effectiveness.
To kickstart your personal development in your early career, have regular check-ins with your manager. You can get honest feedback and support as you navigate your strengths and skill gaps. Once you know the areas you would like to improve, you can discuss solutions. It might be that they can support you or, better still, enrol you in a training programme. Personal development requires a great deal of reflection and self-awareness, so it’s important to be honest about what you can do and what you want to achieve. When you embark on a journey of growth, you naturally become more effective.
Creativity
Creativity is not an asset to be overlooked, particularly when it comes to personal effectiveness. Creative thinking can help you save time and resources by finding a new or different way to approach a situation.
The key thing to remember is that if you have an idea and it doesn’t work – that’s okay. Experimentation is the key to innovation. Believe in your own ability to solve problems and think outside of the box. Allocate some time to allow you to come up with new ideas and ask “what if?” more. This will help you get more imaginative with your thinking and ultimately, improve your personal effectiveness.
How Alchemist Can Help Build Personal Effectiveness
If you’re managing young talent and want to develop their skills to increase personal effectiveness, an early careers learning programme might be the answer. Built to develop these seven skills – and others such as managing stress, confidence and accountability – your early talent can begin to nurture their capabilities to create a highly effective team. Speak to an Alchemist today to learn more about our Early Careers programmes: