Managing Oneself is a guide to finding success in your career. Peter Drucker asserts that through careful self-management, you can build a career where you thrive and feel rewarded. Drucker likens managing yourself to taking responsibility for yourself and your own career development so that you can grow and achieve throughout your entire working life.
Other Views of Self-Management
Rather than giving a precise definition of what self-management is, Drucker slowly reveals his concept of self-management throughout his book.
Other authors have offered a more concise view of the concept of self-management, sometimes drawing on Drucker’s ideas. For instance, in The First 90 Days, a guide to succeeding in your new job, author Michael D. Watkins outlines two pillars of self-management. The first is to create habits that will ensure your success, such as blocking off time to pursue your medium-term and long-term goals. The second pillar is to build yourself a support system, such as a network of people whose advice you know you can trust.
In this guide, we’ll cover two of Drucker’s key principles of self-management: working from your strengths and setting—and achieving—impressive targets to make yourself stand out.
Drucker suggests that self-management begins with self-reflection, which helps you get to know yourself better. The most important quality that self-reflection helps you discover is your strengths.
Drucker states that discovering your strengths is necessary to success because working on your strengths is the most efficient, and thus best, way to make yourself stand out and advance your career. It doesn’t take much effort to improve something you have a natural ability in, and this effort could turn you into an exceptional performer. Conversely, it would take a good deal of effort to work on areas in which you’re less skilled, and the results would be less impressive—taking you from poor to mediocre.
The Importance of Favoring Your Strengths
Drucker’s advice to work on the things you’re already good at may seem counterintuitive because you may assume that it’s important to focus on improving areas of weakness. However other authors have echoed this idea.
For example, Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, suggests that it’s important to feel like you’re competent at your work, which can stem from choosing to do what you’re good at: in other words, playing to your strengths. Competence is important because it’s a pillar of the principle of self-determination, which is the intrinsic motivation you feel to perform well. In turn, self-determination brings a sense of job satisfaction. Therefore, if you play to your strengths and thus feel like you’re competent at your job, your sense of job satisfaction will naturally increase.
To work from your strengths, you must first identify them. Drucker outlines a strength identification method that we’ll call the future predictions technique. He asks you to write down a prediction of what you think will happen every time you’re at a significant crossroads in your professional life and have to decide on a course of action. At the end of each prediction’s time period, go back and evaluate how accurate your assumptions were. Drucker’s suggested time window for predictions is nine to 12 months.
How Does the Future Predictions Technique Work?
Drucker doesn’t explain exactly why he believes this technique to be so successful at predicting your areas of strength. To link the technique to your strengths, when you’re reflecting on the last nine to 12 months, frame your analysis around what went well and what didn’t go so well. Then, use this to infer your strengths, presuming that your successes were thanks to your strengths.
Now that you know your strengths, you’re ready to answer the question, “How can I excel in my current role?” Drucker says that you excel by making a notable difference to your workplace, using your strengths. Do this by setting a work-related target and then working backward to make a step-by-step plan for achieving it. Achieving these targets will help you proactively advance your career, which is an important aspect of self-management.
Setting SMART Targets
Drucker’s advice on targets is similar to the “SMART” target model outlined by George Doran. Doran said that every target should be:
Specific: The target should clearly identify a desired outcome.
Measurable: The results should be easily measurable.
Assignable: The tasks needed to achieve the target should be assigned to specific people.
Realistic: The target should be achievable within the current circumstances.
Time-bound: There should be a clear timeline for all steps of the target.
Doran found that adding “SMART” aspects to targets makes it more likely that you’ll achieve them.
Doran’s technique works for targets set by anyone for anyone, as they’re assignable. On the other hand, Drucker is more interested in ambitious targets that you set only for yourself—in other words, the type of targets that keep you focused on your own path and career advancement.
Managing Oneself discusses how to take charge of your career to maneuver yourself into your ideal job. Peter Drucker, the author of many works on management theory, outlines the most important factors that he believes will help you succeed in your career efficiently. He asks that you manage yourself and take actions now that will lead to a flourishing career in the future.
Drucker, who died in 2005, is referred to as the founder of modern management. A global leader in management theory and practice for over 60 years, he wrote 39 books and countless articles, including more than 30 essays in the Harvard Business Review. He also coined the term “knowledge worker,” and he considered the measurement and increase of the productivity of knowledge workers to be the next great challenge for managers.
Born in Austria, Drucker received a doctoral degree in Frankfurt and worked as a reporter in Germany before fleeing to England upon Hitler’s rise to power. He moved to the U.S. in 1937, later becoming a citizen, and taught at New York University and Claremont Graduate University, among other institutions.
In 1939, he published his first book, The End of Economic Man, an examination of totalitarianism that influenced Winston Churchill. He began writing about management with Concept of the Corporation in 1946, about his study of General Motors (GM). He followed up with The Practice of Management (1954), Managing for Results (1964), Drucker on Management (1971), and many more works, including his most famous book The Effective Executive (1966). He continued to publish until the early 2000s.
President George W. Bush awarded Drucker the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 for his contributions to management theory. He also received a medal for services to the Republic of Austria, and Japan made him a member of the Order of the Sacred Treasure, an award the emperor gives to significant contributors to an important field. Drucker’s obituary in the New York Times noted that his ideas on management were so influential that a comment from him could change the way top corporate leaders operated.
Publisher: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2008.
This summary is based on the 2008 version of Managing Oneself. The piece was originally published as an article in 1999, which was rerun in the Harvard Business Review in 2005. It was then published as a book in the Harvard Business Review Classics series.
Many of Drucker’s other works focus on improving management techniques. This makes Managing Oneself an unusual addition to the canon of Drucker’s work as in this work, he zooms out to look at the notion of careers as a whole. He also gives advice that’s applicable to all employees, regardless of where they appear on the management hierarchy.
Drucker had two significant intellectual influences in his life. The first was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a friend of his father. Schumpeter educated Drucker about innovation and entrepreneurship, themes which he incorporated into his theories.
The second influence was the English economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Drucker heard give a lecture in Cambridge in 1934. Keynes’s influence on Drucker wasn’t as intentional, as he pushed Drucker to take a view on management starkly different from his own: “I suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behavior of commodities, while I was interested in the behavior of people," Drucker later wrote. Drucker therefore emphasized the role of the employee in determining the success of a business and asserted that workers are assets, not liabilities.
During Drucker’s most active period from the 1950s to the 1970s, many other books on management were more technical and subject-specific, giving them a smaller audience. In contrast, Drucker aimed to appeal to managers in any industry and any company. Although some of his works today seem to be stating the obvious, he was one of the first to share such ideas, which have been described as immortal.
In the 1990s, when Drucker wrote Managing Oneself, career advice guides were beginning to recognize that careers were flexible and that individuals may pursue several careers across a lifetime. Managing Oneself tapped into this zeitgeist by offering a long-term perspective on careers and giving advice on how to construct a second career before your first is even finished.
Managing Oneself was influential enough that, as noted, it appeared in a 2008 Classics Series of the Harvard Business Review, a collection of “seminal pieces” covering topics related to management, leadership, and life.
Reviews praised Drucker’s minimalist approach, as his advice distills the entirety of a career into just 55 pages. Other positive reviewers found Drucker’s structured and forward-looking approach to careers thought-provoking. Some said that the book should be required reading in the workplace, and one reviewer noted that, “If done correctly, this is the LAST ‘self-help’ book you'll ever have to buy.”
However, other reviews noted that the piece lacked practical techniques to help the reader consistently apply Drucker’s advice to their own life. Additionally, some readers said the advice given is obvious and contains many tropes of career guides.
Throughout the book, Drucker poses a series of open-ended questions to stimulate the reader into thinking about their own career aspirations, such as, “How do I learn?” He also cites several examples, some of which are taken from his own career. This gives credence to his ideas and helps us to translate them into real life. In one instance, he outlines the importance of having compatible values with your workplace by explaining why he quit his successful job during the Great Depression: because it wasn’t aligned with his values.
The book is split into several sections, each covering a different aspect of self-management. This adds a smooth flow to the book, making it easy to read and absorb the information. However, some of the sections jump between one topic and another, and they aren’t listed in order of importance, which makes the logic occasionally challenging to follow.
In this guide, we’ve explained Drucker’s practical advice and his steps on how to find a career in which you can thrive. We’ve also combined sections to create chapters, grouping together similar themes of advice.
Additionally, we’ve changed the order of some sections for improved clarity: For example, Drucker first discusses reflecting on your strengths, then your learning style, then, lastly, your work values. However, he describes working in a job with incompatible values as condemning a worker to “frustration and nonperformance,” suggesting that values are central to managing yourself. We therefore brought the section on values forward to come just after finding your strengths.
Furthermore, we’ve added commentary highlighting instances in which Drucker leaves out important details, such as not providing a thorough definition of what self-reflection is despite having a whole section on the topic. Our commentary also gives detailed instructions on how to apply Drucker’s advice, comparing it to approaches found in other career and management guides.
Managing Oneself is a guide to finding success in your career. Peter Drucker provides a template of the necessary steps to build a career where you thrive and feel rewarded, complete with self-reflection exercises to apply his ideas to your career.
In this guide, we’ll explore Drucker’s ideas on how to manage yourself. We’ll begin by discussing why self-management is necessary. We’ll then look at the steps of self-reflection Drucker recommends, as well as how to put this self-reflection into action. Finally, we’ll look at Drucker’s notion of a second career, which is a new career starting around the midpoint of your working life.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss what self-management is and why it’s a practice that Drucker believes you should engage in.
According to Drucker, managing yourself is taking responsibility for yourself and your career development so that you can grow and learn throughout your working life. In other words, it means taking the initiative to develop your skills so that you maximize your chances of having a successful career.
When managing yourself, Drucker notes that it’s helpful to think of yourself as your own boss, making decisions about your future. These decisions could be pursuing additional training courses to bolster your CV or improving your social skills to engage more positively with your colleagues.
Other Views of Self-Management
Rather than giving a precise definition of what self-management is, Drucker slowly reveals his concepts of self-management throughout his book. Other authors have offered more of a concise definition of self-management, sometimes drawing on Drucker’s ideas.
For instance, in The First 90 Days, a guide to succeeding in your new job, author Michael D. Watkins outlines two pillars of self-management. The first is to create habits that will ensure your success, such as blocking off time to pursue your medium-term and long-term goals. The second is to build yourself a support system, such as a network of people whose advice you know you can trust.
Other authors also add an emotional component to self-management. In Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Travis Bradbury defines self-management as the ability to use self-awareness to manage your emotions. This means acting on rational thoughts to avoid being controlled by emotion and using positive self-talk. Bradbury also ties self-management to support systems, encouraging you to publicize your goals so that others can hold you accountable and support you.
Drucker believes self-management is necessary because our working lives have changed drastically. We are now in the era of the “knowledge worker,” which has altered the kind of work we do.
Knowledge working means that now we can make choices about our working lives, and Drucker asserts that making good choices is necessary to having a successful career. As a knowledge worker, you can, for instance, choose where you work, and for how long you work there, unlike in the past, when workers had one career path for life. As you are likely to be the only constant factor throughout your career, you must take responsibility for your career path by learning to manage yourself.
What Is a Knowledge Worker?
Drucker briefly discusses the concept of being a knowledge worker and the choices this involves, but he doesn’t give a definition of the term. He actually coined the term “knowledge worker” in his book The Effective Executive, in which he defined it as someone whose chief professional asset is their knowledge. This contrasts with a role in which your chief asset may be your physical strength or your deftness when operating machinery.
Examples of knowledge workers include programmers, lawyers, academics, and architects. As developed economies move away from production-related industries and towards service industries like technology, marketing, and research, knowledge worker roles are increasingly common.
In this chapter, Drucker explains the necessity of self-management to take responsibility for yourself and direct your career. In this exercise, you’ll identify a self-managed person and explore how to emulate them to get started on your path to self-management.
Describe someone who you think embodies Drucker’s notions of self-management. This could be someone from your personal or professional life or a famous person.
List three to five qualities that this person has that make them good at self-management, with an example of a time when they demonstrated each of those qualities.
Identify the quality from your above list that would most help you to manage yourself. How could you start to adopt this quality in your life?
So far, we’ve explored Drucker’s idea of what managing yourself is and why it’s necessary. Next, we’ll explore how you can begin to manage yourself. Drucker’s first step in self-management is self-reflection, a process that helps you get to know yourself better.
Knowing yourself is part of the process of taking responsibility for yourself and will help you to advance in your career. Drucker says that once you have greater self-knowledge, you can and must actively seek out situations where you’ll thrive.
What Is Self-Reflection?
Despite discussing it extensively, Drucker doesn’t fully define what self-reflection is. In this guide, we define self-reflection as looking inwards to discover things about yourself that are hidden from your conscious mind. This could include any biases, your habits, and your deeper emotions.
Many writers recommend self-reflection and outline the benefits it has beyond advancing your career. For instance, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey suggests self-reflection as the starting point to challenging your perspective and taking on the perspectives of others, instead of dismissing them out of hand.
The Harvard Business Review also published data) to support the effectiveness of self-reflection. According to researchers, employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting on what they learned performed 23% better after 10 days.
In this chapter, we’ll go over the stages of self-reflection that Drucker says lead to self-management, which include thinking about your strengths, your values, and how you learn.
The first stage of self-reflection is thinking about your strengths. Drucker states that this is necessary to success because working on your strengths is the most efficient, and thus best, way to make yourself stand out and advance your career. It doesn’t take much effort to improve something you have a natural ability in, and this effort could turn you into an exceptional performer. Conversely, it would take a good deal of effort to work on areas in which you’re less skilled, and the results would be less impressive—taking you from poor to mediocre.
For example, if you’re already disposed to public speaking, you just need to polish these skills to be a great presenter, and this could open many doors for you. On the other hand, if you’re terrible with spreadsheets, it would take a long time to learn how to get better, and that effort would translate into only a moderate level of proficiency.
The Importance of Working From Your Strengths
Drucker’s advice to work on the things you’re already good at may seem counterintuitive, because you might assume that it’s important to focus on improving areas of weakness. However, Drucker is adamant that finessing your strengths is the way forward, and other authors have echoed this idea.
Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, suggests that it’s important to feel like you’re competent at your work, which is possible if you play to your strengths and choose to do what you’re good at. Competence is important because it’s a pillar of the principle of self-determination, or the intrinsic motivation to perform well. In turn, self-determination brings a sense of job satisfaction. Therefore, if you play to your strengths and thus feel like you’re competent at your job, your sense of job satisfaction will naturally increase.
Drucker outlines a method to identify your strengths that we’ll call the future predictions technique. He asks you to write down a prediction of what you think will happen every time you’re at a significant crossroads in your professional life and have to decide on a course of action. At the end of each prediction’s time period, go back and evaluate how accurate your assumptions were. Drucker’s suggested time window for predictions is nine to 12 months.
How Does the Future Predictions Technique Work?
Drucker doesn’t explain exactly why he believes this technique to be so successful at predicting your areas of strength. To link the technique to your strengths, when you’re reflecting on the last nine to 12 months, frame your analysis around what went well and what didn’t go so well. Then use this to infer your strengths, presuming that your successes were thanks to your strengths.
- For example, if over the last year, you took control of your company’s social media accounts and doubled the number of followers, you can conclude that social media account management is one of your strengths.
When you’ve used the future predictions technique a few times, you should be able to identify your most promising strengths. Drucker’s next step is to act on this information by positioning yourself in situations where you work from your strengths, preferably in a company and role where these strengths are a core part of your daily work. This will help others to notice you, which may in turn lead to you advancing up the career ladder.
He also says that it’s necessary to spend some time and effort developing your natural talents to become extremely proficient, turning you into a star player.
Developing Your Strengths
A central lesson of Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You is to adopt the attitude of a craftsman and to hone your skills, which is similar to Drucker’s idea of working from and developing your strengths. Newport recommends that you consciously work on your skills, pushing yourself to regularly solve work-related problems so that you become quicker and more competent. He underlines that this will help boost your intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction, turning a job you’re good at into a job you excel in and that you like.
It’s possible to combine both Drucker’s and Newport’s advice to achieve career success. You could begin by discovering your strengths using Drucker’s future predictions technique and then positioning yourself in situations where you’ll use those strengths. Then, adopt Newport’s craftsman attitude to hone your skills, which will have the dual benefits of increased job satisfaction and the possibility of career advancement.
Now that you’ve identified your strengths, the next step is to think about your personal values. Drucker says that this is essential because your values are connected to your motivation to succeed in your career. If you work in an organization with the same values as you, you’ll naturally want to work hard, which will help you advance.
According to Drucker, your values in a work context are the way you operate and the goals you strive for. On an organizational level, this concept of values could translate to what we now call a company’s culture. Different examples of values are how much oversight the company believes it’s necessary for managers to have or how open the organization is to adopting new ideas.
How to Identify Your Values
Drucker talks about work and organizational values in a general sense, but he doesn’t give a detailed guide to how to identify your values.
Brené Brown outlines a process of identifying values in her book Dare to Lead. She suggests that your values are ideals that seem so much a part of you that they’re central to your identity (or, in the case of a company, your organizational identity). According to Brown, you identify your values by recalling moments where you believe you acted with integrity and other moments where you had to do something that felt wrong. These will reveal your internal values system.
- Teamwork is an example of a workplace value. If you value teamwork, a time you acted with integrity might be when you stayed late to help a colleague finish her presentation. Conversely, acting without integrity could be taking credit for a colleague’s contribution to a project.
Just as with your strengths, try to work for companies that have values matching your own. Even if you have a role using your strengths, Drucker states that working somewhere with different values to your own will ultimately lead to failure because if you’re not doing what you believe to be right, you'll eventually lose motivation.
For example, you might feel you do your best work using your strength of project management in a collaborative environment, working with people from many disciplines to deliver a project. However, perhaps you work for a company that values projects produced by homogenous teams of “product developers,” “sales,” “marketing,” and so on. The company thinks this motivates each team to achieve, as everyone is responsible for their own success. If you try to manage projects in these conditions, you may excel at the technical side of your job, but you’ll eventually start to underperform because the company’s values contradict your own.
Drucker says that a sign that the company’s values are incompatible with yours is that you gradually become unhappy within yourself, questioning why you give your time and effort to an organization whose principles you question.
How to Find a Job With Compatible Values
Drucker underlines the importance of finding a job with similar values to your own, but he doesn’t discuss how to do this. Judging a company’s values can be difficult, especially when you don’t have firsthand experience of working for them.
Glassdoor is a site where employees can anonymously evaluate the companies they work for. The site lays out a plan to help job seekers to first identify their values and then find a compatible employer, suggesting:
Asking family and friends about their jobs and their organization’s values
Researching careers you’re interested in and applying to similar open positions
Asking about company values during the interview process
Now that we’ve covered reflecting on your strengths and values, Drucker’s next step of managing yourself is to think about how you learn. This is important because you can only achieve outstanding results if you follow the learning style that suits you best.
Drucker believes that your learning style is part of your personality, set from a young age. As with your strengths, your effort is best spent identifying your learning style and then favoring that style so that you can learn the necessary information more efficiently.
How Do We Learn?
Drucker doesn’t discuss in depth what a learning style is. It’s generally defined as the way that students best absorb and process information. Drucker implies that there are only two learning styles—readers and listeners—but Fleming and Mills (1992))/reference/ReferencesPapers.aspx?ReferenceID=1809935) outlined the VARK model of learning styles, with Visual, Aural, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic learning options, as well as multimodal options for people who use a blend of styles.
However, the authors of Make It Stick refute the idea that each person has a predetermined learning style at all, as Drucker suggests. The authors say this belief hinders learning and, although you may have a preferred learning style, you actually learn best when information is presented in a style complementary to the subject matter. Therefore, you may be better off taking a nuanced approach, seeking out different kinds of materials to support the learning required for your job.
- This might mean, for example, seeking visual information to understand data about the company’s performance, but asking your boss to explain aloud why one style of client relationship management is preferable.
Drucker says that self-reflection is the first step towards self-management. In this exercise, you’ll apply his techniques of self-reflection and start thinking about your strengths and values.
Looking back on the last 12 months, identify an achievement that came from working from one of your strengths. How did this strength help you to succeed?
Which two to three values do you consider to be the most important in your work life? Examples of commonly held work values are accountability, balance, creativity, honesty, independence, and reliability.
What two to three values does your company expect you to show? These can be values stated in materials such as a company handbook or values that you infer from feedback from your manager.
Describe one instance where your values aligned or clashed with your company’s values. What do you think this experience says about your fit with your current position?
In the previous chapter, we discussed various elements of self-reflection that Drucker recommends to manage yourself so that you learn who you are and what your personal recipe for career success is. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to put that advice into action.
Drucker outlines two suggestions: First, we’ll explore his ideas on setting targets. Then, we’ll discuss his ideas on managing relationships with people in your working life.
Once you’ve thoroughly worked through the stages of self-reflection, you should have identified what your strengths are and the kind of job where you produce excellent work. Drucker recommends that you then answer the question, “How can I excel in my current role?”
You excel by making a notable difference to your workplace using your strengths and other kinds of self-knowledge. Do this by setting a work-related target and then working backward to make a step-by-step plan for achieving it.
Drucker gives several target-setting recommendations, including:
An example of such a target would be the manager of a team at a call center deciding to reduce the time callers spend waiting to speak to an agent by 15% within a year. This manager would work backward from 12 months away to figure out how to achieve this goal, noting that they’ll need to check that the call center agents have access to the software they need to handle calls and that they’re motivated to help people efficiently. These two factors would dictate the manager’s top priorities for the forthcoming months.
Setting SMART Targets
Drucker’s advice on targets and his specific ideas around what kind of target to set are similar to the “SMART” target model outlined by George Doran. Doran said that every target should be:
Specific: The target should clearly identify a desired outcome.
Measurable: The results should be easily measurable.
Assignable: The tasks needed to achieve the target should be assigned to specific people.
Realistic: The target should be achievable within the current circumstances.
Time-bound: There should be a clear timeline for all steps of the target.
Doran found that adding the “SMART” aspects to the targets made it more likely that the target would be achieved.
The SMART target method and Drucker’s guide for target setting both agree that targets should be specific, measurable, and time-bound. However, the techniques differ in that Doran’s SMART targets technique works for targets set by anyone for anyone, as they are assignable, whereas Drucker’s targets are ones that you set for yourself. Moreover, the SMART target technique calls for a realistic target, whereas Drucker incites you to push yourself to achieve an ambitious goal, not necessarily considering how feasible it might be. He may justify this by saying that the target is achievable if you’re working from your strengths.
Now that we’ve discussed one part of Drucker’s plan to put self-reflection into action, we’ll analyze the other, which concerns managing your professional relationships.
Managing your professional relationships is an essential component of building trust with others, according to Drucker. Trust gives you credibility, creating a pool of people who know your skills and track record. Another reason why trust is important is that most jobs involve working with other people in some capacity, so if you can’t foster trust and collaborate well, it’ll hinder your ability to advance.
Trusting Your Colleagues
Author Simon Sinek would agree with Drucker on the importance of trust between colleagues, and he outlines a further reason why trust is important in his book The Infinite Game. Sinek argues that trust between colleagues is a core component of workplace psychological safety. This allows you to open up to your colleagues and your boss (and vice versa) if you need help or if you made a mistake, which you may be afraid to do if you don’t trust those around you.
A sense of trust in the workplace therefore leads to people catching and rectifying problems early on, rather than fearful employees sweeping potential issues under the rug until they become difficult to solve.
Drucker gives a strategy to build trust and improve the quality of your working relationships. Just as you now know your own preferences, you must recognize that everyone you work with has their own strengths and values—Drucker recommends that you find out what those are. You do this by communicating with them.
He says to begin by describing the results of your self-reflection to your colleagues and then asking them to tell you the same information about themselves. You must also observe your colleagues closely to gain as much information about them as possible. This allows you to understand each other and work together more effectively, complementing each others’ preferences. Drucker’s advice applies up and down the hierarchy, helping you to manage your managers. For example, you might start communicating with them in a style that suits them.
How to Get to Know Your Colleagues
Drucker is clear on the benefits of sharing the insights of your self-reflection with your colleagues and manager and on getting them to do likewise, but he doesn’t give an exact template for how these conversations should take place. This raises several problems: A discussion about your own strengths and values would possibly make for some stilted water cooler chat, and it’s hard to know how to encourage your colleagues to invest equally in this process.
Forbes gives some more concrete suggestions of how to get to know your colleagues’ working style. They recommend asking your colleagues about the challenges they face and offering to assist them. This links to another step they suggest: to help your colleagues so they feel obliged to help you in turn. They also advise you to explain the benefits of effective collaboration to your colleagues, such as the possibility of a bonus, to open the gateway towards accommodating each other.
Drucker gives two main steps to apply the knowledge gathered from self-reflection to your career. In these exercises, you’ll see how to apply the information gathered from your self-reflection to your career so that you can advance and receive recognition from those around you.
What target could you set that would play to the strengths you identified during self-reflection and make a difference to your workplace? Explain how your target fits these criteria.
What are the first three steps you should take to achieve this target?
Now, think of a person that you collaborate closely with in your professional life. What is their top work strength? What would you say is their top work value?
What steps could you take to better accommodate this person’s strengths and work values?
The last concept Drucker outlines is that of your second career, which is a change you initiate around the midpoint in your working life. This could be a complete switch in careers or a gradual transition towards something more suited to you. Drucker states that those who have a successful second career are the natural leaders who’ve mastered the principles of self-management.
The Second Career and “The Great Resignation”
Drucker’s concept of the second career is one that played out in “The Great Resignation,” a movement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. According to surveys from 2021, 50% of the U.S. workforce wanted to make a career change, and at the peak of this trend, approximately four million Americans quit their jobs every month.
While some of these people cited working conditions such as greater flexibility in other positions as the main reason why they quit, 61% of employees who quit said that a newly-gained industry-recognized credential was part of the reason they got a new job. This indicates that they were switching careers or looking for a more advanced position within the same field, both of which come under Drucker’s definition of a second career.
The same survey found that 78% of those who changed their jobs were happier in their new role, which upholds Drucker’s assertion that a second career is generally a better fit than your first.
Drucker says that there are several advantages to having a second career. First, it helps you avoid career stagnation. If you’ve been working the same job and industry for 20 years, you may not be inspired by the idea of continuing on that path for the next 20 years. Changing careers presents a fresh start and a new challenge.
Second, it can give you another pathway to success. In today’s knowledge economy, Drucker underlines, we increasingly judge people by their achievements. If your first career hasn’t been successful, having a backup option presents a new opportunity to achieve.
Further Advantages of a Second Career
Drucker’s last reason to consider a second career—that it will help you be seen as successful—is one that relies heavily on the notion that you can only succeed through your career, rather than in other areas of your life. It also assumes that a career is something you can either “succeed” or “fail” at, which is quite an extreme view of careers as a whole.
Regardless, there are reasons why a second career may be beneficial, including the possibility of a fresh start as Drucker suggests. Other reasons include that a second career is possibly more adapted to the current job market. Furthermore, a second career gives you the opportunity to pursue a role that you’re actually interested in. Your first career may have been dictated by financial constraints or family expectations, whereas your second career could reflect a genuine interest. Finally, you could also earn more money from a second career, if you switch to a job in a field with higher salaries. This could be not just useful but necessary, as longer life expectancy has increased the cost of retirement.
One method Drucker gives to start a second career is to pivot from the path that you’re on to use your skills in a different industry. For example, if you previously worked in human resources and were responsible for recruitment, you could pivot and start to work as a headhunter.
Drucker’s other path to a second career is to run a career or activity parallel to your main job and slowly switch from one to the other. For instance, you may have a main job as a sales account manager and have a secondary source of income renting out a property as a vacation home. As you become more proficient at managing the vacation home, other people may ask you to manage their properties too, and you can slowly transition into a property management role.
How to Switch Careers
Drucker outlines some general pathways to switch from one career to another but doesn’t take into account the practical considerations of a career change.
Two of the most common constraints when changing careers are time and money. For example, it’s common to take a pay cut when switching careers, as you probably have less experience in the new field. In this regard, Drucker’s pathway of a slow career transition may be best because the second career starts out as a secondary income, and you can switch to it full-time when you’re sure you can make a living.
However, working both a job and a side job presents a constraint on your time, and it could detract from time spent with family or pursuing other interests. If you’re looking to preserve your work-life balance and could afford a pay cut, Drucker’s first plan of jumping from one career path to another may be better.
Drucker encourages everyone to have a second career, to keep their working life interesting and to increase their chances of career success. These exercises will help you to plan out your transition to your second career.
First, identify what your ideal second career would be. (Would it be a shift into a totally different field or a change to a different role within your current industry?)
Now, consider which route into a second career would be best for you: a gradual career transition or a sudden switch. Why this route?
What three actions could you take within the next year to lay the foundations for your second career? (For instance, you might take a training course relevant to your ideal new role or professionally network with people in your desired industry.)