Appraise Yourself Honestly

It’s important to understand what you’re good at – but it’s twice as important to understand your areas of weakness too. Once you understand what you’re not so good at, you can either work to develop and strengthen those areas, or make sure that you take your career in a direction that allows you to avoid your areas of weakness.

The following list of questions is based on research done at Harvard Business School. Go through each of the questions and score yourself from one to ten (1 = very poor, 5 to 6 = average, 10 = exceptional) for each skill or ‘competency’. Then try to think about examples of why you are good or bad at each one to use as ‘evidence’ for your score.

Be really honest with yourself. No one can be good at everything!

• Achievement-orientation – to what extent are you someone who strives to gain personal, professional, and academic achievements?
• Interpersonal skills – how good are you at communicating, getting on with other people and working in teams?
• Influence and persuasion – how good are you at negotiating, cajoling, asserting yourself and getting what you want from other people?
• Flexibility – how good are you at adapting to new situations and sudden changes of circumstance?
• Expertise/technical proficiencies – what are your areas of specialist knowledge?
• Reasoning – how good are you at solving problems and making difficult decisions?
• Business awareness – to what extent do you understand the commercial or market issues that affect your work?
• Control – how good are you at leading other people, delegating work and exerting your
  authority when necessary?

Now look at your ratings and the examples you have collected as evidence for your scores. Firstly, do you think the scores are a fair and honest appraisal of your own skills? Now compare your list of skills to your life mission statement from Chapter 1 – do you have the skills you need to achieve your career goals? And, if not, how will you get those skills?