■ Don’t talk too much. Never over-commit yourself. Save up
what you want to say until the right moment. Keep your
powder dry. Don’t shoot your mouth off. ‘Whereof one
cannot speak, thereon one must remain silent’
(Wittgenstein).
■ Learn to cope with stress. You won’t avoid it and you have to
live with it. If problems are coming at you thick and fast, try
to slow down. Relax. Take a little time off. Give yourself a
chance to put the situation into perspective.
■ If things go wrong, bounce back. Accept reverses calmly.
Think about what you need to do and then get into action –
fast. There is nothing like purposeful activity in these circum-
stances.
■ Get people to trust you – you will do this if you never lie or
even shade the truth, if you avoid playing politics and if you
always deliver what you promise.
■ Accept constructive criticism.
■ ‘Admit your own mistakes openly, even joyfully’ (Townsend,
1970). Never make an excuse. Accept the responsibility and
the blame if you make a mistake.
SELF-DEVELOPMENT
The best way to get on is to rely on yourself, while seeking and
benefiting from any support you can get from your manager or
the organization. Self-development takes place through self-
managed or self-directed learning. This means that you take
responsibility for satisfying your own learning needs to improve
performance, to support the achievement of career aspirations,
or to enhance your experience, within and beyond your present
organization. It can be based on processes that enable you to
identify what you need to learn, by reflecting on your experience
and analysing what you need to know and be able to do, so that
you can perform better and progress your career.
The case for self-managed learning is that people learn and
retain more if they find things out for themselves. But they may
still need to be helped to identify what they should look for. Self-
managed learning is about self-development, and this will be
furthered by self-assessment which leads to better self-under-
standing. Pedler et al(1986) recommend the following four-stage
approach:
88 How to be an Even Better Manager