What do you understand by the term personal effectiveness

Personal Effectiveness Tips: How to Increase Visibility of Your Contribution at Work

Personal effectiveness trap

When you are a high-performer, it may seem to you that the attention of literally everyone is focused on your outstanding personal effectiveness. It may seem to you that the management is delighted when you have:

In other words, you brought an outcome which is above average for the company. And maybe even above the industry average. But after some time you have realized, that no one tracked your progress. And nobody in the company knows about your significant achievements. Because everyone has their own tasks, their own workload and their own remarkable progress, about what, in turn, you are not aware of, right?

Probably a lot of people are familiar with the personal effectiveness trap, when they are sure that:

But no. Most likely no one will notice, unless you take care of it.

“Most likely no one will notice, unless you take care of it”

Why usually nobody in the office recognize your accomplishments on their own?

Firstly, people are normally more interested in themselves than in others. Unless you are a celebrity, a successful businessman, a politician, a public figure and so on.

Secondly, there is no reason for your colleagues to monitor your personal effectiveness. In contrast, they are focused on their own performance due to a variety of targets and KPIs set up for them by management.

Alright. What about your line manager?

Well, experience shows that your manager may behave in similar way your colleagues do: focus on their own tasks, KPIs and issues. Besides, your manager has a boss too. Therefore, even if your line manager will notice positive changes in the company results, she/he may not associate these results exactly with your work.

So, here we come to the next logical question:

Why get more visibility of your impact?

When the result of your work becomes visible to management or shareholders it opens up opportunities for promotion and salary increase. As you continue advancing in your career you may become an industry recognizable expert. Hence it opens up opportunity to choose the most interesting product or company for you. Not to mention subsequent remuneration increase and status upgrade.

In addition, you are likely to get respect, feeling of accomplishment and finally sense of self-fulfillment.

However, the more visible you are, the higher your chance to evoke envy among colleagues, and even to acquire enemies.

Nevertheless, it is your choice: whether to stay in the shade or shine in the spotlight.

Disclaimer: There is always a chance to become visible, even if you prefer to stay in the shade. And vice versa.

Which path to choose?

There are two main ways to make your contribution within the organization more obvious: straightforward and soft power.

Straightforward way

This way may look quite unartful and may cause disapproval from colleagues, although it does not use “dirty techniques”. This approach may seem not diplomatic, and perhaps even audacious. Probably because in today’s society it’s not common to say directly about your desires and intentions. It is considered more acceptable to hint and then expect others to figure out what you want. By the way, this often leads to misunderstanding and problems in business relationships. Anyway, I knew at least one huge company, where the straightforward approach had been cultivated as an essential part of corporate culture. So, here are the steps:

Most people feel uncomfortable when it comes to direct self-promotion. And prefer to be more diplomatic. In such case soft power way is more suitable.

Soft power way

Soft power way consists of numerous steps that are not related to each other directly. However, each of these steps aims to increase visibility of your contribution based on your personal effectiveness. Therefore, the more steps you perform, the higher synergy effect you get.

Conclusions

So, you may follow the straightforward way or the soft power way. Or you may mix both ways. However, when developing your personal effectiveness visibility strategy, you should take into account all relevant factors:

This article provides only general guidelines, while each case is unique. Therefore, I would suggest you to benefit from the wise advice of your personal coach to build your own unique go-to-visibility plan.

Whatever path you choose, I wish you good luck!

About the author:

The article originally published on TWA Consulting blog on June 29, 2019.

7 Basic Personal Effectiveness Skills

Every day we spend our time and energy on achieving our goals. But even the same goal can be reached with different costs by different people. It happens because we all have different personal effectiveness.

Our personal effectiveness depends on our innate characteristics – talent and experience accumulated in the process of our personal development.

Talents first are needed to be identified and then developed to be used in a particular subject area (science, literature, sports, politics, etc.).

Experience includes the knowledge and skills that we acquire in the process of cognitive and practical activities. Knowledge is required for setting goals, defining an action plan to achieve them, and risk assessment. Skills also determine whether real actions are performed in accordance with the plan. If the same ability is used many times in the same situation, then it becomes a habit that runs automatically, subconsciously.

Here are some skills that will greatly increase your personal effectiveness:

1. Determination

It allows you to focus only on achieving a specific goal without being distracted by less important things or spontaneous desires. It may be developed with the help of self-discipline exercise.

2. Self-confidence

It appears in the process of personal development, as a result of getting aware of yourself, your actions, and their consequences. Self-confidence is manifested in speech, appearance, dressing, gait, and physical condition. To develop it, you need to learn yourself and your capabilities, gain a positive attitude, and believe that by performing the right actions and achieving the right goals you will certainly reach success. Check out these practical tips on how to increase self-confidence.

3. Persistence

It makes you keep moving forward regardless of emerging obstacles – problems, laziness, bad emotional state, etc. It reduces the costs of overcoming obstacles. It can also be developed with the help of self-discipline exercise.

4. Managing stress

It helps combat stress that arises in daily life from the environment and other people. Stress arises from the uncertainty in an unknown situation when a lack of information creates the risk of negative consequences of your actions. It increases efficiency in the actively changing environment. It requires problem-solving skills.

5. Problem-solving skills

They help cope with the problems encountered with a lack of experience. It increases efficiency by adopting new ways of achieving goals when obtaining a new experience.

6. Creativity

It allows you to find extraordinary ways to carry out a specific action that no one has tried to use. It can lead to a decrease or an increase in costs, but usually, the speed of action is greatly increased when using creative tools. It requires the ability to generate ideas.

7. Generating ideas

It helps you achieve goals using new, original, unconventional ideas. The idea is a mental image of an object formed by the human mind, which can be changed before being implemented in the real world. For generating ideas you can use a method of mental maps, which allows you to materialize, visualize, and scrutinize all your ideas, which in turn contributes to the emergence of new ideas.

These are just some, but the most important personal effectiveness skills which make the achievement of any goal easier and less costly.

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Why personal effectiveness is important?

Asked by: Mrs. Gail Baumbach

Personal Effectiveness is a universal need. Having effective living skills can lead to more control over daily life, more focus and sense of achievements. Those who live effectively feel more energised and they are able to manage themselves when necessary.

Why is personal effectiveness important in the workplace?

By working on personal effectiveness, employees get a better understanding of their talents. They learn to use these optimally. They also see which skills they lack and need to develop to achieve their goals.

What does personal effectiveness mean?

In short, personal effectiveness means getting the best out of yourself. It’s an approach to success that involves utilising all of your energy, skill and motivation to develop and reach the goals you set for yourself.

How can we do personal effectiveness?

Why do we need to have personal effectiveness reflection?

Personal Effectiveness & the 4 Principles of Success

21 related questions found

What are the 7 personal effectiveness skills?

What are the effectiveness skills?

How do you describe an effective person?

Effective people don’t just know what to do—they know why. They have a long-term goal. They have short-term goals that support their long-term goals. In short, they have purpose—and that purpose informs everything they do.

What are the keys to improve your personal performance?

How does self knowledge affect my personal effectiveness?

What are the 5 areas of personal development?

There are several different topics within the personal development world, but they all seem to fall under five major categories. The categories are mental, social, spiritual, emotional, and physical.

What are 3 areas of improvement?

Three themes in the areas for improvement — confidence, knowledge, and communication — were in the top 10 for most of the jobs we studied. Yet the top themes for work improvement appeared to be more job specific, compared to those themes provided for the strengths.

What is Personal Effectiveness & Self-Management?

December 19, 2014

An element of Whole-Hearted Living is personal effectiveness and self-management. Many of us know what personal effectiveness and self-management are, however have we mastered it? (without being perfect of course!). So, just so we are on the same page –

Personal effectiveness means making use of all the resources (both personal and professional) you have at your disposal (i.e. your talents, strengths, skills, energy and time) to enable you to master your life and achieve both work and life goals.

How you manage yourself (i.e self-management) impacts on your personal effectiveness. According to CASEL, self management is “…the ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviours effectively in different situations.” This includes –

How Can We Increase our Personal Effectiveness?

In order to increase or change our personal effectiveness or performance, we need to take time out to reflect to see where we currently are. Once we know this, we can then take action and monitor our behaviours to see if we are getting the results we would like.

Some ideas on how you can increase your personal effectiveness include –

If you are ready to take yourself on the adventure of getting to know yourself (your true self), why not join the Toolkit? A place where I share tools, inspiration and ideas to live a courageous and openhearted life.

What do you understand by the term personal effectiveness

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Personal Effectiveness

What is personal effectiveness? It can’t just be achieving our goals because we could do so in a very wasteful, time consuming or sloppy way. How about making best use of our time and all other personal resources at our disposal? This means achieving our goals efficiently, like investment, getting the best possible return.

Personally effective people are thus more than just people who get what they want. They really have two qualities: They make good use of their resources and they are skilled at achieving their goals. Whether you want to be a successful sales person or good in sports, being effective means a combination of efficiency and skilled execution.

People are personally effective in different ways because everyone has different goals, values and priorities. Skilled communicators, for example, can be effective in numerous ways depending on what they want to achieve. Those who want to entertain people have a good sense of humor. If they want to wow large audiences, they must have excellent presentation skills. Similarly, a coach needs to communicate sensitively and be a good listener.

What Does Personal Effectiveness Mean to You?

Which of these goals mean something to you?

People who are personally effective make good use of their skills. They don’t squander them. They use them to achieve their goals and do so in a way that is efficient and cost effective.

How can you become more personally effective? Start by clarifying your goals, values and priorities. What is it that you want to achieve, in the short term at least, if you aren’t sure about the longer term? What skills do you need to acquire in order to achieve your goals? Then: what is the most efficient, easiest way you can get what you want? That is, how can you apply your skills? How can you invest your time and effort to get the best return on all your efforts and talents?

Personal Effectiveness and Confidence

It is hard to be effective if we aren’t confident. Our confidence grows when we play to our strengths and have a confident attitude. Confidence isn’t based on the way we are or what happens to us as much as you would think. It’s just that we tend to blame circumstances for our failings so we don’t see that it’s all between the ears. That is, it’s not how we are but how we see ourselves that counts.

To build and maintain strong self-confidence, it’s important to say positive things to yourself. Whenever you catch yourself strongly criticizing yourself, stop and say some positive things, like recalling your good qualities, things you have achieved or things you have done for others. Also, watch who you compare yourself to. It’s good to have role models but there’s no use beating yourself if you can’t be like your favorite rock star or movie star. Pick realistic role models and don’t forget to compare yourself with people who aren’t doing as well as you. Even if you haven’t achieved much in your life, try to do nice things for others. That makes you a better person and is something to be proud of.

Some people defeat themselves. They feel so bad about themselves that they lash out at everyone around them, which just ensures that they will stay in the hole they’re in. The easiest way to raise yourself up is to start doing nice things for other people. In a while, you will start feeling better about yourself and then you can start taking on bigger challenges. You will fail at some things. Everyone does, but use a diary to keep track of everything you achieve, even little things. Review it regularly to celebrate your success. Building self-confidence and personal effectiveness is a gradual process of building on past successes, taking stock of where you are and moving onto bigger things.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a long term goal. Very few people do. The key is to create a foundation of success on which to build. As you achieve more and try new things, continually push yourself outside your comfort zone. Take stock regularly, at least once a month, and ask yourself what you have learned about your abilities and what activities give you the most satisfaction. This stock-taking will then help you to decide what avenues to pursue next.

Being effective at work is more likely if you know how to work with and through people. This means learning how to get the balance right between self-reliance and interdependence. On this topic, see How to Be More Effective at Work.

Building Effective Relationships

Positive relationships at work are a critical key to success. People need to trust and like you to work with you productively. It is essential that people are not saying nasty things about you if you want to get ahead and be successful. See Relationships at Work for more on this topic.

For more on personal effectiveness, see Goals at Work and Career Management. In what areas of your life would you like to enhance your personal effectiveness? Would you like to improve your self esteem, your assertiveness, influencing skills, communication skills?

See my latest books on Amazon to learn how to be happier regardless of your beliefs or circumstances and how to empower yourself to show leadership every day without being in a position or having to overly defer and depend on positional leaders: