Self-management for small-business owners

Robert Kaplan’s article (downloadable for $6.50 here) in this month’s Harvard Business Review outlines steps for managing your career and reaching your full potential. “Managing your career is 100% your responsibility,” he writes, “and you need to act accordingly.” The crucial steps for reaching your for potential — at least, a la Kaplan — are: Knowing Yourself, Excelling at Critical Tasks, and Demonstrating Character and Leadership.

Now, this article was designed for people within conventional corporate institutions, but Kaplan’s advice holds doubly-true for small-business owners. After all, we’re responsible for managing our businesses and our careers within the context of those businesses. So, taking a look at Kaplan’s tools for self-management benefits all of us … in theory.

Unfortunately, the tools for leveraging Kaplan’s model are part and parcel of corporate life — it’s difficult for a solo-preneur to give herself a really useful 360 degree evaluation, for example. So how can Kaplan’s model be adjusted for the small-business owner?

1.) Knowing yourself: It may be impossible to truly know yourself until you’ve seen yourself through someone else’s eyes. And, while you can’t solicit feedback about your personal strengths and weaknesses from your co-workers and bosses when you don’t have them, you can definitely get these insights from your clients … and from other freelancers with whom you collaborate. In fact, collecting this kind of information can be part-and-parcel of a larger data collection process that helps you analyze additional key metrics.

2.) Excelling at critical tasks: Small-business owners have the unfortunate habit of trying to do everything. We spend way too much time reinventing the wheel (how long did it take you to create a functional invoicing system?), and not enough time identifying the truly critical tasks … and getting better at them. Check back tomorrow for a long digression on this problem.

3.) Demonstrating character and leadership: Are you mentoring other small-business owners? Entrepreneurial teenagers? Are you giving your intern or assistant any interesting work to do, in addition to populating those databases? While many small-business owners display mentorship skills within the community (tutoring, coaching Little League, etc), most of us aren’t mentoring other people in our own field. This is well-worth doing because, all other benefits aside, it teaches you how to teach what you do … which gives you a whole new level of expertise and awareness.