Have you ever wondered why you get different results even when you engage in similar activities? You might study for the same amount of hours (likely in different timeframe that determines your productivity) but pass with different grades. You see yourself closing some deals with the same effort you put into another deal that didn’t work out. Having smooth relationship and higher output in your previous jobs, even when you are fighting harder in your current job but it’s not working out. Did you in any time of your life to think about why you were caught up by luck in some days and activities than other days? You can put in same effort in similar scenarios or teams but you get different result. I want to tell you now that the days you feel you were lucky or the days things worked out just well enough are just the days you unconsciously did the right thing at the right time and the other days you might be doing the right thing but at the wrong time. We are not always lucky but sometimes we do the right thing at the right time is when we actually practice personal effectiveness without knowing. Yes! We can be consistent with being “lucky” if we master our personal effectiveness formula.

It is interesting to know that most of the factors that determine our personal effectiveness are all within our circle of influence but we don’t just sit back to reflect on our successes and how it came about. We find ourselves sobering about things we did not do well or we lose self-confidence if we focus so much on our failures that we could have made right if we ever considered our actions and flare for activities where we succeeded. I am going to share some self-determinant factors that we can incorporate into our personal effectiveness formula and see how you experience more of consistency in achieving your planned goals.

Clarity of personal purpose: Couple of times I have asked team leaders about what they think is their purpose in life or what drives them every day to wanting to succeed in their job, I rarely get a convincing response from most of them and that is the instance you know that they are not having a clear direction of what they want to achieve in life. Once a leader lacks personal sense of purpose or direction, he will become passive in his job execution and provide passive leadership to his team. This is where there is no reconciliation point between the leader’s purpose and the team/organization’s purpose and once a leader is not able to find a meeting point between their purpose and his jobs overall vision, they will not find a genuine need to work for the vision rather they will work to earn. Once this is the case, the team or organization cannot recover maximum effectiveness from the team. The major challenge has been individuals being able to gain clarity of their purpose. This is meant to be a deep reflective exercise of searching within about what really matters to you and what do you connect to; body, soul and spirit. Once this exercise is successfully carried out, an individual will be able to know where his passion belongs and what area(s) they will be effortlessly effective. This clarity of purpose exercise can be done in a quiet environment to draw up activities that ever made you feel fulfilled and discuss with your mentor about your self-findings, then get support on how to channel your skills, passion and energy towards what makes you feel fulfilled.

Stand out from the colony: Most times we deem our light by just hiding under the colony because we are scared to fail or make mistakes. But we forget to know that we cannot experience any significant self-fulfillment if we keep doing things because the group is doing it. At this point, we are enslaving our desires and inborn abilities just because we want to follow the crowd. It is unfortunate to see potentials not being realized as they are hiding under the crowd. When you belong to this kind of people, you will not find relevance in what you are doing because you do not have self-conviction for your actions. You can never attain personal effectiveness if you keep accepting “what the crowd says”. By then you are just influenced by the energy level of the group so if the group loses energy, your level of engagement will also drop and as well your level of effectiveness is deeply affected. When you work in teams or lead a team, you must not be scared to be yourself and instead of being jack of all and master of none, try to define your niche, understand your point of strength, discover your purpose in the team and set out to effortlessly contribute significantly to the team. Try not to go with the crowd but identify what could be your key contribution to the team and how you are totally connected to this activity. When your passion aligns to your job, you will never see yourself struggling to always wanting to cope but you will stay inspired by your personal willingness to contribute from your point of strength. You are uniquely made and you can never fit-in if you try to hide under a colony. Always exercise your capabilities and find a common ground between your passion and your job.

Self-organization skills: One of the greatest set back we have from not achieving planned goal is the “conscious behavior of self-induced disinclination”. We probably cause tangible damage to our organization for not reaching set goals by our daily little actions of not sticking to priorities. I have seen many organizations go through the year without reaching 50% of their year goal and it amazes me because the level of talents they have within the organization are exceptionally skilled enough to achieve the organization’s strategic goals. Teams within an organization come together to design the strategic direction for the organization and map out portfolio goals which are broken down to daily activities and KPIs. Every little act from team members are the critical results that builds up towards achieving the organization’s goal. After consulting for couple of companies, I have observed that team members barely work in line with the daily/weekly planned activities and once you start skipping your planned activities then you will certainly lose direction and you are on your way to not reaching the organization’s year goal. We must understand that every little daily activities or KPIs are the build up to the big goal. Most people are skilled but not disciplined enough to stick to daily business priorities. This happens when we lack self-organization skills and we are not able to organize ourselves to keep up with priorities. You will see some employees will pack their makeup case or lunch box and probably forget to pick up their to-do-list pad, and then their day at the office is wholly disrupted. Most people are not able to prioritize their personal and work engagements on a scale of preference. Once you miss one task for today and add it to tomorrow’s task, then tomorrow you are not having sense of responsibility to accomplish your tasks and that will add up to the third day’s task. In this sequence, you will end up accomplishing less than 50% of your year plan and unfortunately this will affect the organization from reaching the year goal. Every team member must focus on developing self-organization skill by figuring out a system or tool that will help them keep up with work priorities and timeline. This needs to become a personal culture over time to ensure that you are unconsciously sticking to work and personal priorities, instead of mixing up “can wait” activities with “must do” activities. Understand timelines and plan ahead. You do not go drinking all night when you have to deliver a task to a client by 8:00am in the morning. You go drink and get home at 5:00am and probably wake up at 8:00am hurrying to meet up. In this situation, you tend to miss out some things and deliver below pal assignments. For you to be effective, you must understand what works for you in terms of how to organize yourself and stick to priority. It can be an App, or note pad or Google calendar or a buddy system. There are several tools out there that can help you improve on your self-organization skills. Personal effectiveness goes hand-in-hand with your ability to organize yourself in managing priorities.

Constant evolution: When you stop learning, you will definitely stop growing and your effectiveness will remain the same, even as the world around you is evolving. You can be very effective with using typewriters in the 80’s but currently the world is moving so fast with new technology and digital software for typing, editing and publishing. If you are someone that is not easy to learn and grow, you will see yourself losing relevance in the workplace and what was considered effective in the 80’s has evolved to be more than 10 times faster and effective as compared to how it was done in those years. You must keep learning new trends and get yourself acquainted to inventions, skills and evolve your behavior to suit the needs of this generation. First thing to do is to keep your mind open for learning and evolve in your behavior and take up challenging roles, inspire yourself to constantly learn from every activity/engagement and then incorporate your learning in your next day’s activities and see yourself becoming better and more effective. When you are constantly leveling up with new trends and advancing in your line of passion, you will notice how effective you will become in running your daily activities. You should have observed how dynamic the world is becoming and you can only keep up being effective if you are updating yourself with current trends that are shaping the world.

Accept responsibilities: Another hindrance to personal effectiveness is avoiding responsibilities of a situation or circumstances. We often find ourselves dishing out blames for not accomplishing our tasks or a team’s task. When it becomes a norm for us to always look for whom to blame for everything, then we are certainly out of track in attaining personal effectiveness. You must be responsible for your actions and goals. See your daily actions as a build up to something big in the end. Be accountable for your daily actions; be conscious and discipline yourself to stick with the plan. At the end of each day, reflect upon your activities and see if you were able to reach your day’s goal. If you did, what learning could you take from that day that will help you even become more effective tomorrow? If you did not reach your day’s goal, ask yourself what went wrong, what activity took most of your time that day and make alternative plans on how to compensate for the undone tasks for the next. When you want to grow and improve your personal effectiveness, you cannot rule out taking responsibilities for your action and always limit blame allocation rather discipline yourself to constantly improve from the learning of each day.

Personal effectiveness is no doubt a crucial aspect of personal and workforce development. As you wish to achieve your personal goal or as companies are looking forward to reaching business goals, it is important to pay attention to how effective you are working towards your goals or how your employees are actively engaging with their strategic activities. Little effort from daily accomplishments is what turns into huge milestone for organizations or individuals. The magic in what we refer to as “lucky day or luck year” is just how often we practice personal effectiveness and getting our priorities right.

There are several ways of designing a personal effectiveness formula; read books, get a personal coach, create a personal work plan and review on regular basis, then improve from your learning, keep updated with new trends, select a preferred self-organization tool that will make you more effective and most of all, discipline yourself and take responsibility for your actions.

Personal Effectiveness for Leaders

Francis Omorojie