The Personal Business Plan: A Blueprint for Running Your Life

4

What Energizes Me?

“Great minds discuss ideas;

Average minds discuss events;

Small minds discuss people”

Eleanor Roosevelt

A competency is an underlying characteristic of an individual that is causally related to superior performance in a job. It is a measurable characteristic related to success at work and can consist of knowledge, skills, and attributes.

In the context of The Personal Business Plan it is important to underline that a competency follows you – it is your competency. This means that by increasing your competencies and becoming more competent, you create value for yourself. So here we are talking leadership for your lifetime, not for your specific job. It is also important to stress that some competencies are simply price of admission competencies, which are common to most people. You must get rid of the usual suspects and differentiate yourself. You must find out in which competencies you excel and clearly formulate those in order to create your competitive advantage.

Sometimes it may be useful to use a simple framework to identify your leadership mode. The management guru Ichak Adizes has developed the popular PAEI framework of prototypical management styles: Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, and Integrator. The two dimensions covered are Extrovert/Introvert and Emotions/Documentation.³⁰

Table 3 The PAEI Framework of Prototypical Management Styles

Neil LaChapelle ...