Self - Management Skills

Skills that everyone needs to excel in the work place and to get along with co-workers are Self Management Skills. These skills include decision-making, learned willingness, self-assessment, self-discipline, self-marking, and stress resistance. (Cologne, 2000). These skills are known as "Soft Skills" (Cologne, 2000) we know and use these skills every day they are also referred to as social skills. "The skills include personality traits like emotional maturity, eagerness to learn, and willingness to share and embrace new ideas." (Cologne, 2000)

Looking at the Self-Management skills these are skills that we use everyday, at home and at work. Decision-making is a process that everyone does in the work place and with his or her home life. It is a process that incorporates a sequence of activities that includes gathering, interpreting and exchanging information then creating and identifying a course of action. (Leigh, 2004, pg 127) Learned Willingness, everyone must have the willingness to learn about new skills and absorb new ideas that could be proposed by other team members. Learned Willingness can also be thought as the ability to embrace new ideas. Self-assessment is something that you do to assess your own performance.

Self-discipline is considered to be a work ethic, are you someone that needs to be told what and how to do something, or can you manage your own time. This is a personal trait. Self-marketing is how you present your ideas to the group. Stress Resistance is your ability to meet deadlines and handle stress at work.

After doing some research on Self-Management skills, there seems to be a lot of interpretations out there of what these skills are. For Instance, the Wisconsin Job Seeker website views these skills as to how well you are matched with a particular job. The Job Bank views these skills in a similar way. In my research I also found an article about how Parents can start teaching their children at a very young age self-management skills. Other articles I found referred to them as "personality traits". And I even found an article dealing with self-management skills and dealing with a chronic illness.

For Ace consulting, performance of the team using self-management skills should be based on both individual and team efforts that include; how well the team makes decisions, how well individuals market their ideas to the team, and the team's willingness to accept and embrace these ideas. We should also measure both how the team deals with stress and what they do to make sure their projects are completed on time. These measurements need to be balanced between the individual team members and the whole team.

References:

Thompson, Leigh L., 2004, "Making the Team, A guide for Managers, Second Edition", Pearson Education Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 07458.

Cologne, Dr Goeran Nieragden, September 200, "The weekly column, The Soft Skills of Business English, [Electronic Version] retrieved on February 27, 2006 from http://www.eltnewsletter.com/back/September2000/art282000.htm