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2. How Do
I Perform?
Amazingly few people know how they get things done. Indeed, most of
us do not even know that different people work and perform
differently. Too many people work in ways that are not their ways,
and that almost guarantees nonperformance. For knowledge workers,
How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What
are nay strengths?
Like one's strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of
personality. Whether personality be a matter of nature or nurture,
it surely is formed long before a person goes to work. And how a
person performs is a given, just as what a person is good at or not
good at is a given. A person's way of performing can be slightly
modified, but it is unlikely to be completely changed and certainly
not easily. Just as people achieve results by doing what they are
good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best
perform. A few common personality traits usually determine how a
person performs.
Am I a reader or a listener? The first thing to know is whether you
are a reader or a listener. Far too few people even know that there
are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both. Even
fewer know which of the two they themselves are. But some examples
will show how damaging such ignorance can be.
When Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in
Europe, he was the darling of the press. His press conferences were
famous for their style General Eisenhower showed total command of
whatever question he was asked, and he was able to describe a
situation and explain a policy in two or three beautifully polished
and elegant sentences. Some years later, the same journalists who
had been his admirers held President Eisenhower in open contempt He
never addressed the questions, they complained but rambled on
endlessly about something else. And they constantly ridiculed him
for butchering the King's English in incoherent and ungrammatical
answers.
Eisenhower apparently did not know that he was a reader, not a
listener. When he was Supreme Commander in Europe, his aides made
sure that every question from the press was presented in writing at
least half an hour before a conference was to begin. And then
Eisenhower was in total command. When he became president, he
succeeded two listeners, Franklin D, Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Both men knew themselves to be listeners and both enjoyed
free-for-all press conferences. Eisenhower may have felt that he had
to do what his two predecessors had done. As a result, he never even
heard the questions journalists asked. And Eisenhower is not even an
extreme case of a no listener.
A few years later, Lyndon Johnson destroyed his presidency, in large
measure, by not knowing that he was a listener. His predecessor,
John Kennedy, was a reader who had assembled a brilliant group of
writers as his assistants, making sure that they wrote to him before
discussing their memos in person. Johnson kept these people on his
staff and they kept on writing. He never, apparently, understood one
word of what they wrote. Yet as a senator, Johnson had been superb;
for parliamentarians have to be, above all, listeners.
Few listeners can be made, or can make themselves, into competent
readers and vice versa. The listener who tries to be a reader will,
therefore, suffer the fate of Lyndon Johnson, whereas the reader who
tries to be a listener will suffer the fate of Dwight Eisenhower.
They will not perform or achieve.
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