The Hindu Business Line : Managing oneself

THE flavour of the season among management gurus is self-management. Indeed, it has even made it to the sancta sanctorum of Universities, including Harvard, as a topic hot enough to figure in seminars and publications. The academe has apparently got tired of trying out recipes the most prominent of which was management by objectives. It was subsequently sought to be further honed into management by exception and by exertion.

All such definitions envisage getting things done by managing others, bringing into play the full array of attributes such as leadership, motivation, goal-setting, team-building, orchestration of skills, talents and resources to optimal advantage, and performance appraisal.

Self-management is now coming to the fore as an imperative pre-requisite to the ability to cultivate all the other managerial traits and be effective and successful in running organisations. The new entrant to the corpus of management literature is a radical departure from old assumptions and perhaps also poses the most severe test to one's resilience and mettle.

The seemingly simple statement that one cannot manage others unless one is good at managing oneself has several implications and dimensions which are so esoteric as to elude the comprehension of the run-of-the-mill manager. It is also one that will make life difficult for him in that he can no longer permit himself to take refuge behind alibis, excuses and scapegoats other than himself for any thing that happens.

Self-management, in this sense, makes heavy demands that almost fall within the realm of extra-sensory perception: It calls for an innate capacity for sustained introspection combined with the concomitant ability to look within, take stock of one's strengths and weaknesses, determine one's own emotional and spiritual quotients, see oneself as others see one and buttress the positives and neutralise the negatives.

It helps the manager develop an intuitive power to get the best out of those under his charge and be an inspiration and role-model for them. A person of such endowments also acquires a moral and ethical stature which makes him unassailable as a leader.

Actually this is not a revolutionary discovery. Knowing and managing oneself as a basic quality of the ruler has been the precept of India's sages and seers from times immemorial.

B. S. Raghavan

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