Two Handy Tools

In addition to reading It’s Your Job: Take Charge of It and putting it’s lessons into practice, we’ve provided you with two additional ways to help you use the book within your organization. The Personal Competence Rating Form lets individuals find out how they are doing in the five parts of their jobs. The Jump Start Discussion Leaders Guide lets you hold group discussions about the book. You can use all or part of the guide—at most it would take less than four hours.

• The "Personal Competence Rating Form” can be used to see the amount of improvement a person needs or if many forms are added together, it can be used to find out what the organization needs. It can also be used to measure improvement over time and to gain some knowledge of issues that need to be attended to by upper management. (See pages 42-44 in It’s Your Job: Take Charge of It.)
  
  
• The “Jump Start Discussion Leaders Guide” is not required reading. It is a training module for those organizations that prefer to offer special training when new procedures are introduced.
  
  

A Way To Get Started

1. Read the whole book. Follow each chapter’s instructions, which are: Ask yourself: How am I doing on Knowing? on Deciding? on Assigning? on Influencing? on Coping? Search your memory to find two or three examples in each of the five parts—where you did something better and where you did not. Search your memory on each of the five parts where others you know did and did not do something better.
   
   
2. Supply copies of the book to your staff and ask them to do the same as described above.
   
   
3. As an option, use the Personal Competence Rating Form to find out your organization’s competence. Do this in a few business units or with a cross section of people. For the most candid answers do not have individuals sign their names.
   
   
4. Hand out books to some people at any level in the organization—those who have obvious shortcomings in one or more of the five parts of their jobs: for example to someone who isn’t coping very well, to someone who needs to accept influence better, to someone who needs to be more influential, or to someone who’s not doing well assigning tasks to others.
   
   
5. If you decide to use the book’s methods to help yourself and others achieve on-the-job success, supply everyone with a copy of it.
   
   
6. The “Jump Start Discussion Leaders Guide” is another way to help people use the book and get the most out of it.
   
   
7. Tell all supervisors and managers, “From now on it is not your prime responsibility to make someone who reports to you on-the-job successful. That is their responsibility. It’s your responsibility to help them by listening, counseling, and taking other appropriate action to help them.”
   
   
8. Be sure your human resource policy on performance reviews (both day-to-day on going comments and yearly formal reviews) includes a part where each person tells his or her supervisor/manager what they have done or are doing to improve on KNOWING, DECIDING, ASSIGNING, INFLUENCEING and COPING.
   
   

Make Subtle Changes To Benefit Your Organization

• Have managers and supervisors at all levels ask each of their direct reports from time to time, “How are you doing on KNOWING? How are you doing on DECIDING? On ASSIGNING? On INFLUENCING? On COPING?
  
  
• Incorporate into yearly performance appraisals an item where people being reviewed tell their supervisors or managers how they are doing in each of the five parts of their jobs.
  
  

Extra Advice

Please read the chapter on Influencing, because you are sure to get resistance from some people who will sit on their hands or tell you —“I don’t have time.” “What we have is OK.” “This is just another fad!”