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Can you get better at handling numbers? Yes - with practise, you can improve the way you manage project finances and get better at the processes required for project accounting. But if it feels like whatever you do you just can't get your head around project budgets, maybe you have come up against your Executive Skills.
I spoke to Chuck Martin, author of Work Your Strengths: A Scientific Process to Identify Your Skills and Match Them to the Best Career for You
Would you clarify the meaning of the term 'Executive Skills'? How do they help people get on the right career track and be successful?
The term Executive Skills, which have nothing to do with skills of executives, were named by psychologists because they help people execute tasks. These are not skills that can be learned since they’re cognitive functions hardwired into the brain from birth. The use of the term in neuropsychology dates back decades.
Everyone has a set of strongest and weakest of these cognitive functions in their makeup. They typically have two or three that are their strongest and two or three that are their weakest. In Work Your Strengths, we focus on the three strongest and the three weakest of the Executive Skills across all high performers. Everyone has this personal combination of strengths and weaknesses, and the mix varies from person to person. By matching your strengths to those of the high performers in our study, a person can see where people with the same strengths have been successful.
What are the different Executive Strengths then?
They are:
- Response Inhibition:The ability to think before you act.
- Working Memory: The ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks
- Emotional Control: Theability to manage emotions in order to achieve goals, complete tasks, or control and direct behavior.
- Sustained Attention: The capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue, or boredom.
- Task Initiation: The ability to begin projects or tasks without undue procrastination.
- Planning/Prioritization: The capacity to develop a road map to arrive at a destination or goal, and knowing which are the most important signposts along the way.
- Organization: The ability to arrange or place according to a system.
- Time Management: Thecapacity to estimate how much time one has, to allocate it effectively.
- Goal-Directed Persistence: The capacity to have a goal and follow through to the completion of the goal.
- Flexibility: The ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks and new information.
- Metacognition: The capacity to stand back and take a bird’s-eye view of yourself.
- Stress Tolerance: The ability to thrive in stressful situations.
OK, and there's more detail about those on your website. Which skills did your research show as most common in people who are good at working with numbers?
In financial services, the most commonly found Executive Skills strengths are Metacognition, Goal-Directed Persistence and Working Memory.
Right, so if those are your top skills, chances are you find all the project accounting stuff relatively straightforward. I understand that you can't change your strengths, and if you are not numerically inclined or have the skills you identified here as your main weaknesses, what can you do when you are faced with dealing with project finances?
When faced with tasks that require your Executive Skills weakness, there are a few options. The best is to avoid the task, if possible. Another solution is to seek the help or delegate the task to someone whose strength matches the task, which means the task would be much more natural and easier for them. When there is absolutely no other option but to do the task yourself, then it is best to do it as soon as possible, while still fresh in the day, for example, since the task will be more challenging than those that play to the person’s inherent strengths.
Did you ever look at project managers as a specific group within your profiling?
Our study for did not specifically ask about project management, but Planning/Prioritization would be a logical strength required, since that would allow a person to very naturally sequence items within a complex project.
Great, thanks, Chuck!
I gave away a copy of Chuck's book, Work Your Strengths
Posted on: June 30, 2010 02:17 PM |
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