As an employee, you can focus on improving your own performance but ultimately, the measurement of your success in your field will come directly from your employer and how much they value your skillset and contribution to the company.
This is one of the main reasons I chose to be an entrepreneur.
As much as I would respect the opinion of another with regards to my performance, I wouldn’t see this as fair to myself, mainly because of the lack of control I would have. If I wanted to earn more money and worked my a** off to get a pay rise, but my boss said ‘no’ – is this fair? Of course, it can be circumstantial but regardless, it’s out of my control.
If I am to improve my own performance, I want to be in control of what, where, when and why.
The thing is, as an entrepreneur, you have to constantly improve your performance for a multitude of reasons. You have to better your understanding of your customers, you have to change tactics to move with the market, you have to improve your product to offer ‘better’ and ‘more’, you have to develop your people skills to manage your team effectively – the list goes on and on.
I’m certainly not arrogant enough to think that I am perfect at what I do and that I have nothing more to learn. As a business owner, I know only too well that arrogance can kill a person’s career in a matter of minutes. I am always open to learning, developing, progressing, changing and improving, and I hope that this mindset I have is projected on to my team.
The only way to move forward and succeed is to take time out for self-evaluation.
Self-evaluation is a powerful tool in your entrepreneurial arsenal and there are many ways to do it. For me, I work closely with a business coach which can – at times – almost translate as some sort of ‘business therapy’. By externalising my thoughts and feelings about situations in my business with an objective voice, I am able to carefully evaluate my performance in terms of my reaction, my handling of the situation and the outcome.
As well as working with my business coach, I reflect a lot by writing things down to refer back to. If an undesirable outcome occurred, what were the pros and cons? In hindsight, what would I have done differently? How might I have been different to change the outcome? It’s important to ask yourself these kind of questions to train your entrepreneurial brain to learn and move forward.
Without self-evaluation, you’ll end up in the loop of ‘insanity’ whereby you do the same thing again and again and expect a different result. With self-evaluation, you’re constantly moving in the right direction with the right attitude and the right attention to detail – setting yourself up for success.
