In my book, The Turnaround: If You Don’t Grow, You Go! we talk about the importance of the Know Factors for leaders trying to create a Development Culture within an organization. Leaders must: Know their people, Know their goals, Know what their people are doing, and they must Know their results.

The Know Factors are not just for leaders trying to better know their people. They are important when becoming the boss of you through PR as well. PR again meaning Personal Responsibility. PR is an important part of a Development Culture. A PR Culture and a Development Culture are one in the same. You cannot have either of them unless all of your people are personally responsible for their own growth and for the growth of the company.

Here are the PR Know Factors:

• Know Yourself – What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do you behave? What is your style? What are you motivated by? SOS Leadership uses a great leadership assessment (TTI Success Insights)  ]that looks at all of these things. It helps people better know themselves. Do you know yourself? Don’t kid yourself answering this question. You may need the help of others to properly answer.
• Know Your Goals – PR comes from having clearly defined goals for all areas of your life. You cannot have clearly defined goals if they are not written down somewhere or if they do not have a target date. Clearly defined goals should also have a plan of action. If you know your goals than you are more likely to do something about those goals (like taking action maybe).
• Know What You Are Doing – It is one thing to know your goals, but it is another thing to actually work towards accomplishing those goals. PR is about taking action. How are you keeping track of what you are working on? When you look at your daily to do list, is there anything on there that will get you closer to achieving your goals? Does your calendar reflect what it is you say is important to you? Sometimes we think something is important to us, but there is no evidence of that importance in our daily lives. Also, if you know what you are doing you will notice when you are working on other peoples goals rather than your own.
• Know Your Results – How will you know you have succeeded in accomplishing your goal? What will be different if you succeed? If you want to know your results, you must determine a way to measure them. You can manage what you measure.

In last week’s post, I talked about being your own boss through PR. The above Know Factors will help you be a more effective boss of you. They will help you master PR. What would happen if you really did master PR? And what if every employee in your organization did so as well?

For organizations to find real, long term, sustainable success they must create a PR Culture where every employee is personally responsible. This type of culture not only would transform an organization, it could change our country, our world. PR makes a difference and it starts with you.