As stated previously, there is no greater activity to begin the process of raising the value you create for your organization than a conversation with your boss. By approaching your boss and requesting a conversation regarding value creation, you are already raising your value in your organization. Yet, at the same time, this is not a conversation being held in organizations across the globe.
With so many options and possibilities already existing in your organization, you can start to raise your value immediately. Before you jump out of your chair and begin the shift from good performer to valuable employee, however, you need to do the following two things:
The competitive global marketplace shows little mercy for organizations that are slow to raise the bar for their customers and their employees. Business value tied to external marketplace drivers tend to be strategically focused and is created by:
Growing organizations require value to be more tangible, and the contribution of business value by employees to be broader. While individual value is critically important to an organization’s performance, it is not the type of value that will sustain an organization. Business value tied to internal financial drivers reflects a more strategic perspective that can have a positive impact. Today, your organization needs as many employees as possible focused on creating value through internal financial drivers.
When you perform your job well, you are valuable to your organization. When you are focused primarily on creating individual value, you tend to be in a role that is more tactically-focused. And let’s face it, some roles in organizations need to be tactically focused. This focus is very valuable to the organization. Not every role has a clear line of sight to financial performance, nor should they.
In order for an organization to obtain value from you and for you to raise your value in your organization, you must capitalize on either an existing way of creating value or identify new ways to create value.
In the Raise Your Visibility & Value model, value is defined as the outcome of a situation when the outcome of a situation exceeds the cost incurred by a satisfactory margin. Raising your value is defined as performing activities that connect individual contributions with business performance. To be considered a valuable employee, you must tie as many of your activities as possible to how your organization measures how well it’s performing. For most organizations, business performance is predominantly measured through financial performance. As you work to create value for your organization, you must focus your activities on your company’s financial performance.
Internally, you need to manage your organization in ways that ensure investors and customers stay interested. In order for your organization to survive for the long-term, it needs to obtain value from vendors and employees – internal value.
Deep within the heart of your organization’s cubicle farm, you and your heads-down colleagues are working hard to stay employed. Our metric-based culture has created generations of individuals who believe that good performance alone ensures job security. They still haven’t figured out the dirty little secret behind value creation.
So what is it that will make you stand out to your boss or organization as a valuable employee? When I say that you must achieve more than just doing your job well, I am not suggesting that doing your job well is not important. Conversely, in today’s excruciating work environments, good performance is expected. Your organization is finding less time and spending less money to train you to be a good performer. In her recent Wall Street Journal article, Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD continued to reflect that “Businesses are putting managers in a tough spot. They’re forcing bosses to take on many new responsibilities – but they’re not training them to get those jobs done.”