Showing your value in your job
April 24, 2011
I have recently been spending a lot of time working with the management in my company trying to get folks to distill the message of what they are doing into three slides or less per week. This is a tough challenge for people who are used to just setting up a meeting and talking to whomever they need to reach whenever they want. I’m trying to get structure around it so it helps us get the real information we need to be able to communicate to all teams (not just the CEO) and make the real decisions about true business impacts.
I then was poking around my list of tasks on my home computer today and ran across a blog entry from one of my favorite career coaching blogs, www.azzarellogroup.com, called “Defending your honor (and your budget)“. She emailed this out just over a year ago, and I thought it was very timely that I re-read it again today!
My main take-away:
People at all levels of a company always feel they need to prove that what they are doing adds value. No surprise there. The problem is in how they do that. Patty Azzarello argues that while data and metrics are great, it’s not just about those. It needs to be about some of the emotional side of things as well. For example, don’t just talk about how nifty the technology is that you’re creating, talk about how it will make the company more money, or save the customer money. Don’t talk about total number of leads you brought in on the marketing side, talk about “qualified prospects who are ready to engage”.
It seems far too often we talk about things that don’t necessarily tie back to the company’s main strategy (which is usually get more qualified customers, make them happy and earn lots of money). It seems simple enough, but I think far too often, each part of the business doesn’t understand how they personally contribute to that directly. This is something I’ve been working with each of the managers in our company to help drive them to understand that. It’s a learning process for all of us, but I think we’re making headway.
So, I agree completely with Patty and wish that more folks spent the time thinking about how what they did benefits the company and the customer rather than how it supported the one specific item they were driving.
