A Useful Career Success Strategy - Are You Adding Value?

Focus: Professional Success, Career Management

Audio lesson: 2 mins. 44 sec.    

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A USEFUL CAREER STRATEGY - HOW ARE YOU ADDING VALUE?

Transcript word count: 346

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In reality when you read a job description, I’m gonna guess that in some cases it was conceived a while back in different circumstances.  This may not be true for everyone. But I wonder if you now are doing things beyond what is contains. 

Whether you are or not, I want to encourage you to step back for a moment, put aside the formal job description in your mind and do the following:

1. First ask yourself this question:

What are the overall needs of my company, team, and department right now or for the first quarter of 2009? 

2. Make a list without any judgment or editing. 

3. Now look at the list and see how you can incorporate any of those needs within reason into your daily work experience. 

Remember one important component of managing a career is really managing the perception of how you’re doing.  You are in charge of that and the value that you give.   

Make sure you keep track. What you’re doing may not be immediately obvious, so you’ll want to use for discussion during a review. 

To me, this attitude is essential in perhaps reducing the possibility of lay off should they occur in your organization. 

As your self appointed coach, I’d love to hear someone say about you, “Hey, we’ve got to find a way to keep her.”  Rather than, “Yeah…won’t be a loss if we have to let her go.”

Bonus Tip: Coaching your team to value – developing potential

As a manager, one way of adding value is doing so through the collective group.  How do you do that?  Take the exercise suggested above.  Ask each of your team members to do the same.  Meet one on one and see what they come up with.  Boy this could be valuable exercise in lots of ways. 

How can you as a manager add even MORE value?  Do the same exercise as a collective team…asking the question, “How can we as a group add value in this quarter?

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