What professional value do you bring to your clients’ tables?
Execution of strategy focuses your professional activities on creating tangible, measurable value for your company and your customers’ organizations. That concept focuses on economic return on investment, increases in operational efficiency, decreases in waste and defects and increased competitiveness.
Where do YOU fit into that definition of value?
You are a Business Person of Worth. You are more than a passive value messenger spieling out your company’s latest value proposition or mission statement, expecting its meaning to be implicitly understood by everyone.
You are not a static participant in someone else’s strategy or processes.
You are a value creator.
As a value creator, you are responsible and accountable for walking your own talk as you walk your company’s talk. In this manner, you take an active role in catalyzing and driving value. In this manner, you evaluate whether your concept of your own value grates against your company’s concept of how and why you create value. Hmmm…..
Do you consider yourself to be a Value Creator? Perhaps it is time to conduct your own professional value audit.
Start by defining how you deliver professional value into every business and operational equation you touch. Into every professional interaction you engage in.
Professional value is more than whether you make your numbers each sales quarter or meet your engineering key performance metrics or save your company money. Professional value is not a matter of how many academic degrees or professional certifications you earned or whether you graduated from high school or attended college.
Professional value involves more than your individual core capabilities or your company’s core competencies. Yes, these combinations of knowledge and technical abilities make you and your enterprise competitive in the marketplace. There’s more involved.
Professional value makes you unique. Professional value differentiates you from competitors and distinguishes you from colleagues.
Professional value combines professional competencies with core values: personal and professional ethics and capacity for empathy. Professional value is that intangible, that “magic,” you bring to every customer touchpoint.
While professional value differentiates you, it does not isolate you. Professional value makes you a sought-after ingredient for collaboration and innovation. Customers and colleagues invite you to their business and operational tables because you bring out the best in everyone and create relevant and enduring business outcomes.
Professional value allows you to treat each meeting, each conversation, each communication as a unique opportunity. Interactions and deliverables remain fresh, no matter how many times they are repeated.
You regard service delivery as an honor instead of drudgery.
Delivering professional value to marketplaces and constituents inspires you to do a better job each day. You continuously learn from others. You are engaged in continuous self-improvement. You are constantly engaged and engaging.
This week, as you continue to “sell” your company’s value to customers, ponder how you add value into that equation.
As you chew on that question, add another one. Ask customers how they perceive the value you bring to their company.
Professional value casts you in the critical role of value creator for your customers. There is nothing passive about that role and the responsibility involved.
It is your professional mission to evaluate and elevate how you bring magic into every customer interaction.
Step forward. Take an active place at your customers’ business and operational tables. I guarantee the nature of your customer conversations will be altered as you move one millimeter outside your current comfort level.
It is your choice: remain a passive value messenger or become an active catalyst driving value through your clients’ organizations. Your customers will appreciate the difference you make in their business and operational outcomes.
Babette N. Ten Haken is a strategist, analyst, author and blogger. Her focus: the interrelationship between teams, leadership and culture in technology and manufacturing. Her Workshops target excellence in the execution of strategy. Babette began her career in clinical research where she was asked to bring clarity to stalemated cross-functional conversations. Her Playbook of collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Photo courtesy iStock.
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