What Type of Professional Legacy are You creating?

Ever consider the type of professional legacy you create? As you strive to meet an organization’s KPIs for the functional role in which you serve?

As I deliver my speaking programs on storytelling for STEM professionals and left brain thinkers, attendees frequently tell me they are something more than their job descriptions. And, they think that their stakeholders do not recognize their true value. Also, these professionals perceive their workplace culture and mindset as operationally-oriented and numerically goal-driven. Rather than representing a more inclusive and diverse palette of what it means to be a STEM professional and left brain thinker.

Have I just described your workplace and organizational culture?

How would stakeholders outside your professional discipline describe your current professional legacy within their workplace?

1. Would they describe you as someone they cannot understand, because of the default terminology of your professional discipline?
2. Do they perceive you as exclusive and elitist, because you are more educated and have a fancier job title and pay grade than they do?
3. Can they honestly tell themselves that you will have their backs, throughout the projects in which you both “collaborate”?

When colleagues and stakeholders do not understand what you are saying, they cannot understand what you can do. With them, and for them, on behalf of better serving each other and your customers.

What type of employee and stakeholder experiences do you create? Let alone experiences leading to customer success and customer retention?

Participating on cross-functional teams is not necessarily the equivalent of a professional legacy of serving stakeholders.

I survey the STEM professionals and left brain thinkers I speak to and conduct workshops for. Survey results indicate that nearly two-thirds or more of these professionals participate on cross-functional teams. On a weekly basis, at the very least.

Yet, the same two-thirds of these workshop attendees tell me that the people sitting around the table do not know who they are and what they do. Now. Hit your Pause button. Re-read that last sentence. Because that disconnect is where your (and their) lost opportunity resides.

First, consider the quality of your own participation in these types of meetings. Do you tune out until it is your turn to participate? Or are you actively engaged? Why is that?

Then, when it is your turn to contribute, what happens next? Are non-technical colleagues engaged or, like you, do they return the favor and tune out? Because you turn them off: with the words you use and your behavior.

It is difficult to have each other’s backs, as Stakeholders of Worth, when you marginalize rather than include. 

What type of professional legacy do you create by reinforcing barriers to stakeholder communication? Consider the impact on the quality of customer-focused outcomes which might be created, if these barriers no longer existed.

Then, take these next steps….

• Planning your next corporate or association meeting? Engage me to present one of my Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs. Contact me here.
• Download my new checklist and worksheet: Six Professional Development Targets to Hit each Month.
• Subscribe to my blog. Share your email address in the red box in the right column of this blog. Never miss another insightful post.

Babette Ten Haken‘s One Millimeter Mindset™ Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs are created for organizations and associations who want to catalyze stakeholder success and customer retention. There is no better way than storytelling to bridge communication disconnects between professional disciplines, paygrades and levels of education. Her programs are forged from her background as a STEM professional in clinical research, new product development, market research and sales. Find out more right here. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of communication hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Babette’s speaker profile is on the espeakers platform.

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