How much cross functional versatility is built into how you deliver value to employers and clients? Consider that this one attribute, moving forward, tells people a lot about who you are, as a professional of worth.
Can they trust you to have their backs, as you wrestle with change? So you get them to where they need to go, one millimeter at a time? Together?
That description of versatility-based value does not sound like a traditional job title or function, does it?
Regardless of whether you sell, design, manage or hire, your professional value story communicates more than your ability to perform a specific function across multiple employers.
First, you may be a great salesperson, engineer, project manager, quality professional or human resources manager. Congratulations!
Next, are you an order-taker comfortably working within the comfortable confines of a departmental silo? So, your professional story becomes wear-wash-rinse-repeat as you fulfill KPIs. Not exactly a risky-hire. Yet, not exactly a hire who stretches the boundaries of what’s possible when collaborating with people who process information differently.
Because embracing risk is really the key to a professional value story based on cross functional versatility.
- It’s one thing to collaborate with people who think the same way you do. Even if you work across departments or professional disciplines, you all think and speak the same language.
- However, the crux of cross functional versatility is embracing the risk and opportunity of collaborating with people across the organization.
- Seeking out and creating teams of the best possible combination of knowledge workers and manual workers, technical and non-technical professionals, right-brain, and left-brain thinkers.
- Being patient when working with people who are hired because they are soft-skill heavy. Yet are critical thinking and analytics light weights.
- Or, having the guts to ask folks whose professional language involves an average of 6 syllable words, just what the heck they are talking about. You know, the folks who intimidate you.
Regardless of whatever the future of post-pandemic work looks like, showcasing cross functional versatility becomes a key to professional differentiation.
You just may be in the midst of seminal strategic professional stories. The ones which will define who you are moving forward: to colleagues, employers, and clients. Do you recognize the project-related stories which move you and your team one millimeter beyond what is professionally comfortable? So you conscientiously create trust as you wrestle with change and make those hard calls? Together? One millimeter at a time.
- Do you feel that nobody knows who you are and what you can accomplish, together?
- Primarily because you work in a perceived cost-center department buried within the organization.
- While the revenue-generators seem to be having all the fun. And recognition.
- Yet, you often are called in to fix what is broken, rather than proactively create preventive, robust, and enduring solutions?
Think about it. Isn’t it about time to incorporate cross functional versatility into the professional value story you tell? And I’m not talking about a static writing exercise, either.
Rather, let’s address the strategic implications of the value you bring to your organization’s table, time after time. Contact me for a complementary 15-minute consultation involving 3 key questions you may not have yet answered.
My One Millimeter Mindset™ virtual and in-person keynotes, workshops, coaching and mastermind programs translate across strategic communication and collaboration disconnects between people and professional disciplines. Build trust. Optimize strategic business and human capital value in your organizations. Get everyone to where they need to go. Together. One millimeter at a time. My playbook of communication tools and methods, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
Image source: Adobe Stock.
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