Proving your value at work — Why it’s so hard and how to do it anyway
In a perfect world, your contributions would always be acknowledged. Your boss would automatically recognize you for going above and beyond and give you a nice little raise to boot. However, in the real world, people who know how to promote themselves and their contributions get ahead of their higher-performing peers all the time.
The metric “black hole”
In a business environment, if the metrics that determine success for your position are unclear, it’s difficult to figure out where you stand in the organization or know if you’re doing a good job.
- This struggle to come up with a clear demonstration of value in an organization leads to a reliance on shallow vanity metrics (e.g., speed of response to emails) that have next to no correlation to how much value you add to the company.
Step 2: Build your own scorecard
Determine how to track your progress
- Select metrics that are easy to measure and highly valuable
- Build a consistent narrative
- Tie your metrics into the larger company picture
- Goal: Find more ways to delight customers and deliver customer feedback within our organization
- Success metrics: Reach out to five customers each week and aggregate them into monthly reports
- All metrics should be tied into the company’s overarching goals
Send regular updates
There’s a fine line between demonstrating your value and overly boasting about your accomplishments.
- Don’t leave your career up to chance and risk being blindsided in a performance review. Take matters into your own hands by determining the value you want to build, developing your own success metrics, and communicating progress frequently.
How do you promote yourself and your work?
Three steps knowledge workers can follow to naturally build and demonstrate value in their organizations
Step 1: Understand the difference between intensive and extensive value
Intensive value is derived from a specific skill you’ve developed over time
- Extensive value comes from your relationships with others
- Value doesn’t exist in great quantities in the middle
- If your goal is to develop intensive value, you want to build clout around a specific area
- Take on extra side projects to tinker and experiment until you know virtually everything there is to know
- Join conversations within your organization and outside communities
- Reach out to influential people in your field and build mentorship relationships with them
- Use your organizational knowledge and network to connect individuals from different departments to move the needle forward