How do You Create Value?

     Competency 3:  Creating Value

     As mentioned at the beginning business is about the bottom line, and to keep profit margins healthy companies are focusing on finding ways to move to higher value services or products.  No company wants to get cut out of the game bleeding to death on razor thin margins. In today’s world success is based on telling others about the value you create for others.  Therefore, if you want a thrilling career with regular upward movement, you need to be talking about the high value you create in your role.  Being able to share your success and victories with others will make you a sought after individual.  The more you improve on your skillfulness in articulating the value that you created for your clients or organization without bragging the more people will want you on their team.

     The most important is learning how to distinguish what is valuable to others.  This connects with measuring and communicating.  Having the knack to recognize what others find valuable is a true gift for a triumphant business career.   If your are selling water meters, you need to learn what is more important to your client, less maintenance for recalibration or very accurate readings due to old pipes under the streets.  Having the wisdom to focus on what is important to others be it short-term sales, or long-term customer retention, will speak volumes when it matches what is important to the other person in the conversation.  If it is valuable to them make it valuable to you.
 

     Competency 4: Planning

     Most married couples will plan to buy a home based on where they want their child to go to school.  Yet most of them will not spend enough time researching their next job position inside or outside of their current employer, until a vacancy opens or a recruiter calls with an opportunity.  Many individuals do not identify which key skills they need for their next position until they are not offered an interview for a position they desire.  Now is the time to plan which aptitude to develop for tomorrow’s promotion.

     No matter what the situation, at some point, you need to have a ‘plan’ of actions to move forward.  The first plan is how to improve on your weaknesses.  That may include; identifying a report’s or meeting’s objectives; who to contact; how to contact an individual; understanding their audience’s role; getting a group to accept a proposal or just planning one’s week.

     To be effective in today’s work environment, individuals need to be more active in their planning.  Who are they inviting to a meeting, what is the goal of the meeting, how much time for each part of the meeting, who will take notes, and how will people report back on their tasks are some examples of being more detail oriented on planning.
 

     If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.  I once went on a sales trip to Argentina. My company sales agent setup a meeting with the client of a large telecommunications company. The meeting was a complete failure because the sale agent did not know that the company was having financial problems, and that the client had been informed that he would be let go in two weeks. This customer was no longer in the position to make a purchasing decision!  Talk about poor planning, it cost my company thousands of dollars for that sales trip and no value was created.

Networking for Winners

     Competency 5: Communication

     In today’s high tech, always-connected world, people are easily distracted by all the information being communicated at them.  All this digital noise is being pumped to our smart phone or other digital device in a matter of seconds.  To communicate with others we need to plan our messages based on how others like to communicate.  If we are too busy to do something once, then we surely do not have the time to do it again.
 

     Additionally, we need to slow down our communication process to confirm that the individual really understood our message and the reason it is important to them.  We need to check for confirmation of details. We need to validate what we heard with what they really mean.  We must ensure that we summarize what was agreed or disagreed so that there are no misunderstandings afterwards.

     This connects with planning. Who do we contact by phone versus who do we write too. People that are talkers preferred to be called, and prefer short written messages. Individuals that like to read, like longer written messages with details and will ask for information in writing.
 

By c.j. Ng

I was recently talking to one of my clients, Philips Lighting, and they somehow started to ask me if I have any good sales people to recommend to them, so they can hire and strengthen their sales team.

In a candid response, I told them that while the job market is full of sales people, the really good ones are really hard to find.

So they responded and asked me why that is the case.  So I thought about it for a while, and told them what struck me as a phenomenon not just for sales people, but for all kinds of people.  The smart employees tend not to work as hard, and the hardworking employees tend not to work as smart. 

Sometimes, smart employees try to do more with less time and effort.  Most of the time, they ended up simply doing less.  Sometimes, the hardworking ones work round the clock non-stop, only to realise that all their hard work has got little (if any) impact on their goals or business results.  Only a handful few work hard AND smart at the same time.

So the next question is, what if we either could not find, or could not afford the higher pay as demanded by the smart-and-hardworking new hire?  Does that mean we will have to compromise our workforce's productivity as such?

The good news is no.  We don't have to make such compromises even though our new hires are not perfect.  In fact, we CAN quite easily train them to be smarter, and inspire them to make greater contributions.

Currently, I'm a certified facilitator with de Bono China, where we provide the tools to help us organise our thoughts, generate simple yet practical ideas, and drastically improve our creativity.  The Founder, Dr. Edward de Bono, has helped many companies and individuals to make quantum improvements to their bottom lines.  The most prominent case could possibly be the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, ALL previous other modern Olympics lost money.  Los Angeles became the ONLY bidder for the 1984 games, and the Olympics are falling into oblivion.  In fact, the 1984 Olympics made US$220 million PROFITS by doing the following "simple" things:

• Use existing facilities instead of building new ones; and

• Rather than relying on revenue on ticket sales, the 1984 games created history by selling corporate sponsorship and television broadcast rights.

The above strategies look simple, because they are viewed in hindsight.  Peter Ueberroth, the organiser of the 1984 Olympics, attributed his success from a talk by Dr. de Bono, which he attended a few years prior to the game.  If by merely attending a "talk" one can bring unprecedented success in an international sporting event,  learning to work a little smarter should be quite an easy objective to achieve.

Dr. de Bono will be coming to Beijing and Shanghai in October 2011.  You can download details here.

Now that you have made your people work smarter, time to get them work harder.

However, after getting smarter, they might turn around and ask you, "Why Should I Work so Hard for YOU?".

In fact, some companies intentionally make their employees less smart so that they don't ask questions like these.  However, if your competitors' people are a lot smarter than yours, you might be pushed out of business in very soon.

Hence, the responsibility of answering the above question lies on the leaders, rather than the followers.  If you are able to excite your people to exceptional performance, you will have a bunch of hardworking AND smart working people committed to your (and their) success.

In fact, "Why Should Anyone be Led by YOU" is the title of the most downloaded article in Harvard Business Review, and is now a best-selling business book, as well as an inspirational leadership training programme (which I'm one of the Certified Facilitators).

Hence, if you would like to boost your team's engagement to deliver exceptional business results, you will need to:

• Build a sense a Community

• Be Authentic

• Let your people feel Significant

• Excite them!

You can also refer to BlessingWhite's web site for more details.
 

If you would like to get more and better ideas how to make your people work smarter AND harder, you can e-mail info@directions-consulting.com or call +86-136 7190 2505 or Skype: cydj001 and arrange to buy me a mocha.  All information shall be kept in confidence.