Do you ever think your boss, or their boss are thinking are you really worth your salary?
What a stupid question, of course you are.
Each day you just about keep your head above the water. Context switching between projects, escalations, decisions, meetings, emails, etc. You go home drained and return the next day for the next onslaught. You are working full out to keep everything you committed to on track.
But, have you ever stopped and thought?
- Am I really working on the things that add the most value to the organisation?
- Am I really using my knowledge and experience?
- Am I doing what I am really good at or could I do this standing on my head?
- Am I giving a ten times return on investment?
No, me neither until a colleague of mine Tom Reynolds taught me about value mapping and helped with an exercise on how I can apply this to my role.
What’s Should You Be Doing Instead?
After a lot of thinking and many diagrams, I ended up with two lists –
List 1 – Everything I do today i.e.
- Escalations
- Priority calls
- Decisions
- Programme & Project status meetings
- Admin, tons of Admin
- …
List 2 – Everything I should be doing that add the most value i.e.
- Strategic thinking
- Relationship and expectation management
- Using my experience and internal knowledge to make things better
- Process optimisation
- Coaching, mentoring and helping my team
- Giving back by being involved in regional initiatives
- …
A New Valuable Me
I took this and drew it out on the white board in my office and during the day I would validate what I was doing against it.
If it wasn’t in list 2, then I would work out on how to eliminate it if I could, i.e.
- What’s the root cause of all the escalations?
- Can I delegate or batch this?
- Why go to an hour meeting, when a five-minute call will have the same result?
After a long time, hard work from me and my team, I started to spend more of my time each day in List 2. The list where I add the most value.
Wrap Up
I use this same strategy today for my business i.e. if I am not having a conversation with a client or potential client every hour of my working day or doing what I need to do to create that conversation, then I don’t do it.
Work out where you really add value to the organisation and start doing more of list 2, because if you don’t then leaders like me will be asking whether you are really worth your salary.
Nick