How to Increase Your Value At Work

October 3, 2018

Ed EckensteinPrincipal Consultant & Coach, Smartly Secured

Kurt HaasCloud Architect, QuikTrip

How to Increase Your Value at Work

• Why Do I Need to Increase My Value?

• Hard Skills – Identify and Shape Them

• Soft Skills – the Hidden Tools

• Meaning

• Recap

• Q&A

Session Overview

The Challenge:Why Do I Need to Increase My Value?

Consider the Following:

- Do you want to "move up" in 5 years?- Do you deserve more recognition?- Replacement (outsource and cloud/MSP)- Displacement (automation and industry shifts)

Why Increase My Value?

Get the Promotion

- Start Now and Set Your Goal(s)- Map the Gap (getting there from here)- Measure Your Progress VISIBLY (MBO)- Find a Champion

Why Increase My Value?

Do you deserve more recognition?

- You're already "doing the work"- Put yourself in visible roles and goals- Knock it out of the park and celebrate- Don't sell yourself short (Champion)

Why Increase My Value?

Why Increase My Value?

The Quiet Urgencies:

- Replacement : Who can do your job better?

- Displacement: What can replace your role? (automation and industry shifts)

Why Increase My Value?

The Quiet Urgencies:

- Replacement : Who can do your job better?

- Displacement: What can replace your role? (automation and industry shifts)

Why Increase My Value?

"We stand on the brink of a technological revolution ... In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before …

When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace."

-World Economic Forum

Personal Goals:

- Better Pay- Personal Growth- Self Esteem / Self Confidence

Why Increase My Value?

Hard Skills:Identify and Shape Them

• Your Resume is a Register

• Don't Forget Your Training

• Capture Experiences

• Tell Stories that Leverage Expertise

• Stuck? Get help from people you work with

• Career Coach Advantage (someone that doesn’t know you)

• Evaluate Your Role in the Industry

• Identify the Goal and Gap

• Apply Skillset to Internal Demand

Don’t Lose Track of Your Hard Skills!

Apply/Advertise Your Skillset Internally

• portfolio website

• social intranet (talent profiling)

• linkedIn profile (be discoverable)

Hard Skills

• What can you change going forward?• Track anything and everything you’ve trained for

• Get excited about updating your resume regularly

• ‘Bucket List’ the things you want to learn more about

• Leverage people to help you in hard skills journey

• Learning new hard skills is not the only way to increase value (diminishing returns)

Hard Skills

Soft Skills:Your Hidden Toolset (and Advantage)

Soft Skills

"Training for soft skills is the #1 priority for talent development in 2018"

- Linkedin 2018 Workplace Learning Report

• Relationship building

• Interpersonal

• Listening

• Speaking

• Understanding

• Motivating

• Emotional Intelligence

• “Caught not Taught”

Soft Skills Leveraged

• Hire and Cultivate the Best Soft Skills

• Listen to Understand

• Build Relationships

• Partner to Solve Customer Challenges

• Advertise Their Capabilities

• Publish Whitepapers

• Share Business Cases

• Do the Numbers (Financial Work)

• Total Economic Impact

• Total Cost of Ownership

• Show the Payback: Value of Their Services

Out Softskilled: Cloud Service Providers

• Rate of Change in Technology

• Technology is Often Misunderstood (by us)

• IT Relegated to ‘Keep Lights On’ Roles

• Cloud Providers Commoditizing IT

• Only if duplicated

• Out-Communicated and Under-Valued

• Soft Skills are in Greatest Demand (but not demanded)

• Why Did Gartner Suggest ‘Doubling a Salary’

source: How to Set Your Priorities with Business Architecture

Urgency: Corporate IT Shifts

The Bridge of Commonalities

Use these soft skill techniques to work more effectively with others:

• Common Time

• Common Language

• Common Goals

• Relationships are a Deliverable

• Events and Conferences?

• Invite for Co-Learning Opportunities

• Open Events Remove Barriers

• Coffee (beverage of choice)

Creating Common Time

• Remove Uncommon Language

• Remove Acronyms

• Be Ready to Translate

• Focus on Understanding

• Sounding Smart Hinders Adoption of Your Idea

• Ideas Won’t be Adopted Unless They Are Understood

Building Common Language

• Listen

• Do You Understand Your Business Partner?

• Big Pains/Challenges

• Directions/Strategies?

• Illustrate

• Establish Common Words: Capabilities

• Visuals are More Powerful (tell a story)

• Get it Wrong! (and admit it)

• Get to the Why: Strategy

Common Language

• Listen

• Do You Understand Your Business Partner?

• Big Pains/Challenges

• Directions/Strategies?

• Illustrate

• Establish Common Words: Capabilities

• Visuals are More Powerful (tell a story)

• Get it Wrong! (and admit it)

• Get to the Why: Strategy

Common Language

• Exercise: Goal-to-Action Spectrum

• Understanding Views

• Arriving at Alternatives

Common Goals

• Exercise: Goal-to-Action Spectrum

• Understanding Views

• Arriving at Alternatives

Common Goals

TOP SOFT SKILL CATEGORIES1. Leadership2. Communication3. Collaboration4. Time Management

Soft Skills Demand

Source: Linkedin 2018 Workplace Learning Report

Soft Skills Demand Shifts

Source: Future of Jobs Report, World Economic Forum

Source: Future of Jobs Report, World Economic Forum

Soft Skills Demand Shifts

What can you change going forward?

• Look for Ways to Grow Towards the Business

• Re-Think How Soft Skills Can Articulate Your Value

• Work to Build Your Personal Brand

Shape Your Unique Brand by Assembling:

• Hard Skills

• Experiences

• Soft Skills

• Goals/Interests

Soft Skills

Meaning

Why?

Because the truth is, work does not define you: You define your work, and how it serves your higher-order purpose.-- Mautz, Scott.

85%

Not engaged (67%) or actively disengaged (18%)- Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2017

Image credit: Sean MacEntee via Flickr

Job Crafting

--(Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2013)

"Job crafting is what workers do to redefine and reimagine their job to make it more personally meaningful to them."

Meaning & Job Crafting

Berg, Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2013

Task Crafting

Relational Crafting

Cognitive Crafting

3Approaches

Meaning & Job Crafting

Berg, Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2013

Task CraftingChanging the activities involved in your job: more or fewer tasks • expanding or diminishing scope • altering the way tasks are performed

Examples:• An accountant creating a new method of

filing taxes to make her job less repetitive.• A machine operator volunteering to design a

new logo or his company.

Relational Crafting

Cognitive Crafting

Meaning & Job Crafting

Berg, Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2013

Task Crafting

Relational Crafting

Cognitive Crafting

Changing the extent or nature of your interactions with other people

Examples:• A computer technician offering help to co-

workers as a way to have more social connections.

• A financial analyst communicating with clients using video conferencing rather than just email.

Meaning & Job Crafting

Berg, Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2013

Task Crafting

Relational Crafting

Cognitive Crafting

Changing the way you think about the purpose of tasks, relationships, or the job as a whole

Examples:• A hospital cleaner seeing his work as a

means to help ill people rather than cleaning space.

• An insurance agent viewing her job as “working to get people back on track after a car accident” rather than “processing car insurance claims.”

Meaning

How to Jobcraft - 1

Identify your:

• Core Values: Fairness, Honesty, Achievement, Compassion, etc.

• Strengths: Talent, Soft Skills, Determination, Empathy, etc.

• Passions: What would you do for free?

Meaning

How to Jobcraft - 2

List required job tasks• What do you enjoy?• Which do you dislike?

How can you change things using Task, Relational or Cognitive crafting?

Meaning

• Be supportive and flexible

• Understand your employee values, strengths, passions

• Help them discover organizational, job and task meaningfulness• Ask open ended questions

• Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage

Management Support?

Meaning

• Higher level of self-motivation

• Better performance

• Deeper commitment to the job

• Higher job satisfaction

Benefits to Organization

How to Increase Your Value at Work

• Why Do I Need to Increase My Value?

• Hard Skills – Identify and Shape Them

• Soft Skills – the Hidden Tools

• Meaning

• Recap and Challenge

• Q&A

Session Overview

Hard Skills

• “Hard skills will get you an interview, but you need soft skills to get (and keep) the job”

Soft Skills

• "The Soft Skills Are The Hard Skills"--Amy Edmondson

Meaning

"Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."-- Viktor Frankl

Q & A

Thank YouSlides Available on Request

Ed ed@smartlysecured.comKurt kurt.w.has@gmail.com