Know your worth

There is a lot of talk about how Americans need to be more “competitive” in a global marketplace. I don’t want to write about that today, though. Instead, I’m more interested in talking about your competitiveness and how you can make sure that you don’t lose sight of your talents and what you are worth.

The longer you do something, the easier it can get to lose perspective. If you stay in the job for a long time, chances are, you’ll start to get better at it or you’ll get fired. The longer you’re working for a company, the more you start to create shortcuts to your own prosperity.

Whether these shortcuts allow you ample time to focus on things that matter to you, opportunities for advancement or access to key people who can influence your career positively; it’s natural to get into a role and start seeking out affirmation for the good you do on a daily basis.

Whether you get affirmed regularly or not, it’s very important to know how much value you provide your company. Objective measures of this can come from performance evaluations, comments from colleagues and subordinates or from management within the organization.

First off, you need to know what you’re good at. In a declining economy, no job is really safe. Everyone seems to be cutting back and so, it’s critical to understand what your raw talents are. What are your assets? What do you bring to the table and do better than anyone else in the world?

It can be really easy to attribute your success in a particular situation to “how good you are” and to leave it at that. While that might be true — you could be “that good” — you have to recognize how much your success is reliant on the conditions of your particular job. Where you might thrive in one place, going somewhere else with different conditions and the same you, could result in a very different set of outcomes.

If you don’t know what you do best, you might never reach your full potential. For some, that’s okay, because life is a series of tradeoffs and what you do in your career isn’t the defining thing for most people’s life satisfaction. But it’s important to recognize inherently what you do best, because an ability to nurture and grow those talents, can allow you to thrive and remain confident about your career options even in the most trying economic climate.

Reading, Writing and Big Ideas is a blog by Ron Bronson about starting a business, higher education, web strategy and life in the millennial workplace. Subscribe to the blog via RSS or email.

Entry-level boredom

Whenever I have to give my more competent student workers assignments that are best described as “busy work,” I often feel the need to provide caveats to them that it’s a temporary thing and communicate how much I value their dedication and ideas. Their energy and their tireless desire to work feverishly in pursuit of the goal — even if sometimes they’re moving so fast they forget to do something — is an admirable goal.

But in the end, they’re just students and the sum of their value isn’t something you can always overstate. After all, they’re gone if they can make more money working at the gym (where they can do their homework) or find a better situation that meets their goals more suitably.

I find the balancing act of sustaining the curiosity and professional development of junior employees — especially in the millennial age — to be one of great importance. Fact is, you can invigorate your organization from the ideas of your students and younger staffers by harnessing their ideas to positively impact your bottom line.

But you have to straddle that line between embracing new and big ideas with understanding the constraints of leadership to really be able to free people to do their best work. Leaders are often constrained by the inflexibility of their circumstances (at work) to do much to free their people to do ‘good works’ while keeping them fired up. On the same token, most millennials don’t understand the power structure (due to lack of experience) well enough to understand why they’re not able to have more influence on what happens, why things work the way they do and their role in the hierarchy.

Even if they do understand, they still want more say and to be able to impact the way things work. They want more say, they want to influence and to be able to control the way things work more directly. In the way that past generations were motivated through grassroots movements that affected change at the government level, this generation is far more insidious. They want to affect everything because they feel like their talents, their energy and their insights are more acute than their predecessors.

What generation doesn’t think they are the best and brightest, relative to the past? The real issue here is, how to deal with scores of young employees who don’t understand why they can’t have more say or fail to understand why you can’t do more to change their frustration with the status quo.

Three things to keep in mind are:
1) Communication: If you can’t talk to your people, take a class and learn how. We all communicate differently, but the real point is sharing

relevant

information to the people who need it. Delegating the communications process might make your life easier sometimes, but you’ll pay for it with the lost loyalty of your people. No matter what the news is, people want to hear it from their leaders.

2) Development: When you hire people, develop them. If you feel their valuable enough to put on the payroll, they you need to value them enough to invest in their future professionally. Not everyone is cut out to be a future leader, but that doesn’t mean you can create their leadership qualities. If you think of them as a video game, you want your characters to ‘max’ out on their attributes, to better equip them to embark on the quest they’re preparing for.

I realize that loyalty is fleeting (relatively) these days amongst workers young and old, who don’t have the gold watch and the retirement check as their motivators. But those folks will eventually weed themselves out anymore. It’s well worth it to find the ones who seek the success that the skills you give them will eventually lead to.

3) Focus Them: It’s not always about the prize. Not always about the destination. While it’s about success, it’s also about the execution you employ to get there.

I’m always amazed by the simple focus and tenacity of workers in retail. These folks are the backbone of an industry that generates billions. Folks who don’t make six figures, run stores that make millions and don’t bat an eyelash about it. Many of them are just young people, getting their first job experiences and are finding themselves in the world. Everyone knows they are likely to be transient, that these jobs are just a stepping stone to where they’ll end up next.

Yet, no one questions their loyalty and wonders whether they truly care. They serve us, we applaud their dedication in the form of tips or other pats on the back…and yet, we castigate them as soon as they put on some slacks and show up in the so-called professional workplace.

We all have a role to play in developing our entry-level team members.

Reading, Writing and Big Ideas is a blog by Ron Bronson about starting a business, higher education, web strategy and life in the millennial workplace. Subscribe to the blog via RSS or email.