Increase your value!

A ship is carrying vital equipment to a far out destination. The captain and his crew have to travel by sea for a period of two months before they get to where they are going. With modern navigation equipment, the cargo ship can practically sail itself as turbo engines, sextans and radars as well as compasses and modern radio communications equipment are at hand to aid their journey. But after barely two weeks at sea, the ship enters a category six storm. The Captain, a veteran of the seven seas, is confident that they would pull through, but he has to demonstrate that confidence to the rest of the crew, many of whom have never seen a storm of this magnitude. Morale must be high. Such is the calling of leadership. On the third day, when the storm doesn’t abate, the captain engages in emergency measures. Every member of the crew walks deck with a life jacket on. He hits the radio with a May Day distress call desperately searching for land and begins to consult the boatswain about throwing weighty cargo that is the least important overboard, so that the ship can ride the storm better with a lighter hull. Left to the Captain, they would not throw anything overboard but survival strategies demand desperate measures. His navigator is perusing a map to find out exactly where they could head to and find land.
Imagine that the ship is your place of work and the storm is the economy in which you operate. In a distressed economy, companies often embark upon desperate measures to stay afloat. One of the most extreme is downsizing where “the least important individuals” are let go, cutting overheads with a view to making the organization “leaner and meaner”. If your company enters troubled waters next financial year do think you will be asked to leave? From an owner’s perspective, if you had to choose to cut people from among your trusted employees, who would you let go? Most entrepreneurs are not sentimental and they would send those whose services are the least important to the company home in a jiffy.
The challenge for the modern day employee is to increase his value to the company or organization he works for as rapidly as possible. Two perspectives come to mind here: qualifications and qualities. The business world harps on qualifications to a very large extent. Certificates often bear witness to the competence of the individual, but in a world that is changing, with demands on the modern employee veering into the extraordinary, beyond the acquisition of certificates, there is the urgent need for us to acquire qualities that are deemed useful to the organization where we earn our living. So in order for you not to be among the discarded cargo in a turbulent storm, increase your value!
Every organization requires employees that can deploy soft skills beyond their core technical training. Leading a project or a team to accomplish a task; public speaking abilities that can help in clear, concrete and convincing presentations; persuasion skills that can sway a client to agree to organizational terms and conditions or encourage people to open their wallets and finance a process or project;reading and comprehension skills that can aid a person to peruse a document and summarize its essence with a clear understanding; negotiation skills that enable an individual to specify changing timelines, costs and components of products without losing the interest of the client or customer; Initiative and creativity that leads to new ideas and strategies that can serve the organization to differentiate itself in a competitive environment.
No matter what level of work you find yourself in, whether you operate from the corner office as the boss , the C suite as a middle level manager or even at the lower rung of the scalar chain, you can raise your value to the organization by design. Ask yourself: what is the most important function I carry out for the organization? How can I perfect it? What else can I do that is of importance? Do I ask questions that show I am interested in changing wasteful situations and improving on my performance? Everyone likes an ideas person. Someone who will readily and creatively make suggestions at a meeting that could solve problems is respected and appreciated. Are you that person?
At the orientation meeting that is held for new intakes at major organizations, the Human Resource Manager is always on the lookout for employees who will evolve with the work force and become more valuable with the time they spend in the organization. In every organization there two kinds of employees: there are those who will remain almost the same after spending a long period in employment. They have reached a plateau and cannot develop further. But there are also employees that will continue to acquire qualities and skills with all their days in the employ of the organization. So when you are considering taking up a new position in an organization or starting a new business function, ask yourself: With this new challenge I am taking on, what will I become? It’s a tragedy for you to remain just as you were when you started.
One philosophy we need to adopt beyond acquiring qualities is the attitude of repaying trust with excellence. In the biblical stories of old, a young man called Joseph was sold into slavery and ended up in prison. Wherever he found himself he repaid trust with excellence. Whatever job you are given to do is often based on a level of trust. If you can repay that trust with an excellent performance, then you would be trusted with more responsibilities. Such is the nature of work. So seek out ways to improve your value today and when the ship enters troubled waters, you will not be cast overboard among the least valued cargo in the hull.