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Familiar, Comfortable, Confident


Familiar, Comfortable, Confident

Human resource management and development is starting to move into the executive boardroom. If you want to gain more recognition, respect, resources, or ability to help the people you serve, you cannot avoid numbers. The answer lies in becoming more familiar, comfortable, and confident in using numbers to understand, identify, demonstrate , and communicate value.



Let ‚ s Review:

  • Communicating value depends on a command of financial terms and a clear, concise structure that summarizes the most important points in 30 seconds or less.

  • The terms used to communicate value must correspond to the measures that the audience pays attention to every day.

  • A seat at the table will only be gained if the WLP professional acquires the ability to think like a general manager or salesperson, to think strategically and not tactically, to understand financial statements, and to sell.

  • Financially based communication has been shown to significantly increase persuasiveness, sales, and job search success.

  • Understanding how much their performance improvements have improved the bottom line can be just as important to participants as it is to their executives.

In the next chapter, you ‚ ll uncover one of the most important keys to communicating comfortably and confidently with numbers. That key unlocks the secret code behind the numbers and measures that make up value.



Chapter 2: Decoding Value

In this Chapter:

  • Step 1 of the financial value process: define audience

  • How to play the game and break the ROI code

  • How cascading metrics create financial value chains

  • How to translate from the language of performance to the language of finance and back again

  • Why you must make the translation clear for your audience

  • Why understanding your audience ‚ s ROI timeframe makes a difference in getting them to pay attention to your value statements.

‚“What is my return-on-investment for this program? ‚½ This question is one of the most frustrating questions today ‚ s WLP professional can face. Even if you, as a WLP professional, give what you think is a good answer, you may often get the sinking feeling that your audience is thinking politely that you just don ‚ t get it. Even if you ‚ ve gone to the effort to determine a return-on-investment answer of, for example, 125 percent, you may still be left with the sense that you didn ‚ t answer the real question and that you ‚ ve blown it, but you don ‚ t know why. What went wrong?



How the ROI Game Works

When people say ‚“my return-on-investment ‚½ or ‚“my ROI ‚½ or ‚“my value ‚½ for a program, sometimes they are asking for a number such as 125 percent, but more often, they are not. They are using ROI as a codeword ‚ a codeword that means something different for each person who uses it. To see how fast the definition of value changes and why it is important to be able to connect your answer to what is meant by each individual person, let ‚ s reminisce about a childhood game of communication called ‚“Rumor. ‚½

Children usually play ‚“Rumor ‚½ with eight to 10 people. The players sit in a chain, and someone volunteers to go first. The first person makes up a rumor: the more fantastic, the better. He or she then whispers the rumor into the ear of the next person, who in turn whispers it to the next person, and so on. When the rumor reaches the last person, he or she announces what he or she heard . Then the first person in the chain shares the original rumor, which usually bears little resemblance to the rumor after it ‚ s been passed along by all the children in the chain.

Important ‚  

Understanding value in an organization works much the same way as the game of ‚“Rumor. ‚½ What is described as valuable in an organization changes as it moves from the beginning of the chain (a senior executive) to the end (the individual performer). What ‚ s different in an organization is that the change in how value is described is much more predictable than in a simple game of ‚“Rumor. ‚½ That predictability is the key to breaking the ROI codeword.

Using the principle of cascading metrics, the financial measures at the top (profit, liquidity ratios, cash flows) are always broken down into more specific measures for the next layer of management. That management layer breaks the metrics down again. Eventually, what began as the financial measures of the top officers becomes the performance metrics of the individual contributor .