How to Translate Value

Each level of manager in each separate department, division, or unit has more or less responsibility and, therefore, smaller or broader measures depending on his or her level. This is one part of going back to the basics.

Another part of the basics that many of WLP professionals miss is that each level of your audience will not make the translation for you of what, say, a change in rework rates means to material costs, COGS, or contribution profit margin. Because many WLP professionals are not comfortable with the language of financial measures or skilled in mapping financial value chains, it is easy to fall into the trap of hoping it will be obvious how valuable they are if they speak the language of performance.

In the Information Age, people have no time. They are completely focused on value in the terms that they know it by. They simply will not translate for you what you are trying to say. Your Senior managers want you to act like a salesperson. A key reason is that salespeople know it is their job to make that translation because no one will give five minutes of their time to translate for them.

A personal story may help illustrate this point. I once worked for a high-level sales manager who had a short attention span and a blunt communication style. I interviewed him as part of a research study on how executives viewed the value of human performance technology (HPT). During that interview, I asked this manager what he believed the value of HPT to be. His response was that it was not his job to tell me what the value of HPT was. It was my job to tell him. He had people approaching him every day telling him exactly why and how they could help him accomplish his goals. If I could not tell him why HPT was valuable to him, then I was wasting my time and his.

Important ‚  

Translating value is your job. If you force others to make a translation for you, they will either assume there is no value, or they will draw their own conclusion. Just as in the game of ‚“Rumor, ‚½ their conclusions may not bear any resemblance to what you wanted them to hear. That can be disastrous to making a sale. It is also disastrous in communicating value. If you are being looked at as though you didn ‚ t get the ROI codeword, the first thing to determine is whether you stated your value in terms that matched their level in their measures.