The Eye of the Beholder

If ever there were a loaded word, value would be it. One person may believe your value as a WLP professional is fantastic, but another may scoff in disbelief. There are good reasons why each person perceives the value of WLP professionals so differently. The first and most important one is how the measures ‚ especially financial measures ‚ of an organization affect audience perspective.

In an organization, each individual ‚ s value is determined by how well they meet the financial metrics or financial measures of their job. Therefore, people value what helps them meet their measures more easily; for example, fewer customer complaints about their helpdesk technical advice or what helps them improve the level of the measures they pay attention to every day (a smaller cost of goods sold). People are people, no matter what level or job title they hold. The fact that people manage their behavior to meet their measurement objectives holds true, whether you ‚ re talking about individual contributors or the top officers of the largest multinational organizations.

The recognition that people manage their behavior based on how they are measured and that they value what helps them with those measures has been well known for decades. The issue in communicating value does not lie in whether you are moving the bar on people ‚ s metrics; it lies in your audience ‚ s ability to quickly (in 30 seconds or less) make the connection between what you are doing and their own personal benefit. Most of the time, that connection is very hard to make without help.

Because this point cannot be overemphasized, this book offers stories of WLP professionals just like you who have dealt with the challenge of making the financial value connection.