Boost Your Company’s Value&And Your Own

If you want to feel more valued by your superiors, you should focus on increasing your organization’s revenue and profit and doing more with less. With such a bottom-line focus at almost all business today, executives and managers are being pressed to deliver more without a dramatic increase in resources.

The good news is that executives and managers today feel more valued by their superiors than they did a few years ago. In a survey over a base of 2,000 senior executives and managers, NFI Research found that six out of 10 respondents feel either significantly or somewhat more valued than in the past.

“My value tends to be greater during difficult times,” said one survey respondent. “We have just come through two years of tough times and my position had a much greater value.”

Even though businesspeople are feeling more valued today, there still is pressure to keep that value high, and not everyone views this as a positive.

“Unfortunately, management-value today is relegated to a person’s ability to increase revenue and decrease costs,” said one respondent. “It seems as if leadership, compassion and fairness with employees and the ability to keep the business moving in the right direction isn’t enough anymore. It’s about profits; you don’t make enough, you’re not valued.”

“Finding new and innovative ways for the organization to increase its profits is always the challenge,” said another.

This focus on making and increasing the numbers also can have a negative impact.

“Executives seem so preoccupied with meeting the Wall Street quarterly projection that they no longer spend time listening to their direct reports,” said one manager. “The best solutions often work their way up through the structure. We are gradually losing touch with our best resource, our people.”

According to our survey, the top three things executives and managers feel they could do to be more highly valued by their organizations are, in order:

• increase revenue
• do more with less
• increase profit.

“We are currently living in a period of doing more with less,” said one respondent. “I have just joined a new employer and my focus is to find ways to improve the company at the lowest cost possible. New ideas are valued more since management skills are expected from you.”

Significantly more managers than senior executives say they would provide more value if they provided creative ideas. Also, significantly more managers than executives feel they would provide more value by assuming more responsibility. Only nine percent of senior executives said that taking on more responsibility would make them more valuable.

Of course, value can be quite subjective.

“My organization has been excellent at recognizing the value I provide to it, probably more that I do myself,” said one survey respondent. “Unfortunately, that isn’t true across the board. We seem to have a very whimsical method for deciding who and what brings value to the organization.”

“I probably do more than the overall organization is aware, if this was self promoted it would lead to additional recognition of my value to the organization,” said another.

This bottom-line world is here to stay for the foreseeable future, so might as well align with it, if you haven’t already.