How to Describe All the Value When You Want to Influence

leadership conceptHow to Describe All the Value When You Want to Influence​​

Do you ever wonder how to describe the value of the changes you've led or want to lead? Fred, a project leader, needs a new job. His company—despite his project's success—laid him off. He needs to influence hiring managers to look at his resume so he can land an interview.

Fred needs to articulate the value of his experiences.

This value explanation is similar to people who want to influence which projects to fund or when a consultant offers a proposal to a client. However, the funding or consulting influence examples are not about past behavior but are about the expected value of future changes.

That means each case requires writing about the three facets of value: tangible, intangible, and peripheral. We are more likely to succeed in our influence when we specify all three.

We're all familiar with tangible value.

Tangible Value Focuses on Money or Time

Fred, our project manager looking for a new job, knew he offered plenty of tangible value to potential employers. His most recent project leadership experience proved that.

As the PM, he supported the team so they could reduce the size of each story, stop multitasking, and decrease their cycle time. That allowed the team to release what customers wanted faster. Just three months into the project changes, the company acquired more an additional 5% more customers. In addition, the company saw sales and service revenue rise by 10%.

Fred wasn't sure he—alone—could claim those results. Fred needed to choose how he described his results. He finally decided on this wording:

  • Led team to investigate their cycle time and learn to create smaller stories. As a result of their new collaboration, the team's product saw a rise in sales and service revenue of 10% after three months. Also saw a 5% increase in customer acquisition.

Fred might have also discussed reducing the organization's Cost of Delay and other quantitative data, but he decided to save that for the interviews. Now it was time to move to intangible value.

Intangible Value Focuses on How People Feel

Fred noticed that as the team finished features faster, they clarified the product's purpose. In addition, the team members felt as if they got better at their work. That's when Fred decided to describe the intangible benefits of his work. He finally wrote:

  • The team's morale increased. Each person felt as if they mastered more of their craft. And because the team delivered more often, the team's autonomy grew. The new ease of working meant the product leader could create experiments and learn as they proceeded. The product leader was able to prune the possible features much faster, a benefit that cut a couple of months off the expected project duration.

Now, it was time for peripheral benefits.

Peripheral Value Focuses on Indirect Benefits, Often Avoidance

Before Fred was able to aid the team in changing how they worked, he noticed four of the seven people on the team had changed their social media profiles to “Open to work.”

Fred knew that the cost to replace a knowledge worker tends to range from 50-120% of their yearly salary, depending on their seniority. He was unsure of anyone's annual salary. So he used a floor of $100,000 and the 50% replacement cost. That meant that by changing how the team worked, Fred was able to avoid additional costs of $200,000.

Fred wrote:

  • Able to retain all project staff throughout the project. We delivered on time and within budget, allowing the team to start a new project.

While Fred did not write those peripheral costs in his resume, he did use them in interviews.

Describe All Three Costs and Savings for the Most Influence

While these three benefits work for updating a resume, they work even better if you want to influence project funding decisions or win a consulting proposal. In those cases, remember to include Cost of Delay for tangible value, and collaboration capabilities for intangible value.

Describe all three facets of value for your best chance of influencing someone else. And if you're like me, you'll also persuade yourself of all the value.

The three facets of value come from Successful Independent Consulting: Relationships that Focus on Mutual Benefit. In addition, this newsletter touches on topics in Manage Your Job Search, and Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization.

Learn with Johanna

My new (!) editor has the manuscript for Successful Independent Consulting: Relationships that Focus on Mutual Benefit. Don’t buy the book yet, unless you want to see how much I changed between the original version and this version.

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© 2023 Johanna Rothman

Pragmatic Manager: Vol 20, #2, ISSN: 2164-1196

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