What Value Did I Create Today?

By far the most powerful tool I have for personal development, growth and delivering results is self evaluation and evaluation of the organization or teams I am responsible for.

This is an extremely simple process whereby I simply ask myself, "What value did I create today". as a minimum I will ask myself this when I get back in the car to drive home each evening, but I will often ask myself the same question throughout the day.

Value can be created and delivered in many different ways, revenue generation, improving efficiency, strengthening client relationships, progressing initiatives and the list goes on. The important point is that the value can be demonstrated during that day.

By way of example, yesterday I created value through highlighting the need to increase our patent applications, delegated the responsibility and agreed the timelines, wrote an introduction for our 3 year growth strategy session and set up a prep meeting for next week, refined our internal promotion strategy for 2 key positions, contributed to our pricing strategy for a tender which is due in tomorrow, spoke to a key client and obtained valuable feedback on why we were unsuccessful on a recent tender, proposed an optimization to our project review and reporting process and issued an offer for a new combined office and warehouse facility to allow us to combine later this year. All in all, I can comprehensively justify to myself that I have added value to the organization that day.

I will also encourage others to use the same concept. It doesn't matter where you are in the organization, the same principle applies and ultimately, the more value you add, the more important you are to the organization. This is the advise I give to all graduates starting out, add as mush value as possible, ask he question on a daily basis - if you add significant value, you will progress.