Quantify your Successes.

Perhaps my biggest piece of advice for someone in an operational role is to quantify your value. Whether your daily focus is efficiency, productivity, revenue (or something else), keeping score of the game you are playing will only help you tell the story behind your true worth. The first thing any operator should do is understand what KPIs exist in their function and if nothing does, push to create them.

The same principle goes for anyone looking to grow their career or get that next promotion. Come performance review time, you will be asked to showcase the value you have brought to your company. You better be ready. You can choose to wait for someone to do this for you or proactively establish your value. I have chosen the latter and it has worked wonders for my career.

Here is my framework for quantifying my professional value.

1. Understand what will make your boss successful. Create KPIs around this.

   • In line with my earlier post on choosing the right manager, your ultimate goal should be to get the person above you a raise.

   • Align your priorities with theirs. If you are tracking a metric that isn’t in line with your bosses objectives or key results, you are tracking the wrong thing.

   • Gaining crystal clarity on their success measures is your priority #1. Review their annual/quarterly performance plan together.

2. Apply the ‘Forward’ technique.

   • Ensure that your KPIs are easily accessible. If you don’t have the appropriate portal to pull this data from, employ an analyst to do that (or do it yourself). Often times data can be tough to get your hands on (e.g. company costs, quality metrics, etc.). There are multiple ways to get it, but it needs to be done thoughtfully and systemically.

   • The more accessible a KPI is, the easier it can be pushed through the organization. This will only help strengthen your path to value.

   • If you don’t have a process to put your functional KPIs in an email, create one. Be mindful about the content and recipients (maybe it is just to your team, maybe it is your manager, maybe its a company function). Make this email recurring to create a culture around the KPI.

   • Importantly, expect this email to spread like wildfire after you send and be okay when it does. Assume this email will get forwarded at least two levels up in the organization.

   • Ensure that whatever KPIs are inside of this email resonates with someone two levels above you. Not only should you be looking to make your boss successful, but also your boss’ boss.

3. Don’t become single threaded.

   • One of the phenomenons about creating a KPI is that it provides purpose and clarity for yourself and your peers or team. While it usually starts great (it’s refreshing to see progress in real time), it can become paralyzing if not managed appropriately.

   • I once experienced this with a margin KPI we had set. Once we set up a dashboard to report on gross margin of our product, it quickly became an obsession. The data was so accessible to everyone that too many conversations centered around only that KPI. We lost sight of other business objectives like customer centricity and started making decisions like robots. This is an extreme case, but make sure any KPI is supplemented with other business metrics (like net promoter score, recurring revenue, etc). Otherwise, you can be quickly viewed as a one-trick-pony and create the wrong professional culture and brand within a team or organization.

4. Performance reviews should not be annual.

   • Taking this back full circle, once you have set up your own KPIs, a meaningful method to report against them, and you begin seeing progress or dips in their value, talk to your boss about them!

   • Treat each 1x1 like an analyst who is watching the stock market. Unpack the trends you are seeing, center the conversation around improvements, discuss root causes for better or worse.

   • Whether your performance is reviewed quarterly, bi-annually, or annually (each company has different HR techniques), you now will have meaningful metrics to evaluate yourself on.

   • Your performance discussion has moved away from the low-hanging fruit topics that bad managers often fixate on (“your attitude is….”) and transitioned to a data-driven evaluation of tangible impact you have brought to your company.

   • More importantly, your manager can easily and actively campaign for your growth through data points that showcase just how important you are.