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Are You a Sought After Adder of Value?

Think carefully before answering this question. Your answer will determine if you will be invited for a return engagement to the C-Suite.  Answer affirmatively, and you will be expected to prove it, early and often. Answer negatively or demonstrate you are not a value-adder, and you are guaranteed to become an exile banned forever from ethically accessing the C-Suite.

Those who occupy the C-suite have too little time and too many strategic decisions. The patience-threshold of those at the top of the corporate pyramid is very narrow. The successful ones depend on staff and trusted advisors to lighten their decision-making burdens so they can focus on what really matters most to fulfill their CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, CMO or other Chief duties and expectations.  

The conjunctive noun: value-adder carries obligations. The higher one climbs up the corporate ladder the greater the expectation of shared value. Deliver high value often and others will seek you.

Value, at this stage, is relevant, accurate, insight that enables Chiefs to consistently make informed, correct decisions. Time and outcomes reveal whether a decision is correct or incorrect.

Notice I said: insight, NOT information. This distinction is important. Information is a free, readily accessible commodity that may be true or false. Staff credentials carry the expectation of skilled Information-gleaning skills when accessing the World Wide Web and its seemingly infinite resources.

Insight is information with a dose of expertise from first-hand experience or substantiated secondary sources. Insight is the platinum standard in the corporate or C-Suite information game.

The expertise of the insight provider must be established as a credible, trustworthy source; otherwise, the shared insight of the bearer is of marginal value.  The very first challenge of a value-adder is to establish trust-worthiness as a reliable, consistently accurate insight-provider.

This process begins outside the domain of C-Suite occupants. Often, it begins with a subordinate. Sometimes it arrives on the wings of a peer.  Even someone in another company or institution who the C-Suite occupant knows and respects can be the bearer of relevant insight.

Becoming a value-adder of insightful information is a disciplined process one must acquire and repeatedly exercise to master. Recently, I overheard a truism of our instant gratification society:

“In a society where average is the standard few people are willing to sweat to achieve excellence.”

Becoming an excellent value-adder of insightful information sought after by C-Suite occupants requires sweat equity plus the application of disciplined rules. These I will share in my next blog posting.

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