How do some professionals make $600,000 per year (before the bonuses) while the average professional makes only $60,000?
Is it because the higher paid professionals have more experience? Better credentials?
No.
Instead, higher paid professionals offer a specific business function that enables their bosses, shareholders and stakeholders to reach the outcomes THEY want.
Read closely here… “The outcomes they want”.
Contrary to what most mainstream professionals think, these are not just the business outcomes they are responsible for (like hitting a sales quota). It also includes, and is perhaps dominated by, the personal outcomes they want to achieve as well (like getting a sales bonus).
So far so good. The outcomes they want – and what ultimately motivates them to hire you for a high-value job – aren’t just what’s written on paper. It also includes their selfish interests. Common sense…
But It’s Not Just Common Sense
You see… This shift in recognizing the “personal outcomes they want” as the driver of hiring decisions changes the entire landscape!
When you truly understand this core concept, you realize that your job isn’t actually about the job itself. It’s not about the value you produce. It’s not about hitting your KPIs (key performance indicators) or growing the share price by x%.
Yes, those are parts of the job. But they are not the deciding factor that moves decision makers. They are the rationalizations, cliff-notes and perhaps even excuses they use to justify what is really driving their decisions.
The real driving decision is them getting their way. The personal outcomes they want.
That’s just how the human brain works…
In this context, the #1 secret to becoming a high-value professional is learning “how to align with the drives of decision makers”, which in practical terms translates to “how to let the people you’ll be working for feel that their trust and confidence in you will PERSONALLY pay off”.
How To Get The High-Value Job
It’s actually quite straight forward. You have to understand – and satiate – the core motivations decision makers with power and authority have. Here are the top three:
Delegation – the desire to give you goals and have them accomplished, rather than instructing you step-by-step and babysitting you along the way.
Yes, counter to what many act like, most managers actually want to delegate. But since most managers are bad managers, they either don’t know how to effectively delegate, or don’t understand that sticking their nose in every little detail of your job is grossly unprofitable.
Good leaders don’t want to micromanage, they want to lead. They don’t want to be bogged down with the details. They want YOU to take care of all the details. That’s why they’re paying you – to take the pain of all the details away.
That’s why good leaders ONLY hire people that can be delegated to. And yes, while there are ways of squeezing value out of people who have to be instructed every step of the way (see the history of standardization at McDonalds for a stellar example of this process done right), even in such environments, good leaders still don’t micromanage. They still delegate. This time, however, they separate themselves from the fuss by hiring supervisors and line managers, who are delegated with the task of micromanaging the rank and file that need their value squeezed out.
Good leaders only delegate. Any manager worth their salt seeks people who can be delegated to.
Promotion – the desire to get ahead and get to the next step.
Yes, with every new job or promotion, there is a honeymoon phase where you focus on the novelty of the job and get excited about work. But, with varying speeds depending on your personality profile (see “The Personality of the Politically Ambitious” Dynes et al), it fades and is replaced with the urge to figure out the next step.
Ambition is a part of life. And in business, you are either growing or dying. Same applies to your profession. You are either climbing up, or you are falling down.
When it comes to hiring high-value talent, the second biggest motivator is the manager’s own promotion. When hiring, managers ask questions like: “will hiring this person make me get ahead faster?”, “will they make me look better?”, “can they be groomed to become my successor so that when I move up, I have someone I can trust taking over”.
When they interview you, they may ask questions like “where do you see yourself in five years?” or “what do you want to do in five years?” or even “tell me about a conflict with your last boss?”. When they do so, one of the key considerations is, “how are you going to be valuable to my promotion plans?”.
Make no mistake: When managers hire someone for a high-value job, they are secretly dreaming about their next promotion and how your hire fits into their grand scheme.
Loyalty – the desire to know that the hire is going to be someone who can be trusted and relied upon, and will not stab you in the back.
Since the Freedman revolution, which established the Freedman Doctrine as the law of corporate culture – where the sole responsibility of a corporation became increasing value to its shareholders – the old sense of loyalty where you had to put your time in and be patient with a corporation also died.
Today, self-interest rules our (relatively) free markets, and those who do not embrace it, those who still remain in the old domesticated paradigm of loyalty to a corporation, operate on an outdated set of assumptions that lead to failure.
All that being said, the corporate world is NOT a Hobbesian nightmare where everyone is constantly trying to screw each other over. That’s not how the world works either, because that’s against human nature – we are not all psychopaths.
People like people, especially those that they see regularly, become familiar with and work with to achieve collective goals. It’s in our blood. We like to coalesce into tribes and form in-groups that look out for one another.
In summary it’s a bit of both worlds. People like, work with and protect each other as long as their self-interests are broadly aligned. But people also have very little loyalty to one another in the corporate structure.
Here’s where it gets spicy…
When it comes to high-value jobs, the temptation to turn on your boss for personal benefit is very real and periodically presents itself. It’s possible to screw the boss over and take his place, and as long shareholder profits are protected, the corporation doesn’t care.
This is why, a disloyal and unethical hire into a high-value position, can be ruinous for the manager!
Manager’s want loyalty, even more than they normally do, when hiring high-value professionals. Remember that…
The Real Job of a High-Value Professional
Now… Given these three, intrinsic, unspoken and deep rooted desires (delegation, promotion, and loyalty), your job as a high-value professional is to, throughout your communication:
- Demonstrate loyalty
- Display a capacity to handle complex delegations to success
- Inspire a sense that you will lead to your boss being recognized and promoted
How you do this is very interesting… We call it:
The “Evidence Procedure”
Ask yourself this question: “How will they perceive that they’ve achieved their goals of delegation, promotion and loyalty from you?”
How will the physical environment change? How will your boss know they’ve hit their goals? How will they feel?
In other words, what evidence will there be that they were able to:
- Delegate to you with success and were able to eliminate all the clutter and minutia in their mind related to your role, making managing you effortless
- Get recognized, rewarded and promoted much faster and beyond their expectations
- Could rely on you on tough and dangerous times where you helped them out and stayed loyal
Let’s take delegation for example…
How will the physical environment change when they can delegate to you effectively?
Perhaps they no longer have to attend those boring meetings where they babysit staff, because you take care of it for them. They say goodbye to meeting rooms! Instead of spending an hour every week talking about strategy with a bunch of other managers, they get a 5 minute briefing from you, while you attend the boring meeting for them.
How will they know (what will change in their mind) that they have successfully delegated to you?
They might graduate from being an event oriented leader, who thinks about process and work, to being a people oriented leader, who thinks about finding and empowering the right people to get the job done.
How will they feel when they have successfully delegated to you?
Sense of freedom that stems from free time. Lack of friction and frustration that comes from dealing with minutia. Receiving compliments from colleagues about what good a job you’re doing.
These are some rudimentary examples of evidence you can provide to get their brain on your side…
Of course, you should use the Language of Value to present all this evidence in a compelling and believable way – both on your resume as well as during your interviews – but the point here is that, it all starts with understanding what they really want underneath all their job requirements or interview questions.
What do they really want? And what will make sure they believe you?
Once you crack this code, they see you as the ideal candidate, and feel that they are making the right choice.
In other words, you hit all the buttons associated with their desired outcome. This way, hiring you changes from being “just another work thing they have to do” to “the decision that will empower them, liberate their time, and help them achieve their deep rooted goals and ambitions”
Make no mistake: Getting a high-value job is not like getting any job. People bend over backwards, get into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and attend top universities for just a shot. Some even sacrifice their dignity, lick the boot of every leader they work with, and work themselves to the bone while missing their kids growing up.
I’m not saying that overworked and obsessed method of getting a high-value job doesn’t work. It does. It can get you there…
All I’m saying here is that there is a much better way to get a high-value job. It bypasses the need for connections, introductions or “hustle” – it cuts right to the chase. Gets to the heart of the matter. Gives them what they truly want, without any dancing around the bush or playing silly corporate games.
Ultimately, this is turning the tables with the corporate world, and leveraging the science behind decisions.
Just ask yourself:
How would my job change if my boss was willing to truly invest in me?
What if my boss’ boss did the same?
What if I could get their brain on my side?
That’s what we teach. And if that’s something you could use, you’ve come to the right place.