Does it ever seem like you’re providing massive value for your company, and then wish there was a way to turn it into a promotion? Or a pay raise?
Success is NOT about grinding eighty-hour weeks! True success comes from becoming Invaluable.
My team and I are thrilled to share an entirely new in-depth YouTube video! It’s a deep dive into exactly how to secure that promotion or pay raise.
Throw out the exhausting daily hustle and learn how to master the Five Invaluable Factors that will make you…
Irreplaceable.
Watch now⤵️
How Value Per Hour Works
In my work as a strategic advisor to high growth businesses, I’ve seen two kinds of employee archetypes. the Replaceable and the Invaluable. Replaceables ignore the five principles I’m going to share with you, while Invaluable professionals build their Value Per Hour by living them.
No-one does just one thing at work. You might juggle sales, statistical analysis, or administrative reports. Each of those roles carries a different value per hour in the marketplace.
Administrative work might top out at tens of dollars per hour, while sales or high-level strategy can be worth hundreds of dollars per hour. If you work hard to develop a weakness in admin work, you expend immense energy for very little bump in value.
If you raise your high-value strength in strategic analysis, your value per hour skyrockets. Put your energy into your genius and let the rest go!
“No-one does just one thing at work.”
Factor One: Capability
Capability is about how much time you spend on the things you were born to do. An invaluable person builds their capability through their strengths rather than obsessing over their weaknesses.
So… what are your strengths? They are found at your unique combination of three distinct elements:
- Gifts: Your natural baselines. They are the effortless talents you have had present in your life since childhood. You didn’t buy them, and you didn’t learn them. They just are!
- Loves: Your passions. They allow you to stay emotionally fueled because you enjoy them so much that it doesn’t even feel like work.
- Skills: Your acquired abilities. They are the knowledge you have gathered over time from school, training, or experience.
- Gifts: Your natural baselines. They are the effortless talents you have had present in your life since childhood. You didn’t buy them, and you didn’t learn them. They just are!
Combine all three—gifts, loves, and skills—and you have a true strength that defines your marketplace capability.
To uncover your strengths, try a little introspection. Schedule a brief five-minute session of quiet thinking. Disconnect from all distractions and ask, “What comes naturally to me?” Repeat this for your loves, asking, “What am I naturally passionate about?” Then do the same for your skills, jotting down your knowledge and your training.
After that, get some external data. Ask others questions like, “What do you see that comes naturally to me?” If a trait is mentioned multiple times in each category, that is a strength!
“An invaluable person builds their capability through their strengths rather than obsessing over their weaknesses.”
Factor Two: Adaptability
If Capability is focusing on your strengths, then Adaptability is knowing when, where, and how to actually use them. Think of Adaptability like a radar. It is all about anticipation, timing, and a deep, intuitive understanding of what is happening in your environment.
Anticipation is your ultimate career leverage, and it begins with reading internal workplace trends. You should know and understand your company’s values, vision, and culture. Invaluable people look for the unwritten rules.
Adaptability also requires looking past emotions and looking toward the cold, hard numbers. Invaluable professionals speak the language of their business and ensure they are a great investment.
I teach my clients the rule of three: one dollar in yields three dollars out. If you can prove you operate at a three-to-one return, you are virtually irreplaceable!
When you increase that ratio, you are profitable and promotable.
Factor Three: Productivity
Productivity is far more than just trying to work faster or more efficiently.
I define Productivity as maximizing the amount of time you spend on the work that is most valuable. Think of it as your Most Valuable Activities (MVAs) versus your Less Valuable Activities (LVAs).
Think of your workweek like a commercial cargo ship. The hours you work are your total cargo capacity. How are you choosing to fill it?
The Replaceable professional fills their ship with packing peanuts. They spend their day trapped in low-priority meetings, doing email, or formatting documents—basically doing what a low-paid employee or some piece of technology can already do perfectly well.
The Invaluable professional, however, fills their cargo space with high-end microchips, their MVAs. They focus each hour on the most valuable work like strategic thinking, leadership development, or closing major accounts.
To separate your MVAs from your LVAs, track the category of work you do for a day. Ask yourself, “How much would it cost me to pay someone else to perform this task at my level?” If it plays to your strengths and carries a high replacement cost, odds are it’s an MVA.
One common trap is switchtasking. You cannot do two attention-requiring things at the same time. Your brain is really just rapidly switching back and forth, and every single little switch exacts a heavy toll. More interruptions means less productivity, more mistakes, and way more stress.
About 25% of your workday is wasted on switching costs alone. That equals one full workweek every month!
The Invaluable professional deploys switchbusters to protect their focus. For example: they turn off notifications, wear noise-canceling headphones to signal they are focused, and ditch the open-door policy for a closed-door, open-calendar policy.
Factor Four: Community
Community creates a massive multiplier effect on the previous three. You could be the most productive person in the entire building, yet if your network is zero, your capability is trapped in a silo. You need others!
Stronger workplace connections account for nearly half of the salary gap, and about one-third of the promotion gap.
Consider these principles to build a strong community:
The Invaluable professional is generous. They offer kindness with zero expectation of return. When you attend a gathering, ask yourself, “What can I give?”
Focus: Avoid switchtasking on other people. Give full, undivided attention to conversations. Place your phone completely out of sight.
Remember individuals in your community. Remember their names, their hobbies, their partners, children, and pets. Find a remembering system that works for you. Try making a quick note on your phone after a conversation with a few details, and then later review those notes to create a clear action for follow-up.
And maintain Contact. True connection requires recurring, thoughtful outreach over time. Manage this follow-up through a CRM or simply by creating reminders in your calendar.
“The invaluable professional is generous. They offer kindness with zero expectation of return.”
Factor Five: Visibility
Do people recognize you as a leading expert and a decision leader in your profession? If not, you may need more Visibility.
Visibility is an act of service that makes your expertise discoverable.
To help others identify your areas of expertise, look at your past work and ask, “What can I share that will be useful to others?”
While you are developing your skills, publicly share what you are learning to maximize your value!
You want to balance two types of visibility:
- Internal. This is how your work colleagues and managers perceive your value. Invaluable professionals know their true value does not come from what they know, but what they do and how they enable others to do it. They document solutions against chaos and they teach and train colleagues.
- External. This is how the global market respects your name and expertise. View everything as service. Focus on helping others on a larger scale. You could schedule an hour a week in your calendar to create something meaningful, and share what you learned this week… or add commentary to an industry article.
Commit to sharing long term and watch your visibility become a compounding asset!
Your Next Step
Consider the five invaluable factors again:
- Capability
- Adaptability
- Productivity
- Community
- Visibility
Ask yourself, “What is one action I can take this week to improve one of these factors?” Then schedule time in your calendar to take that action!
I invite you to watch the full video attached at the beginning of this newsletter! You’ll discover in much greater detail how to implement these five factors into your daily rhythm.
For weekly tips on productive leadership and time management, follow me, Dave Crenshaw, on LinkedIn.
