In this latest episode, I speak about a crucial aspect of your professional success that often goes overlooked: understanding and leveraging your perceived value.
In today’s competitive landscape, it’s not just about delivering results; it’s about ensuring that your stakeholders recognize the value you bring to the table.
Let’s explore how you can master this art and elevate your career to new heights. Here are some questions I discussed during this episode:
- Who are your stakeholders?
Before diving into strategies for enhancing your perceived value, it’s essential to identify your stakeholders. These are the individuals or groups who have a vested interest in your work and its outcomes. They could be your managers, clients, colleagues, or of course regulatory bodies. Understanding their needs, expectations, and priorities is the first step towards demonstrating your value effectively.
- How do you create value for yourself through knowing your stakeholders?
Knowing your stakeholders enables you to tailor your efforts to meet their specific requirements. By aligning your work with their goals and priorities, you not only enhance your relevance but also position yourself as a valuable asset. Whether it’s providing insightful analyses, delivering timely solutions, or offering strategic guidance, catering to your stakeholders’ needs is key to creating value for yourself.
- How do you discover the problems and why should you create the solutions?
Proactively identifying problems and offering solutions is another crucial aspect of increasing your perceived value. Instead of waiting for issues to arise, take a proactive approach to problem-solving. By anticipating challenges and offering innovative solutions, you demonstrate initiative, resourcefulness, and leadership qualities—all of which contribute to your perceived value.
Key Takeaways:
- It’s not what you think is valuable- it’s what your stakeholders think is valuable: Shift your focus from your perspective to that of your stakeholders to truly understand and deliver what they value.
- Make them understand your worth through tangible evidence: Back up your claims of value with concrete examples, metrics, and outcomes to demonstrate the impact of your contributions.
- Build-Up on Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneurship Mindset: Embrace the mindset of an “intrapreneur” within your organization, seeking out opportunities for innovation, growth, and value creation or an Entrepreneur running your own organisation.
By mastering the art of leveraging your perceived value, you can propel your career forward and achieve greater success in our dynamic field of statistics.
Learn more about how you create your value and turn your new perceived personal and professional worth into becoming the basis of your company’s growth. Listen to this podcast episode now and improve your role in the company.
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Transcript
You’re not paid for your performance. But for your perceived value!
[00:00:00] Alexander: Welcome to another episode of the effective statistician and this is another short friday episode You are not [00:00:10] paid for what you do. Now this is hard to swallow, yes. But it’s true. [00:00:20] You are not paid for what you do. You are not paid for doing publications. You are not You’re not paid for [00:00:30] writing SAPs.
[00:00:31] Alexander: You’re not paid for designing studies. You’re not paid to do QC. All these kind [00:00:40] of different actions. You’re not paid for what you do. You are only paid for the [00:00:50] value you create for your organization. That’s why you get paid. And [00:01:00] If you think this is not true, then you have a problem. Probably. Because you [00:01:10] might actually do a lot of things that don’t create value for your organization.
[00:01:16] Alexander: And all these kind of different things. can be either a [00:01:20] waste of time, or can even be harmful to your career. So, if you’re not [00:01:30] sure what kind of value you create, then you really have a problem. Now, value is a [00:01:40] It’s a really interesting thing because it is not what you think is value, it is what your [00:01:50] stakeholders think is value.
[00:01:53] Alexander: And it is their perception about the value you create for [00:02:00] them. Now, there’s two things. The first is, of course. Who are your stakeholders? Well, first and foremost, [00:02:10] those that sit in your line management. Your supervisor, your step supervisor, and so on. These are for [00:02:20] sure all your stakeholders. And you need to create value for them.
[00:02:26] Alexander: I have sometimes I’ve done [00:02:30] things that weren’t so, let’s say, exciting for my more higher ups in the organization and that was not very, [00:02:40] very helpful. So don’t do that. Make sure that you create value from the perspective [00:02:50] of your line management. That of course also means that you create value for stakeholders outside [00:03:00] of your line management.
[00:03:01] Alexander: So usually when we think about statistics, biostatistics, biometrics as an organization. We report [00:03:10] into a statistics organization very often and set reports maybe into R& D or whatsoever. Maybe you’re sitting as a [00:03:20] statistician somewhere in an affiliate and you report into the local pay organization or the local, [00:03:30] medical organization whatsoever.
[00:03:31] Alexander: Yeah. Irrespective, it is important that you create value for your direct line of [00:03:40] management. And then of course for all the functions your line of management depends on. That are [00:03:50] the stakeholders that you provide value to. For example, regulatory. [00:04:00] You provide value to regulatory by solving problems from regulatory.
[00:04:09] Alexander: For [00:04:10] example, they want to get a drug approved or they want to Keep a drug on the market despite some safety events, [00:04:20] or you create value for the internal payer organization because you help them get a good price or [00:04:30] get a lot of access or whatsoever. You create value maybe for your manufacturing organization because [00:04:40] you design certain studies that help them increase their yield in terms of production or [00:04:50] decrease timelines or whatsoever.
[00:04:53] Alexander: Whenever you think about value, Look out for two things. The [00:05:00] first is problems, challenges. Where are challenges? Because there’s [00:05:10] scarcity in resources, scarcity in time, or problems with quality, something around that usually. [00:05:20] Whenever you see these challenges, great, you can offer a solution there. And that helps [00:05:30] you create value.
[00:05:31] Alexander: Because you solve a problem. That’s one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is [00:05:40] to look for opportunities. Sometimes your stakeholders may not actually see that they [00:05:50] miss an opportunity. Typically, for example, they do the same design of a study that they have done for years. Now, let’s [00:06:00] say in oncology there is a 3 plus 3 design.
[00:06:02] Alexander: Now you say, hey, there’s these cool Bayesian designs with which you can work much [00:06:10] more effectively. Oh, hey, do you know really about the probability of your study? I can help you [00:06:20] using simulations. To look for all kind of different other ways to design the study so that we increase, [00:06:30] don’t know, speed, that we decrease sample size, that we increase probability of success, whatsoever.
[00:06:38] Alexander: That’s an [00:06:40] opportunity, yeah? Regulatory or operations or so on, whoever you’re working with, might not be aware about [00:06:50] the challenge they have. Because, well, they just do the same thing again and again and again, and they don’t see the opportunity. [00:07:00] So, opportunities are one thing, problems are the other thing.
[00:07:05] Alexander: And now, you create value [00:07:10] through a couple of different things. The first is, you can create value by increasing speed, [00:07:20] for example. And, the more value per time, The more you provide, the better, you know, [00:07:30] so the other thing is you can create value by doing something that is unique, something that only you [00:07:40] can do, and that therefore has bigger value or maybe what you create [00:07:50] a really vast impact.
[00:07:53] Alexander: It’s not just something that helps with this one study but it helps with all the studies. [00:08:00] Or maybe it helps at least with everything in the therapeutic area. Or you’ve Solve a problem that gets rid of [00:08:10] lots of other problems, or you solve a problem that is really, really big. So, impact is another thing.[00:08:20]
[00:08:21] Alexander: Scalability. Can you do something that you can scale up? So that you can do it [00:08:30] again and again and again with decreasing costs. For example, can you improve the quality of [00:08:40] how. So, your medical affairs association, your medical affairs function works with Q opinion leaders [00:08:50] in terms of how they communicate data there, how they speak about data.
[00:08:55] Alexander: Can you give them better training in terms of [00:09:00] data literacy? And can you scale that so that you’d only do it once and then, you know, it repeats again and again. Could [00:09:10] be, for example, that you have some kind of. Scalability in there that has some kind of self training in it, video training. And then you have a [00:09:20] Q& A and that Q& A is also pretty scalable because it doesn’t matter whether there’s 5 MSLs diving into it.
[00:09:29] Alexander: Or [00:09:30] maybe you have scalability through a train the trainer approach. Of course, if you think about software solutions, there’s a [00:09:40] lot of scalability in there. So think about the product that you create in a way that you make [00:09:50] them scalable. The services that you create, can you make that scalable? Can you help not just your study?[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Alexander: But can you share it across many different organizations? Then you also increase the overall impact. And you increase [00:10:10] the overall perceived value of your solution. Now one thing is really, really important here. [00:10:20] You need to understand what exactly is the problem. And as we all know, [00:10:30] the first thing that we get asked for is usually not solving the problem.
[00:10:36] Alexander: Very often, our stakeholders [00:10:40] don’t know exactly what the problem is. They will come to you and say, hey, we want to have a one armed clinical trial. [00:10:50] Or, we want to have another poster. Or, we need these 100 tables, whatsoever. Just [00:11:00] giving these kind of things to your customer might not really solve their underlying problem.
[00:11:07] Alexander: So, you need to have good listening [00:11:10] skills to understand these problems. That, by the way, is all. Marketing. Yeah. Marketing includes [00:11:20] deeply understanding your stakeholder needs. And I’m not saying your customers, because customers and [00:11:30] always sounds like there’s a financial transaction, involves that you sell something and the other person gives you money for it.
[00:11:39] Alexander: In a sense, that is [00:11:40] actually the case in the organization. If you have some kind of internal. money kind of systems and you would usually get get money [00:11:50] from the area that is most closest to the clients because that area actually gets the money from the clients [00:12:00] and then they hand it back to the other areas that help them get the money.
[00:12:05] Alexander: Now, if you want to drive value, [00:12:10] you need to think about yourself, your group, your organization, as [00:12:20] kind of something like a company within the company. Some people call it intrapreneurship instead of entrepreneurship. [00:12:30] Yeah, I don’t care about that, but really you need to make sure that you are on [00:12:40] top. of a couple of different roles that are usually required in any company.
[00:12:47] Alexander: And you basically need to replicate [00:12:50] these roles within you, irrespective of whether you’re just an individual contributor. Well, just deletes [00:13:00] the sentence the word just. If you’re an individual contributor. If you’re a supervisor, if you’re a department lead, you always need a [00:13:10] couple of these different roles.
[00:13:12] Alexander: The first is, of course, production. And another one is quality control. You need, of course, to produce something. [00:13:20] And you need, in terms of services, or products, or deliverables, or these kind of things. And you need to make sure that they meet the requirements. The quality [00:13:30] requirements of the different stakeholders.
[00:13:32] Alexander: And I’m talking about quality requirements in terms of what the stakeholders actually value [00:13:40] and what they expect in terms of functionality and all these kind of different things from your services or products. Of [00:13:50] course, that may include that it is Audit proof. Yes, that the FDA or someone can come in and [00:14:00] audit you and there are no major findings or maybe even not any minor findings.
[00:14:05] Alexander: But it also means that Your [00:14:10] regulatory counterpart, your clinical counterpart, your operations counterpart, that they are happy about what you [00:14:20] deliver. Then you need to have within you, your group, something like an internal [00:14:30] research and development department. Think about that as you need to constantly create new innovative [00:14:40] solutions to fulfill the demand of your stakeholders.
[00:14:47] Alexander: And if you don’t [00:14:50] innovate, if you don’t come up with better solutions, you can’t provide more value and you become very. [00:15:00] replaceable. That’s why you need R& D. Well, look into the bigger market. What are the companies that long term succeed? [00:15:10] They have some R& D somewhere. Sometimes it’s not obvious, but they always have it.
[00:15:15] Alexander: And then the two areas that I want to [00:15:20] talk more about in the next episode are marketing and sales. Yes, you need as a person. [00:15:30] As a group, you need marketing and sales. And if you think really? Then stay tuned for the next episode where we’ll talk a [00:15:40] little bit more about marketing and sales.
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