Avoiding Extinction – How to Provide Superb Value in Today’s Workplace
If you increase the amount of value that you personally provide in today’s dynamic, diverse, and sometimes diabolic workplace, you still will not guarantee job security at your current employer. However, learning how to add superb value will make you more marketable and employable in general. The Avoiding Extinction workbook and process represents an evolving attempt to provide leaders at all levels with a practical tool to prepare themselves for today’s dynamic and diverse workplace.
How Can You Benefit From the Avoiding Extinction Workbook?
The Avoiding Extinction workbook and process requires you to reframe your beliefs, alter your behaviors, and redesign your job. All three change types help increase the degree of personal value you add to your job on a daily basis. If you complete the six steps of this process, you will better meet all three of these requirements.
However, once you complete an initial pass through the workbook and process, you cannot rest for too long. The pace and magnitude of change in the world will not allow you to do so. Fortunately, most of these steps set some important personal systems in motion to facilitate use of the process, again and again.
In order to add more value at work, you have to spend your time differently — every minute of your day, each day. It is not as simple as it sounds to make such investment decisions, however. It involves much more than “simply” practicing effective time management. Adding superb value is much more of a mental process than a physical one.
It is not as much about how you spend your time as it is about how you decide what you spend your time on. The value added time investments you make include how you act and think as you spend time. How much discipline can you show and stick to the goals and plans that support your efforts?
EXPLORE MORE: How Effective is Your Job Design Work System?
What Beliefs, Behaviors, and Tasks Does Your Organization Value?
One major key for adding value at work involves aligning your beliefs, behaviors, and daily tasks with those that are valued by the organization. In turn, you need to know the direction the leaders of the organization want to go. You need to know what processes they feel are important to improve and what roles they expect people in your position to fill. Since cost effectiveness drives most organizations, you need to know what the key cost areas are. Most importantly, you must know the key actions you can take to optimize performance in those process areas that you can influence.
The “Avoiding Extinction” workbook was designed with respect for the jobs of the line manager and supervisor in particular. When one does not work on “the front lines” on a regular basis, it becomes difficult to form a perspective of what it is like to try to change the way they do their job in the midst of the daily “fires.” This workbook shows an appreciation for such time demands and job stresses. It also provides challenging expectations and practical tools for making such a personal role change possible.
Who Created the Avoiding Extinction Workbook and Process?
The “Avoiding Extinction” workbook and workshop were designed by Kevin McManus, who has served as an industrial engineer, Production Manager, Plant Manager, and Director of Quality during his 40-year business career. Kevin has facilitated over 500 performance improvement workshops. Plus, he has taught the TapRooT® root cause analysis process internationally over 18 years.
Kevin recently completed three years of service on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award judges panel, and he has served as a national Examiner, Senior Examiner, or Alumni Examiner for over 20 years. Kevin writes the monthly Performance Improvement column for Industrial and Systems Engineer magazine.
NOTE: This workbook is currently out of print. If you would like a copy, please email me at kevin@greatsystems.com.
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