Bypass Depending on Your Employer

“Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.” Edward Gibbon

One of the downsides of being an employee is that you always rise to your level of incompetence. From the time you started working till you get close to retiring, your capability nose dives.

A couple of years ago, MTN Nigeria had to fire a number of its early staff. What was the reason given? They have become incompetent in the new economy. Of course, they were very capable when they were employed. But then they settled because they had a job. They stopped striving. They relaxed. They settled for job security. They assumed they will always have a job for life.

What they don’t know is that the markets shift at a greater rate these days. The capability a company needs to succeed in a market can change overnight. A business can be the market leader today and could be filling for bankruptcy the next if it refuses to notice trends in the market and adapt itself to them.

To remain useful and relevant in the workplace, employees should constantly be acquiring new capabilities. Capabilities could be anything that allows them to create value for their employer. It could be their skills, ability to leverage technology, knowledge, partnership, and collaborations.

Convert Your Salary To Capability

The salary is not the harvest of an employee. It is a seed. I wrote about that extensively in my book, Salary Shift. It's just like the Monopoly Game. Each time you pass go, you are given $200 to invest with. The greatest investment an employee can make is in new capabilities to remain useful.

This means that the amount you start with isn’t important but what you do with it. My first job as a graduate paid me N500. Someone who had the capability but wasn’t a university graduate was paid 14 times more than I was. There I learned the importance of having capability. As a result, I became a consultant to a state government earning 6-7 figure monthly for the value my capability created.

So instead of spending my money on something else, I walked home. I used that money to buy books and develop new capabilities. I did the same thing when I was serving the nation. While others were using their money to live big and others were saving theirs, I was converting mine into a new capability. I still do the same.

It is said that when most employees are in their 40s and 50s, they are just on a cruise waiting for their retirement. Even if they attend employer-sponsored courses, it's not for the learning but for the stipend that goes with it. On their own, they will never invest in coaching to develop new skills. Most of the capabilities you have right now may not be relevant in the next five years. Develop new capabilities so you don't become outdated.

One of my coaching clients is in his 50s and he continually invests in himself to develop new capability so he can remain relevant, useful, and valuable. When you are useful to your employer, your employer can make you a partner. When you are useful to the marketplace, the marketplace can make you a fortune.

To double your income, you should triple the investment you make in acquiring new capabilities. It will pay you more. Even if your employer is not ready to invest in your developing new capabilities, you should invest in yourself. You are the one who will reap the benefit.

The greatest investment employees can make is not the equity in a building or a side hustle but the development of new capabilities that make them useful. If employees continually invest in converting their salaries into capabilities, the compound effect of the new capability will impact their positioning and income in the workplace.

At Value Giver Coach, we help employees to remain valuable, useful, and relevant to their employer and the marketplace. Those who pass through our program continually develop new capabilities to create new forms of value for their employer. They are always becoming more competent. They don’t retire, rather they keep growing, creating, and earning.

Why depend on pension, when you can continually improve and develop new capabilities to keep creating value. As long as humans exist on earth, the need for value creation will always be out there. To create value, you need to develop capability.

How Capability Helps Employees

Here are some of the reasons why every employee should continually invest their salary in developing new capabilities. That is what we help you do at Value Giver Coach. Companies can only have the best of their people when they invest in their people’s capability.

1. Capability Captures Opportunity: When employees develop capabilities that help their employer capture opportunities, they make their employer excited.

2. Capability Provides Confidence: With a new capability, employers become confident about the future. The employer knows they can face the future and win.

3. Capability Creates New Streams of Income: With a new capability, employees can become the rainmaker and create new forms of income for their employer.

4. Capability Make You Partner: When employees become very useful and relevant to their employers, they position themselves to become partners with their employers

5. Capability is An Investment: Developing and improving capabilities using the salary is the greatest investment an employee can make. The compounded effect of developing capability pays the greatest. It helps employees do more than they are paid to do.

6. Capability Provides New Capability: When employees develop capabilities, their combined capabilities create new capabilities for their employer. The confidence level of their employer soars.

7. Capability is Key to Collaboration: When it comes to value creation, collaborations are based on capability, not projects. Each collaboration should provide new forms of capability for their employer.

8. Capability Gives You Economic Security: When employees focus on becoming more capable, they bypass job security and dependency and move to economic security and interdependency. The best employees employers should seek are those who are not dependent.

Employees who are dependent on their employer have reached their level of incompetence. You can only be useful when you are capable. Employers need more employees who are capable and useful not those who are dependent.

We are organizing a Game-Changing Value Creator Coaching program. You can be part and should be part. It is for you. If you want to attain freedom and find fulfillment at work, then become a value creator.

Be part of the Game-Changer Value Creation Coaching program. You will go through the mindset required to create and the tools you need to always create value in the workplace. Are you ready for a fundamental change- a breakthrough in the way you approach your work? If you are, then you are ready for the Value Giver Coach Program. Please call +2348101671745.

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