Am I Adding Value?
Today, we’re talking about one of the most important questions we must ask ourselves. That question is: Am I Adding Value? Am I adding value at work? Am I adding value to my friend group? Family unit? The board I’m a member of?
To illustrate the practice, every time I sit down to write the Muse, I ask myself: “Will my readers find value in today’s topic? What am I adding to the conversation that isn’t blindingly obvious?” If I can’t answer those questions about a prospective topic, I ditch it entirely or put the concept on ice and move on.
Unfortunately, asking the “am I adding value” question is just the start of your journey into the world of continuous improvement. To truly make an impact, it’s necessary to understand how value is added to a project, process, or interaction. For now, we’ll focus on the world of business, primarily because things get messier when talking about friends and family, but the concepts that follow can definitely be extended to those realms of your life.
To understand the how of adding value, we must introduce the concept of a value stream. Put simply,
A value stream is a set of activities that add incremental value to a product or service from its inception to its delivery to the customer.
The process to order a latte at your favorite coffee shop is a value stream. Any physical production line is a value stream. That boring two hour meeting you attended on Thursday is a value stream. A flight on an airline is a value stream. The process to approve a requisition for materials at the office is a value stream. I could go on and on. You might want to hit pause right now, close your eyes, and think about all the value streams you interact with in an average day.
Once you begin thinking about the world around you as a set of value streams, it becomes much easier to think of your role in adding value to the value streams that you interact with. More importantly, when you start thinking of everything as a value stream, the concept of organizational flow becomes obvious. After all, what do streams do? They flow. Some wind aimlessly, others take more direct routes. Nearly all streams flow into rivers, which ultimately make their way to the world’s ocean’s. If we carry this analogy to your work, you add value along one or more value streams which ultimately end in the delivery of a product or service to the ocean of consumer demand. Hence,
Every employee of every company in the world is involved in value creation and impacts one or more value streams either directly or indirectly. Unnecessary complexity, over-engineered processes, extraneous approvals, and myriad other blockers impede flow and therefore constrain value addition to any process.
So what are some of the benefits of viewing the world through the lens of value addition and flow?
First, to optimize flow and value addition, you must define and codify the current set of best practices to create the finished product or service that is delivered to the customer. This is done through process mapping events and the definition of standard work. After all, how can we know we’re adding value if we don’t know how the work gets done in the current state? How can we continuously improve on the current best practice if we don’t have a solid baseline to move forward from? That baseline is standard work.
Second, focusing on value addition and flow takes the emphasis off of “me” and puts it on the “we.” Once the organizational culture begins to tilt toward value addition, the team becomes the focal point. We then naturally start asking questions like: “are my team’s outputs optimized as inputs for the team downstream or does the team downstream have to engage in extra quality control steps and rework to keep the process flowing?” Empathy for the work of other teams up and downstream improves, accountability is enhanced because everyone knows what everyone else is supposed to be doing, and ultimately, organizational trust is enhanced.
Third, thinking of your work as a set of contributions to the value stream leads to improved customer focus. Where does the value stream ultimately lead? To the customer. Unfortunately, far too many employees are disconnected from the customer experience and have no idea how their work impacts customer satisfaction. Codifying value streams through process maps and standard work will lead to happier customers and an enhanced sense of purpose and belonging within teams because everyone will be able to draw a straight(er) line between the work they do and the customer experience.
Before I go, I mentioned at the top that the concept of value addition can be applied to one’s personal life. There are many ways you add value to friend groups, family, and other non-work-related activities. For example, when in a conversation with a group of friends, I like to pause and periodically ask myself if I’m adding value to the conversation. If the answer is no and I’m just talking to hear myself talk, I use that moment to remind myself to talk less and listen more.
Want more on the topic of value addition? In my forthcoming book, The Balanced Business, which will hit store shelves this fall, I devote much of the book to the concepts of flow and value addition. See you next week!
