How to Become a Highly Valued Member of Your Organization

Idea

Breaking new ground is key to the longevity of any organization, and people who can deliver this are highly valued.

In fact, at the senior levels, we’re expected to bring in new relationships, methodologies, business results. Of course it’s crucial to provide top-notch service to existing clients and handle the existing workload well, but without new efforts and new business, we won’t grow the pie.

For in-house counsel, this could be instituting a new system to cut litigation costs by 30% in addition to handling existing cases efficiently. For relationship bankers, this could be expanding coverage into new growth areas in addition to executing existing deals.

Where do you have the opportunity to grow the pie in your organization?

Example

When I first started on the capital markets coverage desk, they carved out a list of companies for me to cover. This consisted of two “house accounts” – one was Morgan Stanley’s own treasury department, who by definition could only do business with its own capital markets team, and a large and frequent borrower where we already had a good relationship.

The rest was what I will euphemistically refer to as “junk for a list”, which meant the companies I was assigned were either competitors’ house accounts or very infrequent borrowers with low business potential. This portfolio provided me with some revenue base (albeit very small) from the house accounts and a much bigger territory of “greenfield” accounts where I was meant to cut my teeth and demonstrate my abilities.

It takes different skills to bring in new relationships than to maintain existing ones, and the former is more rare.

It took time and effort, but I ended up winning business from the new prospects and got even more kudos for these new efforts than from serving the house accounts. When I was later promoted, it was because I had both: enough critical mass of revenue and a track record of bringing in new business.

Action

Look at the opportunities on your plate and make sure you have a good mix of:

• Existing business opportunities that can potentially bring in enough results to sustain yourself/your group (i.e. the “house account” equivalent below), and
• New territory where you can show that it’s your (as in you and your team) acumen and hustle that wins the day.

Think broadly about these opportunities and be open-minded – clients can be internal as well as external, and “new business” can be creating new products or improving processes as well as generating revenue.

What’s your opportunity to grow the pie this year?