Does Your Work Sustain Behavior Change?

You are not an author. You’re not a speaker, guru, consultant, blogger, or innovator, you are in the content business. Your revenues are generated by effectively leveraging and monetizing your work in as many appropriate modalities as possible. Sometimes that may be a book or a keynote speech, but more often it will be as a provider of consulting services, assessment tools, diagnostics, video enabled training, and licensing of your content. That’s your business, but what’s your ultimate impact? How do you know your work is working and how do you justify a pricing structure that rewards you fairly for the impact your work has on a client’s business results?

Well, that’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s not as hard as you may think. All good content leads to an observable behavior change. Your work may teach me to present better, be a better listener, be more innovative, generate more leads, close sales faster or manage more effectively. I can observe if it’s working or not based on how people behave after engaging with your body of work.

This is where most thought leaders stop. It makes sense, but what if we take it a bit further? Why does having a group of individuals that can present better, listen better, generate more leads, and close more deals matter? Because in the aggregate those small improvements correlate directly to a business result.

The business results are not always the same even though the content is and the delivery format— it varies depending on the company you work with and the department you are focused on. It is critical that you engage with your clients early on to expand the conversation beyond, “We make you better at…” to “Let’s figure out what would happen to your business if ‘X’ population was better at ‘Y’.”

Maybe employee engagement increases, it might be customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, margins increase, profits increase, they retain employees longer, they retain customers longer. Ultimately, tying your work to changing individual behaviors with measurable business results will separate you from the pack.

You jump from having a skill development conversation with a junior or mid-level HR person to a business results conversation with a business leader. It’s a much more engaging conversation and one that results in your ability to expand your reach inside an organization and increase your tenure with the client. You become more of a strategic partner that drives a measurable business result and less of a vendor providing a nice to have service that results in great feedback from participants. Great feedback is table stakes. Stretch your thinking so that you can connect your work to business results. It’s more profitable, more engaging, and much more intrinsically and extrinsically satisfying.

Want to learn more about creating sustainable change? Read more at Why Leverage Matters: Entertainment vs Behavior Change