If you’re struggling to justify:
- What it is that you do,
- Why it’s important,
- Why you’re the right person to do it, or even
- Why you’re the right person for a dream job you want to do
…then there’s something I want you to do: I want you to start thinking about that justification in terms of a critical question that the person asking for that justification is actively and knowingly asking right now.
I started thinking about this when a friend reached out to me after finding a listing for what looked like her dream job. She wanted my help to make sure she was making it clear why she was the ideal fit for this new position in a new organization.
But I’ve also heard from a lot of friends and seen a lot of clients recently who are struggling with a very similar issue:
“How do I adapt how I’m talking about my job, or even myself, or even the work that we do, when the person asking suddenly cares about different things than the person who used to be in charge?”
The answer? Ask yourself,
“What is the most urgent, important question this person is asking out loud right now?” What do they care about? What is driving them to ask you for the justification?
There are a lot of sources out there that can give you hints—or even outright tell you—what the organization or that the person asking values, whether it’s your current boss or somebody new. For example, pay attention to what they or the organization has written, published, or said about what their goals and values are. If it’s for a new job, look at the mission of the organization, its webpage, and especially in any of the materials the hiring manager has posted.
If you can’t find something specific, know that just about everybody always cares about doing things faster, cheaper, or more profitably.
For instance, I once had a client who didn’t exactly know what it was that a hiring manager was looking for, my client just knew that he was interviewing for a chief marketing officer position.
So he decided to frame what he could do in terms of what he wanted to be able to do as a CMO at any company. We ended up framing that critical question of the hiring manager this way:
“How can a CMO grow the brand value of the company?”
Growing brand value? That’s growing money. And hiring a CMO? That’s putting someone in charge of that.
After you’ve defined the question the other person is asking, the next step is to connect what you do and how you do it to something that the other person considers valuable.
Continuing the example, my client’s job was to draw the connection between what he had done in other CMO roles to how we could help this new company achieve the desirable outcome contained in that question.
From there, m client could take all the things he was really strong at and put them in the context of growing brand value. In his case, that was by focusing on communities and building the capabilities of those communities to support the brand—something that the hiring manager could intuitively understand and see the connection to.
And? He got the job!
I know having to justify what you do can be stressful. It can feel like you’re having to justify who you are, as well. But with this approach, you’re not explaining why your job or even you are important, period; you’re explaining why what you do is important to what the other person thinks is important—why it’s important to the outcome they’re trying to achieve with their question.
You’re saying something like, “Here’s what’s core to this job that is a way to achieving the efficiency or eliminating redundancy.” It could also be something like, “Here’s what I believe is key to achieving efficiency or reducing redundancy,” or whatever the organization’s mission or the person’s stated value is.
Whenever you’re asked to prove yourself, justify yourself, or present yourself as the best option for something, the key is to make your answer all about them while it seems to be all about you.
If you want to know more about how to do this, this step is the first step in creating any message for any purpose. I call it the Core Question, and you can learn more on my monthly free webinar, Fundamentals of Message Design.