To bring about contribution thinking, the first and most important thing is to bring about visibility.

Visibility is a more contexted version of vision sharing. Vision sharing is strategy level work, but in the day to day warp and weft of one’s action what one needs is not vision but visibility – i.e. the link between who one is and what that vision is – how does one get to the vision. Therefore, one of the critical drivers for contribution thinking is that one must have visibility into what one has to contribute into.

Complete visibility will come from visibility into one’s roles, visibility into the roles of one’s team members and visibility into the role of the organization in the lives of its clients. All these have to be ‘locked up’ together and the straight line between one and one’s customer has to be seen.

 

If one can see this straight line, the work becomes meaningful and valuable, and one moves into the contribution thinking mode. If the straight line is not there, it is of no use. That is why it is often easy to motivate and incentivize sales people – but the deeper you go into the system it becomes harder because you cannot see the straight line between you and the customer.

So one simple definition of visibility is – draw the straight line between you and the customer, and get everything aligned into that.

Tagged with: