How to keep your job Cover.indd - Richard Maun

Powerful You
hand for an added safety margin. This means that we don’t just
want to be good, we want to be great so that when people are in
discussion about what to do with us, a very short conversation will
ensue, which will run like this:
‘We need to decide what to do with Richard. We’ll keep him.
Put him on the pile over there and we’ll sort him out later, after
we’ve got rid of these people, whom, much as we “like” them, we
can no longer afford to keep.’
An Added Value Employee has many qualities and attributes and
we will consider how to develop these in this book. When we step
back from details and boil them down to their essence, though,
they fall into three main categories:
Productivity
People skills
Public Relations (PR)
This is what I call the AVE Concept and we will explore it in
greater detail in the next chapter. For now we need to recognise
that scoring highly at each one of these things is essential, or we
run the risk of losing our job. Our ‘AVE scores’ are the value we
attach to our Productivity, our People Skills and our PR activities.
Whatever your starting point is today, you have to remember
that you have more power than you realise and that you have the
skill and talent to succeed. If you’re in doubt, go back and reread
the previous chapter and think about how Peter made the
transition from plodding to performing. The secret to his success
was to realise that he did have the power to make things happen,
to negotiate with people and to make changes. His problem was
essentially that he had forgotten that it existed within him.
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