How to grow with your startup? Understand your value.
By: Kelsey Cohen
Tags: Startup, Career Advice, Career Change

It is the nature of a startup to be constantly evolving at a dizzying pace. More often than not, what a startup was 3 months ago and what a startup is today are basically two completely different companies.

These dramatic internal shifts as the company grows and scales are probably one of the biggest reasons why tenures at startups last under 5 years. It’s hard to navigate shifting roles, responsibilities, and titles at an established company — let alone one that changes so completely every quarter.

How do you grow and adapt in a way that is aligned with the vision of the company and at a pace that keeps up?

I’ve been wrestling with this question a lot lately. As I try to navigate my shifting role in a fast-growth startup I keep coming back to this idea of value.

I have observed in myself and others that the misalignment of how I value myself, how I desire to bring value, how my value is actually perceived, and what value is really needed has caused some of the greatest tensions and resentments in an organization.

I also believe that understanding (and helping others understand) the ever-changing relationship between these different perspectives of value are key to successfully transitioning and adapting along with a startup and throughout your career.

Let’s start with some definitions. After a lot of internal reflection, I believe there are four perceptions of value at a workplace. For clarity, when I use the word “value” I am not referring to morals or ethics, I am referring to the combined skills, experience, and talent that make someone who they are.

What are the four perspectives of value?

Owned. This is how you value yourself. These values are the skills, expertise, experience, and talents that you know you’re good at, that you are proud of, and that define how you operate in the world.

Ask yourself these questions to identify your owned value:

What skills, experience, and talents are you proud of? What do you find yourself doing naturally and repeatedly everyday? What are the tools in your tool box that you rely on?

Desired. This is how you want to be valued. These values are often aspirational — skills, expertise, or talents that you wish you had or are currently developing.

Ask yourself these questions to identify your owned value:

How do you want to contribute to the conversation or project? What do you want to be admired and respected for? What do wish you were an expert in?

Perceived. This is how others value you. These can be explicit skills related to your job and, they can be implicit value that you bring to the table.

Ask yourself these questions to identify your perceived value?

What are you praised for regularly? What skills and expertise of yours do others rely on? What do others ask you for help with?

Note: Perceived value can change depending on the context of the relationship. Your manager may value for different reasons than your peers, for example. Because of this, it is important to examine the perceived value within the different contexts of your company.

Needed. This is the value that company needs from you. These are external values that the company (or your manager or peers) are relying on you to bring. Needed value can change regularly depending on the project or problem that is currently being tackled.

Look at the asks, goals, and objectives that have been made of or given to you. What skills, expertise, or talents will you use in order to achieve them?

Lookout for common misalignments.

Misalignment 1: Owned and desired. When how you currently value yourself is not how you want to be valued.

The desire to bring value in new and different ways is, at its essence, a desire for growth! This means you are no longer satisfied with the skills and expertise you currently have and want to develop and add to your owned value. This is amazing — and we should all be striving and helping others strive to grow and learn.

However, it’s important to consider the consequences, trade-offs, and opportunities of leaning in to your desired values.

I started out my professional career as a graphic designer — and I loved it. For years I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for my creative talents and I couldn’t imagine a time when I would want to do anything else. Then, I started a new job at my first startup and worked under an amazing CMO. She was at the forefront of humanist marketing and I was tasked with helping design our persona documents. As I began learning about behavioral marketing and segmentation, I started wanting to contribute in ways that were not just graphic design.

This is an example of how my owned value and desired value split. At the beginning, my owned and desired value were aligned. Sure, I wanted to grow and become a better designer, but I still wanted my value to be in design. Then that changed and I didn’t want to bring value through design anymore. Identifying and working towards this desired value changed my life and career.

I made the decision to broaden not only my skill set, but also my expertise. I pushed myself and asked to take on more strategic marketing projects and tried to learn as much as I could from the CMO. When I moved to a new company, I was hired as a graphic designer, but still had that desire to be valued as more than that. And when the opportunity came, I voiced that desire, expressed my owned value outside of my design skills and luckily, the VP of Marketing saw my potential and took me under her wing.

I have had an incredible career and I am very proud that I went from Graphic Designer to Director of Marketing in 5 years. I intentionally shaped my career path and took opportunities as they were presented. But I had to leave things behind in order to grow.

I repeat, I had to leave things behind. This is something that no one told me that seems so obvious now. In order to transform a desired value into an owned value, sometimes you have to let some of those skills and talents go. That doesn’t mean that you can’t still value those things in yourself or that you can’t return to them when you need to, it simply means that when your desired value creates a fork in the road between where you are and where you want to be, you have to choose one.

I had to work really hard to make that transition in my career. I did the job of both a designer and a marketer while I proved to the company that I could bring value in this new way. I persevered while my ideas and opinions were questioned, while I was told to stay in my lane, while people attempted to keep me exactly where I was. It was painful, tumultuous, and unpredictable.

Misalignment 2: Owned and Perceived. When how you value yourself is not how others value you.

It can be incredibly confusing and frustrating when there is a difference between the way you value yourself and how you are actually valued. It can, however, also be very enlightening.

At my previous startup, I took on the responsibility of helping run our leadership meetings. There was an obvious need for it, but no one was stepping up to do it, so I volunteered. I knew it would be challenging, but I knew the value I could bring. I have a knack for structuring meetings so they are productive and actionable and am very good at asking the right questions and forcing people to go deeper on a topic when necessary. I am also diligent at keeping meetings on task and on time, at creating next steps, and following-up with people afterwards to make sure they are clear on the expectations. This was my owned value.

However, after running a few meetings, I realized that I was not, in fact, being valued for my organizational, managerial, or communication skills. I was being valued for my timekeeping and note taking skills. This was my perceived value.

This perceived value was made abundantly clear when I was told in no uncertain terms how much better the meetings were now that I was the dedicated note taker and how I didn’t need to worry about asking so many questions because other people “now had space” to handle it.

This is a clear example of how my owned value and perceived value were completely different things. Yes, I am good at taking notes and setting agendas, but those were not how I saw myself truly contributing. This misalignment was incredibly frustrating for me, especially since I was actively using all those other skills and no one seemed to notice or care.

However, let’s pretend it happened the other way around — that I was asked to set and manage the agenda and take notes for those leadership meetings. Then, as I began asking questions and following up with people afterwards, was praised for the focus and clarity that my questions created and was told how much more progress was being made because everyone was prepared for the next meeting. This would have been a situation where the perceived value showed me how I could (and arguably should) be valuing myself.

Pay attention to how your owned value and your perceived value are matching up. Is the value you cherish and hold deeply within yourself is not being seen or appreciated? Or, are others seeing value in you that you didn’t even know you had? Both perspectives are important to understand when navigating and growing in your career.

Misalignment 3: Owned and needed. When the value you bring and the value that is needed are no longer the same thing.

This misalignment is one of the most common, hardest to identify, and most painful. When your owned value and the value needed by the company are not the same thing, it usually results in a separation — but it doesn’t have to. A misalignment between these two perspectives of value can also be a catalyst for growth.

In my current role, I was hire number two and joined as Director of Marketing before we even launched. It was an incredible (and risky!) opportunity, but I was so excited about the idea of owning and building a strategy from scratch. I also knew that every tool I had available to me would be used. As a marketing team of one, I reached deep and relied on my design, digital acquisition, email, content, data, and customer insights experience to launch a brand into existence. The fact that I truly was a marketing swiss army knife made that possible.

But, I knew that I would not always be solo marketer and as we added the first few people to my team, the ways in which I had been bringing value, and the new ways in which the company needed me to bring value changed. I would be lying if I said that it was an easy transition, that I readily and eagerly relinquished all those things that I had been doing and seamlessly moved into a leadership role. IT WAS NOT EASY, OR SEAMLESS, OR SMOOTH.

It was (and still is) so incredibly hard for me to let go of the doing. Because the truth is, I am doer. I liked designing our print materials, running and optimizing our facebook ads, writing and crafting our content, posting and managing our social accounts, coding and creating our emails, analyzing and reporting on customer behavior and performance. I liked it all and felt an incredible amount of pride in accomplishing the work and achieving the results.

But the company needed me to do more. I had to have several hard conversations with our founder, all about the topic of me “getting out of the weeds” or “thinking bigger” or “overall vision and strategy” before I had a simple, but impactful moment of clarity.

One evening as I was driving home, after a particularly rough day at work, I literally had a commuting epiphany (I don’t know if that’s a real thing, but I’m claiming it if it’s up for grabs).

I was trying to root-cause my mixed feelings of resentment, lethargy, and unhappiness. That day, I had a tense conversation with our founder about how I was spending my time. I walked away feeling unappreciated, frustrated, and certain that I was letting him and the company down. But I was doing all the things that got me, got us to where we were! I was using that skill set that got me hired, that helped me succeed, and that helped the company grow exponentially and now, suddenly it wasn’t enough anymore. I wasn’t enough anymore.

Then I realized, it wasn’t about doing more of the same, he was trying to tell me that he, that the company, needed me to do more of something new.

At the same time, I also told myself that just because I would be bringing value in a different way didn’t mean that the way I had brought value in the past didn’t matter. Of course it mattered and of course it made it difference and of course I can continue to take pride in those accomplishments.

But to grow with the company, I had to move forward and grow too.

It was (and continues to be) challenging for me to accept that how I once valued myself is not the same as how I value myself now. For so long I have defined who I am by what I can do. My diverse background, those unique combinations of experience and skills are part of my story and my identity. But just because I am not using every single skill I have doesn’t mean that they are not still part of who am. They absolutely got me where I am today and absolutely were a big part of the success of Bloomscape. But the way I used to bring value and the way I get to bring value now and in the future are not the same.

That is growth, that is change, that is success.