How to Identify and Get Paid for Your Disruptive Skills

Whitney Johnson has posted an interesting couple of articles on the Harvard Business Review Blogs about the above subject. The first one was titled To Get Paid What You're Worth, Know Your Disruptive Skills and the second one has the title How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills.

Here is an excerpt from the first article that reminded me of a little exercise I sometimes do with my Master's students:

"...if we subscribe to classical economics — which says that the price paid for any given service is the price at which the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded — aren't we paid precisely what we're worth? And if we still believe we're trading at a discount to our intrinsic value, is it possible to change the market's mind?"

The exercise I run with the Master's students is about how to put a price in dollars on their value to an employer. I ask them how much money their parents have invested in raising them, and how much the State and their parents have paid to educate them. An average 25-year old can quite easily calculate that the total investment in him or her, since birth, has been more than $1 million dollars and s/he is often amazed at how high that figure is. I then ask them what sort of return should be obtained on that investment and they usually come up with a figure of 15%. "Do you think you'll get that 15%?" I then ask and the answer is often "No."

Education and rearing aren't the only source of individual value to an employer. Every person comes with his or her specific talents, which sometimes add a lot of value to the basic investment in upbringing and education.

I then suggest to them that the way to change the market's, or their future boss's mind about what they are worth is to be cognizant of it themselves. If they don't know the value of what they have, what is to stop them from giving it away free.

The first paragraph in Whitney's second post begins:

"In my previous post, I talked about the importance of re-evaluating your portfolio of skills and leading with those that are unique — your disruptive skills. These may be capacities that are so innate you may not even consciously recognize them, or skills you have honed over years of practice. These are the skills that can help you carve out a disruptive niche — consequently upping your value in the marketplace. But how do you identify these skills? Or as one reader queried over at YCombinator Hacker News, 'How do you identify the skills that disrupt others' previously-established judgment of your worth to them?' This is a subject I've researched and thought deeply about; readers of my last post also left some great advice. Here are three questions to get started."

I strongly encourage you to read both articles to see what those three questions are and why they need to be asked:

How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills - Whitney Johnson - Harvard Business Review