Many people moan and groan that their wage isn't high enough. And it's not rocket science, those that get rewarded the most are those people who are consistently adding value.

The more value you add, the higher income you earn.

Do you have a system for figuring out what activities you'll say no to and what activities you'll say yes to so that you can add much higher value?

Well, here's something that's really interesting.

In most companies, people don't have a good grasp on their company's competitive advantage.

Not Knowing Your Company's Competitive Advantage Puts You At Risk

And not knowing this means that they're often busy doing great work, but work that isn't necessarily supporting what makes you as a company stand out from your competitors, and what makes you stand out as an individual.

This can have a direct impact, not only on the company's bottom line, profit and longevity, but your own bottom line, income and career and life fulfillment.

I'm going to take you through a model that helps you to think more deeply about how your company sets itself apart in the marketplace, and how then you as an individual can set yourself up for greater success.

I'm going to start explaining it from a company perspective. Then once you've got the model and the concept, then we're going to dig a little bit deeper into how you can set yourself up to be a rockstar in your company, maybe even in your industry.

This model is simple, and yet not many companies, and certainly fewer individuals use it to differentiate themselves.

Get Curious

And if some of this you already know, well, I'm going to encourage you to Get Curious as you move through this module. Keep asking yourself, how well am I using this knowledge to set us apart: company and individually?

It is one thing to know something and a completely different thing to use it. Let's get into it.

Five Types of Work

There are five types of work that are executed in any organization. And if you want your team to be seen as Rockstars, then you need to ensure that your team is clear about:

which type of work they need to excel at
which type of work they need to just get done
which type of work needs to be gotten rid of

This understanding of how to focus your attention,

> excel

> get done

> get rid of

is built off the backbone of your competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The five types of work are Competitive, Competitive Enabling, Business Essential, Compliance and Wasteful.

Competitive Advantage

Any business, if it wants to be a rockstar in its industry, must have a strategy around what its competitive advantage is. What differentiates them in the marketplace from their competitors. And a really good example of a company who strongly aligns everything they do to their competitive advantage is Southwest Airlines. So I'm going to use them as an example to illustrate.

Southwest Airlines

When Southwest started operations, travel was really only done by rich people. Airlines were very formal and very stuffy.

Southwest wanted to become the airline that regular people could use to visit their families. The competitive advantage they wanted to play to was to be accessible. And the strategy they chose to do this was to be cheap and fun.

Southwest's Competitive Advantage:

Accessible

through a Strategy of

Cheap and Fun

Choices to achieve competitive advantage of Cheap airfares

Some of the choices they made so that they could offer cheap flights were:

Smaller hubs

instead of going to the major hubs, which costs lots and lots of money, they only fly to the smaller hubs. As an example, they don't fly in and out of Chicago.

Same airplanes

They bought exactly the same air airplanes - Boeing 737s. So if something breaks down, they've got inventory and they can replace it in and out very quickly.

No allocated seats to save on staffing

They didn't have allocated seats. It is, or I think it still is, first in, best dressed, which saves on staffing expenses.

Quick turnarounds

And they have very quick turnarounds so that planes aren't sitting on the ground very long.

Wheels Up is a favorite saying. If the wheels are up, the company's making money.

As an aside, in 1971 when they were almost about to go out of business, I think they only had a few dollars in the bank. They invented the 10 minute turnaround. Where most other airlines their turnaround was around 1-1.5 hours.

While due to security restrictions now, the 10 minute turnarounds are no more, Southwest is still one of the fastest in the world for turnarounds.

Team members attitudes/skillsets

They employ team members who are willing to make decisions, thereby needing fewer management levels and keeping their costs down.

Their team members are selected because of their friendly, customer focused attitude and willingness to multitask to get done what needs doing.

Can you see how they put in the play the systems and processes and just kept layering them? They just laid them on top and on top so that it makes it cheap and friendly, which was and continues to be their competitive advantage.

If you work at Southwest and want to succeed

Therefore, if you are working at Southwest Airlines and you want to be seen as a Rockstar in that company, then you'd better be great at finding ways to reduce costs and to get and keep staff motivated to make it enjoyable for their customers to get to their destination.

Knowing your company's competitive advantage enables you to value-add

This is where as a leader, you can really value add.

Because if you know what it is that differentiates your company in the marketplace, then you will know where to focus your energies to have the greatest impact. You can really hone your attention in on creating and fine tuning those systems and processes that enable your company to excel at its competitive advantage.

Word of Warning - Don't get distracted ...

But you knew there was a but coming. There's a word of warning.

Many companies say that their competitive advantage is their great customer service or their focus on quality. But often you dig a little bit deeper. Those are just words that they mouth. A bit like their value statements that they make and stick on the wall and never look at again.

Kmart and Walmart and Customer Service

For example, here in Australia, Kmart, (which isn't part of the US Kmart brand), but similar, it's like Walmart. Kmart's vision is to provide families with everyday products at the lowest prices.

However, Kmart also state that one of their values is customer service. And when I looked on their careers page, it says they're looking for enthusiastic associates to provide superior customer care.

Yet, you only have to step foot into a K-Mart store (and not very far!) to know that their focus is on lowest prices, not superior customer care.

And that is as true of Walmart.

They too sprout service to the customer, yet you don't have to Google too hard to find a lot of stories about how poor Walmart's customer service is.

If you want to be acknowledged as a real contributor ...

So if you're an employee in either of these companies and you want to be acknowledged as a real contributor, then you'd be better off putting more of your attention on excelling at ways to help the company reduce costs than you are improving customer care.

Not to say customer care isn't important because it is.

But in these two companies, as an example, it is likely that customer care is something that falls into a category we'll discuss in a moment, which is called Business Essential.

However, I want to turn our attention to Nordstrom's who are famed for their level of customer care.

Nordstroms Customer Care

Some 30 years ago maybe, a consultant from the US that we were working with, Paul, told us a story about Nordstroms. He loves shopping at Nordstroms.

One day Paul saw a pair of shoes and a store window and thought, "Gee, I like the look of those." Then he thinks to himself, "Oh, Nordstrom's is just up the street. I'll go up there and see if I can get them."

He goes into Nordstrom's and describes the shoes to the assistant.

The Assistant says, "Look I haven't got them at the moment, but if you've got 15 minutes to spare, here's a voucher for a cup of coffee in our restaurant. Go and have a coffee kickback for 15 minutes or so, and then I'll have them for you."

And so Paul goes off, has his coffee, and when he comes back, this guy's got the shoes in Paul's size.

Paul said, "How did you do that?"

And the assistant said, "Well, I walked up the street to the shop that you told me about and I bought them for you."

Can you imagine somebody in most other large retail stores doing that?

Could you even imagine the systems of Walmart or Kmart or Target enabling that to happen?

Somebody using their credit card or taking money out of the cash register, leaving the store, walking up the street and buying a product, not in stock to sell to their customer.

Their inventory systems couldn't cope, let alone the team member having the desire or the authority to do so.

Now, I don't know if this story still holds true today. If a team member could still walk out of Nordstroms and go and buy some shoes. But it was a pretty powerful story back then. And one I've told thousands of people since because it had such an impact.

Most people in Australia have never heard of Nordstroms, but I've got heaps of them have gone there and visited now because of the story I've told them.

Nordstroms competitive advantage: Superior Customer Care

However, the point of the story is: Nordstrom's are very clear. To deliver one of their competitive advantages, they must employ, train and coach people who are passionate about putting the customer first.

It is to their competitive advantage to invest a lot of time and money, systems and resources into hiring and training the best people for customer care and giving them the freedom to make great decisions in the moment.

Not only that, the systems need to be flexible enough to allow for those, "in the moment" decisions.

In fact, like Nordstrom, Southwest too, hold as one of their strongest competitive advantages the ability for frontline team members to make decisions. Decisions that would, in most other airlines only be allowed by people, several pay grades above.

By designing their system so that people have the freedom to make decisions, Southwest are reducing their costs.

Because when you know what has a direct impact on the customer experience and an impact on your strategy, you then put the right effort into those tasks or activities being done exceptionally well.

So if you are working in either a Nordstrom's or Southwest, you'd be best served to give your attention to improving systems, processes, etc that skyrocket customer care and decision making.

Which leads us to the next type of work that we do, which is Competitive Enabling.

Now is the time to click over to the Take Action tab and undertake the reflection activity