What Are You Really Worth?

April 11, 2013

It’s a fair question and an answer each of us should know without thinking about it. I’m not talking about your salary alone - think more broadly for a moment. I will cover salary ranges for the healthcare CIO market early next year – no worries. I went through this “what are you worth” exercise a few years ago in my own business and the analysis and the answers gave me a huge wake-up call.

Tim Tolan

I was talking with a very solid CIO last week—a real 'A' Player—about an opportunity we're working on. We'd spoken (many times) before so I already knew his credentials, but I wanted to schedule some time the following week to have an in-depth conversation about the role and location, and also to understand where he was as far as evaluating the opportunity.

In a typical 40 hour work week (which is rare for most of us) we work approximately 2,080 hours in a calendar year. Take a couple of weeks for vacation and for arguments sake throw in another two weeks in paid holidays or more PTO time (depending on tenure) and now we are down to 1,920 hours of real work output in a given year. Still a lot of hours – right? Maybe. Maybe not. It all depends on how you choose to spend your time each day, week and month. Actually it really boils down to how you value each minute of each day and how productive you are. That’s the real math we all have to think about when it comes time to determining what we are really worth. It’s not funny or fuzzy math either. It’s very real. Read on.

In our example above, the CIO earning on average $225K annually is worth $117.18 per hour $225,000/1,920) - or $29.30 every fifteen minutes. And if you are managing a $3.5M budget your executive leadership enterprise value is worth $1,823 per hour ($3,500,000/1,920) or $455.72 every fifteen minutes. That’s a completely different way of determining your value but an exercise we should all go through as we reflect on our career and look ahead to the New Year. With our industry about to explode increasing productivity for you and your team has never been more important. It really puts the “X-Factor” on how you spend your time if you are honest about your time management. It should also force you delegate or outsource low value tasks instead of trying to do everything yourself. Spend an extra 15 minutes reading the sports section each morning or spending an extra hour tweaking a PowerPoint presentation could prove to be costly.

So the next time you decide to spend an hour doing any low value task or spending your valuable time with anyone that is not engaged in helping you to move the needle in your organization – STOP! Think about your value and determine if the time you are about to invest is really worth it? You will be surprised at how you spend your time/value if you stop each time and think of what you are about to do and measure your value in real dollars and cents.

There are only so many hours in each day and once we use them they are gone forever.

Make ‘em count!