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Building Personal Capital
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What Is Personal
Capital? Personal capital is your ability to make a
difference in any undertaking. It's made up of two components:
- Processing ability
- Leverage
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Processing power is the ability
of a person to transform ‘givens’ into ‘desireds’.
It requires thinking and doing and relies on your energy,
character,
knowledge, and skill. The less ‘givens’ (resources)
provided and the more difficult the ‘desireds’ (final result)
are to produce—the greater is the demand on a person’s
processing power (Vitalo 1998). The more processing power you
have, the
more your results are a function of you. The highest level of
processing power is to create something out of nothing.
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Your Processing
Power in Action
Imagine you start a new job. Your assignments will be new and you
will need coaching to get the work right. The results you produce
are partly
due to your coach (a resource). As you build your know-how, you
will do the same task without coaching (less resources) and produce
the same result. The result you produce is no more a function of you
alone. Your processing power has increased. |
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| The second part of personal capital is leverage. Leverage raises
the productivity of others by their acquiring and using your expertise.
It amplifies your processing power through others. Demonstration and
coaching are two ways in which you leverage your capabilities. You also
leverage your capabilities by producing new knowledge and sharing
it with others. The better you are able to generate new knowledge
through learning
and
the
more proficient you are in representing your knowledge and transferring
it to others, the greater is your leverage. |
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Your Leveraging Ability in Action
Imagine a new employee starts in your work area. Her first task is to prep
the base plates used for mounting the statues your company sells. Her
task is to drill a set of holes that must be precisely located on
each plate. When you had that job, you learned that you could reduce
your errors by constructing
a jig that fit over the plate and correctly identified where the holes
should be drilled. You watch the new employee and notice that her error
rate is
like yours used to be. You comment on how frustrating it is to not
get the holes correct and offer her the use of the jig you created.
She accepts it
and her error rate drops. You just leveraged your expertise and benefited
another by raising hers. |
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How Do You Build
Personal Capital? You build it by learning from others and
from your own performance and using that learning to improve your next
performance. The products we offer provide you knowledge, skills, and
instruction so you can benefit from the ideas and methods that others
have already developed. For example,
- Our Kaizen Desk Reference
Standard teaches you how to take a given work process
and transform it into a better work process and
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- Our Working With Others
training program materials teaches you how to add value to other people's
ideas while sustaining collaborative relationships.
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Why Build Your
Personal Capital?
You develop personal capital because you value making a difference in whatever you undertake. The more personal capital you have, the wider the variety of circumstances in which you will be able to take any given resource and produce a desired outcome on your own or working with others in teams. Also, you will be able to take on and complete more complex and novel tasks successfully. |
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If you seek to be a world-class performer, you need to
fully develop and continuously improve your personal capital. If you get
satisfaction and energy from seeing your efforts result in tangible benefits
for others as well as yourself—then you also want to continuously
increase your personal capital. And if you like working with others who
have these qualities, you too need to continuously increase your personal
capital so that you can fulfill your responsibilities as a team member.
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