In my last column, I discussed the lamentable fact that your results at work, as great as they may be, won’t always speak for themselves. So, let’s look at how you can help them along.
I had a colleague once — let’s call him Alan — who was unable to open his mouth without expanding on the greatness of his achievements. Organizing telephone calls with colleagues in other countries became “reshaping international collaboration”. The spreadsheet used to track his results became a “state-of-the-art monitoring tool”. And, although Alan had only one intern working for him, he always spoke about his “department”. All this was said without a hint of irony. The shameless audacity of his self-promotion left everybody speechless.
This is definitely not what I mean when I say that you need to get your results noticed. For all the reluctant fascination Alan inspired in me and others in the company, he oversold his achievements.
A better way to make people listen is by responding to their questions. Your manager doesn’t need you randomly listing your accomplishments whenever they see you. However, when they ask, they will expect you to present the relevant facts clearly and calmly.
You can also encourage them to ask questions with the help of a simple method. This will also allow you to channel your inner Alan and let loose a little about the wonders of what you can do — but without the drawbacks described above.
Instead of talking about what you have done, talk about what you are going to do. In other words, make a promise. Taking responsibility for future events sets up an opportunity to talk again when the promise is fulfilled. For example, your boss may follow up with a question two weeks later (“By the way, how are things going with that China project you are working on?”).
If you think this is too high-octane and too much like hard work, there is a beautifully elegant alternative. And that is not to speak about your results at all, but to have others do it for you. To engineer such a scenario, you just need to be consistently kind, competent, generous, helpful, attentive, modest and caring — in other words, it’s not much work at all.