Career Coach - Column with Bo Graesborg

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 alone. I had a colleague once. Let's call him Ellen, 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 Ellen 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, Ellen 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 Ellen 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're 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.