Toot your horn

Toot your horn. Photo by Ev0073

We were for the most part instilled by our parents to work hard. And when it comes to acknowledgement and recognition we are humble and do not want to take recognition for our hard work. Do you agree?

In your workplaces, you will need to take credit and toot your horn. No one is going to do this for you. The benefits of this are many. For example, groups are always on the search for talent and they'll admit that it's hard to find the right person. They're on the search for people that get the job done. If they run into a person who can share about their accomplishments, they are very interested in continuing the conversation. If they run into a person who can't share about their accomplishments, then they move on to the next person. If you're currently searching for a job, then this is very important. You need to show your value to a potential company and you show this through your past accomplishments. If you don't have a history of past accomplishments and successes, then it becomes very simple and that's to go out and accomplish something.

As people, we can't read minds and to communicate we need tools.  Two fundamental tools I will talk about is the status report and the other one is sharing through conversations.

Weekly Status Reports
This tool is a weekly summary of the activities on a project. It includes what's been accomplished in the last week and what is the plan for the next week. It also identifies milestones, deliverables, risks and issues. It also provides a sense of the cost of the project. From the perspective of the manager, they get visibility into the entire project. From the perspective of the team, they get visibility into other areas that can potential have an impact on them.  They also feel included and part of a team.  From the perspective of the project manager, it's your best friend.  You not only toot your own horn, but you toot the team for their accomplishments. If you're the manager, you can toot the project team's accomplishment to their manager and up the chain giving you and the project team visibility. The CEO can see your accomplishments.  You might be asking, "what if I'm not the project manager?"  The answer to that is to send your status to the project manager in time for the project manager to update the entire project.  You'll get some added bonus points from the project manager because now s/he doesn't have to ask you for it.

I am a fan of the weekly status report as you can tell. By review time, you have a year's worth of accomplishments. In a sense you are actually building content for your performance review throughout the year.

Sharing
Have you been in a conversation with people and they don't share at all? You might as well be stuck by yourself or talking to a wall.  It's as if they don't trust you to share anything with you. You might think that they've got something to hide. Now, if you've been in this situation in either position, what could you do to ensure that people know what you're up to? Hmm. Share? Yes, share everything, not just the good but also the bad. You could get insight into what you did that helped you have a great result or insight into what you could have done better.

I'll leave it at this for now. Thanks for reading and hope to have you back here soon.

Regards,
Gil Gido
NAAAP Seattle
President