Midlife MavericksYour work doesn’t speak for itself. If you stay quiet, you stay invisible.
You’re good at your job.
You deliver on time, solve problems nobody sees, manage that impossible client only you can calm down, and saved that project from going under at the last minute.
But you’re still earning exactly what you earned three years ago.
If you don’t promote your work, nobody will do it for you.
Your boss doesn’t know what you did on Tuesday. Doesn’t know you spent the weekend redoing the presentation. Doesn’t know it was you who fixed the client problem without them having to step in. They have 12 people on the team, 400 emails a day, three management meetings a week. If you don’t tell them, they don’t know.
And if they don’t know, they won’t promote you.
At one of the banks where I worked, Monday mornings always had a meeting. Almost all men. Big groups, 20 or 30 people. It wasn’t a meeting to inform, it was a peacocking exercise. Marking territory. Pissing on corners like dogs. Or as the saying goes, “If you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else will.”
Everyone said what they’d done the previous week.
“Look how great I am!”
“I’m the best!”
One after another.
I hated those meetings. Practically never spoke, because they were very, very large groups and it was a testosterone show I didn’t want to join.
But I learned something. If I didn’t speak, nobody knew what I was doing. And if nobody knew, I didn’t exist.
The easiest way to start isn’t in a giant meeting with 30 people. It’s talking to your direct manager. Then to your manager’s manager. In small groups, it’s easier. You say what you did, the impact you had, what you’re doing next. No show, but with clarity.
At another bank, one of the department heads, who’s now running the whole thing, told me an interesting story. When he was junior, his boss made him send an email every week with all the trades he’d done and the P&L.
He told me: “At first I felt like I was showing off, thought I was being ridiculous. Then I understood the value of it. If I don’t promote my own work, company management doesn’t know about it.”
Every week.
One email: did this, this is how much we made, this is the impact.
It worked. He got promoted. Now he manages thousands of people (Board level).
How do you actually do this?
Create a brag file. Call it whatever you want.
Every time someone sends you an email praising your work, copy it in.
Positive comment from a client on a project you delivered, copy it.
Result that beat the target, copy it.
Problem you solved on your own without escalating to management, copy it.
Feedback from a colleague saying your presentation was the best at the conference, copy it.
Anything that proves you’re good at what you do, goes in the file.
Don’t trust your memory. Six months from now, when you’re preparing your annual review, you won’t remember half of this. The brag file remembers for you.
You’ll need this file at three critical moments.
First: when you ask for more resources. If you’re going to ask for budget, if you’re going to ask for an extra person for the team, if you’re going to ask for training budget, you’ll need to prove you deserve it. You go to the file and pull three concrete examples of impact you’ve already had. Done.
Second: annual review. Your boss will ask what you did all year. If you don’t have anything prepared, you’ll stammer, you’ll say vague things like “worked hard” or “did my best”. That doesn’t work. With the brag file, you show up with a list: this, this, this, this. Numbers. Names. Client emails. Real impact.
Third: when you have to introduce yourself to a new member of management, or in an internal interview for another position, or when you switch teams. You go to the file and you have everything you need to say who you are and what you’re worth.
I like to compare this to potty training, an example I use often. When kids learn to use the toilet, they spend weeks telling everyone: “Mum! Mum! I did a poo on the toilet!” They tell dad, grandma, the man at the café, the lady at the supermarket they’ve never seen before: “Hello! Today I did a poo on the toilet!”
And everyone claps. Everyone says: “Well done! Congratulations!”
We need to be a bit more like children. Do something well and immediately say: look what I did.
Women are reluctant to brag. Probably even more so in the UK than in the US, where this is a national sport. But it doesn’t matter where you are. If you don’t do it, you stay where you are.
Your colleague next to you earns more than you. Does less, has worse results, but every month sends an email to the boss saying: “Look at the deal I closed.” You closed three. Nobody knows, because you didn’t say.
This is even more important when you work for yourself.
When you have your own business, those satisfied client emails become testimonials. Positive comments become references. They’re proof that it’s not just you saying you’re good, there are other people saying it for you.
And that travels much further than anything you can say. A potential client reads your website, sees three testimonials from other clients saying you solved their problems, and they’re half convinced before they talk to you. You can say you’re great, but when someone else says it, it carries ten times more weight.
So save everything. Because one day you’ll need it to convince someone to work with you.
Back when I was still in banking, in December I’d go to my boss and say exactly what I expected to earn in the next bonus. I didn’t wait for them to guess. I didn’t wait for them to “recognize my value”. I said the number. When expectations are clear, on both sides, it’s much easier for nobody to be disappointed and to know exactly what the limits are and how far you can go.
This logic is the same anywhere. Your company will pay you the minimum it thinks it can get away with. If you don’t ask for more, you won’t get more. Or as the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
