Have you ever felt bad about talking about your achievements? Did you ever thought, that you’re just doing your job, when you accomplished something? Did you ever feel, that others didn’t understand, how significant your contribution was?
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, this episode is for you!
We start the episode with a discussion why it’s important and why it’s so challenging to sell your achievements.
Furthermore, we discuss these 10 “don’ts”:
- Assume, that they know the circumstances
- Think, that they know, what you’re working on
- Write long paragraphs of text
- Forward a long email trail about the story of the success
- Believe that good work will always sell itself
- Think, that this is just “doing your job”
- Tell yourself, that you don’t have time for it
- Wait forever to let the project be completely finished
- See this as a one-time effort
- View selling as icky
As well as these 13 “dos”:
- Make it easy for your supervisor to re-use it for higher up management
- Be proud about yourself and your achievements
- Mention the compound
- Mention the impact
- Mention the hurdles
- What differentiates this from usual results?
- What have you done?
- Which (possibly unique) skills did you use?
- What was the feedback from trusted sources?
- What are the wins for the company – financially, timewise, quality?
- How does this contributed to achieving the overall goals and the strategy?
- Consider to create a LIKE example
- What is the win for the department/function? (Increase in visibility; Increase in influence; Reusability; Shared learning)?
Finally, we give you some formulas to apply:
- Achieved Result By Taking Action
- Challenges, Obstacles, Steps and Results
- Situation, Task, Action, Result
Have fun listening and tell your colleagues about it!
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Transcript
How to sell your achievements – actionable advise
00:01
You’re listening to episode number 26 of the Effective Statistician, How to Sell Your Achievements.
00:16
Welcome to the Effective Statistician with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske, the weekly podcast for statisticians in the health sector designed to improve your leadership skills, widen your business acumen and enhance your efficiency.
00:30
In today’s episode we’ll talk about a very, very relevant topic because it’s about selling your achievements. We’ll talk about why this is relevant for you and what you can do to actually do that in an effective way. This podcast is created in association with PSI, a global member organization dedicated to leading and promoting best practice and industry initiatives.
01:00
capabilities with access to special interest groups, video on demand content library, free registration to all PSI webinars and much much more. Visit the PSI website at www.psiweb.org to learn more about PSI activities and become a PSI member today.
01:24
Welcome to another episode of the Effective Statistician. I’m Benjamin Piske and I’m here with my co-host Alexander Schacht. Hello Alexander. Hi Benjamin, how are you doing? Thanks. Alex, today we talk about how a statistician or anyone else should communicate achievements.
01:46
Getting to an achievement is one thing, but how do you communicate your achievements within your team, within for your manager and so on. So this is quite an important way of completing any task that you did successfully is not to achieve the task itself, but also to communicate your achievements. And you had a communication, you had a presentation about it. So you already had a presentation done in your…
02:15
team? Was it for your team? Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so you basically you sold the achievements or you told them how to sell their achievements better to you? Or what did you do? Yes, it was for my team, but also for others in the bigger team. And one of the problems that we saw is that within communications.
02:44
people were not able to explain clearly first to their management and their upper management, but also cross-functionally what they actually are doing and what is the great ways of their doing. And of course, if you’re kind of under constant pressure to kind of explain what your impact is and you can’t explain…
03:14
what you’re doing at work and how it impacts to be the bigger picture, your function overall has a problem. Yeah. But isn’t it that, I mean, isn’t the story or the achievement telling the story for himself or itself? So, I mean, why should you care of, you know, presenting your achievements? I mean, you’re, it’s kind of, isn’t it, like, exaggerating a little bit? Yeah, I think there’s lots of cultural differences regarding this. And I think there’s, especially if I speak about…
03:43
selling your achievements, this word selling has lots of bad connotations. And we’ll get to that a little bit later. But of course, there’s lots of differences in cultural diversity. Germans look at this differently than French people or people in the UK or people in the US or people from Asia. Everybody has a very, very different attitude to this thing about.
04:13
speaking about your own personal achievements. Some cultures are very, very open with that and where it comes very, very natural to speak about your achievements. And in other cultures, it’s not how people are educated. It’s not how people grew up. And so I think if you work in a global organization where all these different cultures come together, you need to embrace that.
04:43
diversity. Yeah. And so knowing about this is, I think, the first thing. And then the other thing, of course, is there’s lots of different things that we are working on. Yeah. So we have decisions that work in preclinical, early phase, late phase, you know, or medical affairs or, you know, HTA. They work on all different types of…
05:13
disease areas and the people that you need to explain your achievements to, they may not have the insights that you have. They may not have the backgrounds that you have. So to be able to communicate in such a way that they can actually understand it is really important. No, I agree. I think this is, I mean, I understand that it’s important to sell the achievement. I mean, selling in a good way.
05:42
But it’s also important to, for that, it’s extremely important to be able to explain what you did. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s also one thing about it is where do you explain it? Do you explain it in a meeting or do you need to write an email or do you need to give a presentation? You need to take the forum into account.
06:12
Lots of these people that you need to explain it to are very, very busy. So you need to be, you know, short and to the point. Very often you don’t have, you know, a 30 minute background introduction possibility, so you need to make it very, very easy to kind of digest the information. And one thing is really, I think also important that I don’t know whether it’s, you know,
06:41
different for different companies. But I think if you have achievements, you also need to celebrate them. And I think, yeah. Depending on the size of the achievement, I suppose. So I mean, of successfully writing an email and celebrating. Yeah, no, I agree. But I think this is one of the, actually, this is one of the, where I think sometimes as a manager or leader,
07:10
give the opportunity to really celebrate, to give the feedback to that person that’s just sold the achievement with a celebration, even if it’s just like a bee on ice cream. This is something that I do miss. I forget to do myself sometimes or often. I think it’s a good thing to celebrate it, to really give the feedback also back to that person saying, well, I received it. I saw what you did.
07:36
Thank you and let’s celebrate. Yes, that’s exactly the point. If the management doesn’t kind of realize what the achievement is, how high the hurdles were that people were overcoming, it’s very, very difficult to kind of celebrate it. And lots of managers and higher ups are so busy that they may not see what’s going around.
08:06
Um, so.
08:10
In order to have the achievement celebrated, of course, the achievements need to be communicated. Otherwise, you can just celebrate for yourself, which is probably also quite nice. No, but I think sometimes it’s also worse not to necessarily take every one single achievement to celebrate, but also to just give the feedback as a leader once in a while to be together with the team, to celebrate with the team for a successful year or something where it’s just a bigger…
08:39
achievement and just one. So just saying it’s been successfully, it’s been great working with you and thank you for this and having a dinner together. Yeah, I think both forms are fine. You know, forms where you have, you know, some kind of regular look back on achievements, but also kind of spontaneous celebrations of achievements. And I think you need to have both. But, yeah, but going back to my kind of presentation,
09:09
I think there’s lots of things that we do about achievements that we shouldn’t do. I think avoiding these mistakes is probably already a big step forward. I actually came up with 10 of these. Let’s see. Okay. First.
09:36
If you explain about your achievements or if you communicate your achievements, don’t assume that the other person directly knows the circumstances. So if you just forward an email, FYI, and that’s it, it’s usually very, very hard for the other person to grasp, OK, what is really the problem here? What was the background? What were the specific hurdles?
10:04
know, what did you specifically do about it? Especially if it’s a long tail in the email with 10, 10 persons already commenting on it, writing back and forth and you as a manager should then read through this long tail and understand so you know, I agree. Yes. See, the other point is kind of, of course, if you kind of report your direct supervisor, say no, but most other people in the organization hire up.
10:33
cross-functionally will not know what you’re exactly working on. So you need to explain a little bit about what is the project that you’re working on, what is the details. And not just say, you know, I’m working on the study. Well, there’s probably many studies in your organization. You need to be a little bit more specific. So that they can
11:03
What is the background and what is the detail? To give a little frame around the information that you just provided. Next thing that I think especially statisticians fall into a trap is writing long paragraphs of text or giving lots of detail. If you ever get an email where you need to start scrolling, just for the…
11:32
Not for the other emails that are in the trail, but for the first one. Most people will not read this. And I think it’s also most people don’t have time for it. So don’t write long paragraphs of text. Yeah, that’s referring back to our episode about writing emails. I think it’s just really getting to the point. Yes, yes, yes. And as we just discussed, forwarding a long email trail about the story of the success is probably…
12:01
not really helpful or not the complete story for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. There’s one other thing that I think in many cultures play a big role is the belief that good work will always sell itself. And I really for me personally, I had a hard time to kind of take this because…
12:30
You know, I was thinking, well, says, you know, you should trust in the system and things like this, but it’s, you know, there’s no perfect system that, you know, recognizes everything. There’s so much kind of things going on. There’s so much change going on. You know, there’s, um, change into supervisors that you have change in their supervisors, you know, change in your team cross-functionally. So you can’t just.
13:00
expect that people will be there for long enough to actually see all the details. And that just naturally good work will always sell itself. It needs a little bit of help. No, and especially if people are really busy, they just don’t see it. And even if you’re doing a great job, it might not just come back, fall back on you.
13:28
just, you know, okay, the project is done. The project was successful. Okay, great. So thanks. Next, next topic. So it’s really, yeah, people are busy. So yeah. Another thing, you know, I once had someone reporting to me said, did an amazing job. And then, you know, I gave her some very, very positive feedback about it. And that person just said, well,
13:56
I was just doing my job.
14:00
Well, of course it’s your job to kind of, you know, drive things forward and complete projects. But that is, you know, you still can celebrate these achievements, yeah? And very often people lack the kind of understanding of what is special about what they’re doing, yeah? Because it’s easy for them.
14:26
but it’s only easy for them. It’s not necessarily easy for lots of other people. And if you’re working according to your strengths, of course, you can be super successful, get lots of achievement, and it can be pretty easy for you overall, but still big achievement. And of course, it’s part of your job,
14:56
just doing your job. Yeah, it’s not, you know, everyday’s job to be successful. Yeah, and of course there will be always kind of failures, you know, so that’s just part of what we are doing. Another kind of mindset thing is just telling yourself that you don’t have time to sell your achievements.
15:22
Yes, it goes back to the point that we just discussed about, just moving on, moving on, moving on from one project to another, another step, stop celebrating or stop investing the time to explain to your managers, to your supervisors what you actually did. Yeah. So, saying it should be a priority to take the time to sell your achievement.
15:51
There’s another specific thing that is, I think, in terms of many of the projects that we work on are very, very long-term projects. If you think about a study from start to finish or even a submission or this complete development of medicine, of course that takes years.
16:16
Maybe something that you have done very specifically at the protocol stage really only works out when you have the readout of the study a couple of years later. But that doesn’t mean that only by the time you have the readout of the study, you celebrate about your achievements. You won’t be remembered at that time. Maybe you’re not around anymore at that time.
16:45
That’s true. It should be time in a timely fashion to do it because otherwise it’s past. That is also together with the celebrations that we talked about. To have it close to the event or to the action, I think, is really important and not so much close to the outcome. Of course, the outcome is important, but even having this potential outcome.
17:15
in mind is important. Another mindset thing is to think you can tick off this box just once. Selling your achievements is not something that you can do once a year or something like this. You need to do it on a regular basis.
17:43
Of course not on a daily basis, but pretty regularly. So by isn’t this like an achievement, isn’t this event driven, let’s say? So I mean… Yeah, but if you have your events only every two years, then you’re probably not making the right selection of the events. That’s what I’m wondering. So let’s say, for example, if you have in your company a quarterly check-in for your yearly goals.
18:11
and you take the quarterly check in as the ones where you set your tick boxes saying, you know, I did this and this and this. But isn’t it more successful in setting your achievements if you do it right after you had this achievement? Exactly. Exactly. And that is, I think, where I wanted to say, of course, kind of, you know, you shouldn’t think about it as a one-time thing.
18:38
If you have it kind of regularly, habitually, and you have achieved something and you sell it and explain about it, that’s kind of the thing. And not kind of thinking, oh, I listened to this podcast, now I go to my achievement box, explain it to my supervisor tomorrow, and then I’m done.
19:03
That’s successful, yeah.
19:09
So, and you know, not just think about it, if you think about promotions, yeah, it’s people get all the achievements together for this one discussion where it’s about the promotion. I think this is a flawed approach. I think it’s much more kind of by the time you get to the discussion about promotion.
19:36
There should be so much kind of storyline in there that you just build on the storyline and just say to the people, oh, do you remember this story and this story and this success and this achievement? And say, oh yeah, you told me about this year ago, two years ago, last six months, three weeks ago. And just this kind of, say, see all this stories line up to your promotion.
20:05
Yeah, I know. I agree. It shouldn’t be like that you come to the promotion discussion with the long list of achievements you did over the last three years and nobody knew about it or at least you haven’t sold it before. Then expect to be promoted. Then you’re in for the promotion the next circle. Yeah. Then maybe your achievements are too long ago and not impactful anymore or not understood anymore. Yeah. Don’t keep it up.
20:35
I think the last point on the what not to do list is viewing the selly as kind of icky, yeah, because selling is not icky. Selling is helping the other person understand. And I think that’s the important thing to have in mind. It’s helping the other person. And if you think about it from that mindset, that’s already a very, very nice thing to
21:05
Yeah, no, I agree. I think this is actually, I think it’s actually something where I see it’s typical Germans. They have a tendency and you know, like under underselling and rather staying, you know, on the lower level saying, well, okay, so yeah, no, I’m, I did my job and I did good, but yeah, okay, that’s the way it is. And, you know, I don’t like the selling business in that way that much, I think compared to other.
21:35
cultures. And now on the what to do list, actually, they have 13 things, but they are rather kind of small. So maybe we can go through them a little bit faster. So in terms of the first thing, if you sell something to your supervisor, he very often may want to kind of forward it to his management. Yeah. And make it easy for your supervisors to do so.
22:05
Okay, that’s a little bit selfish for me being a supervisor, but that will make it easier for the accomplishment to kind of go up in the organization. Yeah, absolutely. Because if there’s a hurdle for the supervisor to say, I have to now get a frame around it, around the achievement to explain my supervisor who does not understand what the day-to-day business is, then…
22:33
This is a hurdle and it might just not pass your supervisor. Yeah, absolutely. Or your supervisor. Supervisor, you know, the easier it can go up to the top, so better. Yeah. And I think that comes back to the point that we just talked about, you know, what not to do. Next point, be proud about yourself and your achievements. Yeah. It’s absolutely okay to be.
23:01
proud about things. If you have worked hard, if you have overcome challenges, if you needed to pull all your experience together to get to this point, be proud about it. It goes back to the celebration, of course.
23:22
And now a couple of kind of very, very simple things. Yeah. If you’re working in a bigger organization, first mention the compound for which you’re worked on. Yeah. Mention the impact, the specific impact on the business. And I think there it’s, you know,
23:45
not something like I did X, Y, Z in time, but what does it mean for the overall business? So that the impact is clear to people. That is, I think, very, very, very, very important. Yeah. And in translation for CRO business, mention the client. This is an important point in the CRO business to say, to understand what
24:15
client, but you know, size of business is impacted by the positive or by your achievement. Yeah, very, very good point that helps to put things into perspective and you know, also for supervisors to connect with, you know, other functions, yeah, or maybe with your client, yeah. So your supervisors know next time when they speak to, you know, in a governance meeting with this client about XYZ they can bring up.
24:44
the story of your success. Next thing, achievement is very much depending on how high the hurdles were. Yeah. So, mention the hurdles. Yeah. Mention whether you had any kind of specific circumstances that made it especially hard to get to there. If you have lots of headwinds,
25:14
mention them, because that will give a completely different perspective on your achievement. And that also goes to the next point, actually, what differentiates this from usual results, so to say. If there were specifically high hurdles, that’s kind of a bigger achievement. If you work within your team that you have worked on for years and everybody is kind of…
25:43
working greatly together, sense that something completely different than if you’re working in an organization where you have lots of turnover and you have different organizations and there’s no established processes and whatsoever. You need to get all these things first in place to actually get to the point.
26:08
Next point I think is also really really important is to be very specific about what you personally have done.
26:20
So, you know, most of the achievements that we have are team achievements. So it’s very rarely, there’s, you know, achievements that are only done by one person. And so it’s important for others to understand, okay, were you just part of the team and, you know, you’re waiting at the sideline?
26:46
Or were you kind of driving things, you know, and coordinating things? Or, you know, did you score the goal? Yeah. So, so what was your effort within the team? Um, also that, you know, ghost practices, are there any possibly unique skills that you used in this? Since that sometimes helps to come up with this topic about what you specifically have done.
27:15
Yeah, of course, if you work in a cross-sectional team and you were a statistician, you don’t need to explain that, well, you brought your statistics expertise to the table. Yeah, but, you know, did you have kind of, you know, because of your experience on adaptive designs or your experience with network meta-analysis or experience with whatsoever, were able to, you know, get something done specifically.
27:45
Yeah, I wonder once you’re finished with the list, how we get now the back to the point of, you know, keeping it short. So we’re having many, many points of you know, what what we should mention. Yeah, of course. And I think yeah, we’ll get at the end, actually, we’ll get to some example formulas, okay, to kind of tell things in a very, very easy way.
28:14
And of course, kind of, you know, not all these things are distinct, you know, you need to some of these things come together very, very easily. And as you said, some are not applicable for some situations either. So it’s really, I’m just kidding. But I think it’s kind of, you know, leading us back to the point of writing successful emails. However you present it, then it’s difficult.
28:41
I more and more understand when you see this as a list of items to be considered, that selling achievements is not a thing to do just in a minute. No, you need to actually reserve time for it and you need to train yourself on it. And so even maybe discuss things with your supervisor if you summarize things in an email and
29:10
ask your supervisor for feedback whether you can improve your communication about it. And by actually improving communication about this, you’ll probably improve communication about lots of different topics. Because a couple of these things here are applicable for probably any communication. What we talked about kind of framing things. Yeah. It’s really, really important.
29:40
But anyway, let’s get back to that rest a little bit. But that’s okay. So another thing about achievement, it is about feedback, of course. Yeah. So if you got feedback from, let’s say, specially trusted sources, that is, of course, especially valuable. Yeah, if you got feedback from your CEO, or from, you know,
30:09
external body or if you get feedback from your client, that is especially helpful. Yeah, very valuable.
30:22
In terms of impact, also you can sometimes link it very, very easily back to things like finances, timelines, or quality. Maybe you can tick all three boxes. That helps very often to explain the impact. What is the win for the company?
30:49
for your higher ups, it’s of course helpful to know how that helps them. So how does this contribute to achieving the overall goals and the strategy of your general organization? Yeah. Yeah, department. Yeah. So, um,
31:10
And of course, for that, you need to know about these overall goals and the strategy. But then you can also use similar wording. So that if your goal of the year is XYZ and to set these buzzwords in it, then reuse these buzzwords to kind of connect your achievement. But you can also for this one, you can talk to your supervisor as well. I think this would be good.
31:40
Help there because usually they do have a better understanding of overall goals and strategies. Yeah, and sometimes, you know, these things also…
31:51
They are sometimes on vogue and sometimes not so on vogue. And it’s a little bit like fashion. Yeah, it changes over time a little bit. One other thing is in terms of for your own records, it might be very good to have an archive of your achievements. So that you…
32:19
can pull these things easily together for when you need them. So maybe for promotional dossier, or maybe you want to switch your jobs within your company or maybe even outside your company, or you want to hire up leaders that are visiting your department.
32:45
and you want to make a presentation about what you have achieved over the last years. Yeah, so I think in these big organizations, there is the need to constantly explain what you’re doing and what values you’re bringing. And these stories of success are very, very powerful because there’s one thing about kind of all the metrics that we have. Yeah.
33:14
timelines, finances, and whatsoever. But these metrics don’t tell stories. These achievements, they do tell stories. And stories are a very, very powerful tool to connect. So use these stories, install these stories so that you’ll have a cabinet of things to pull from. Yeah. And even if it’s just an email.
33:41
folder where you put the emails that you’re writing or presenting. Yeah, also slide sets. Usually you will forward them at one point, so email folder is probably a good thing.
33:57
So, and last point, what to do, think about and include the wind force department into your function. Is there increase in visibility? Is there increase in influence? Is there reusability? Can other people learn from that achievement and can apply best practices? Is there shared learning in this?
34:24
This is always very, very good to kind of embed in an achievement because that will help with the shareability. You know, it’s a little bit like social media, you know, the more usable it is, the best, you know, the more it helps other people, the more likely it will get shared. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, good point. Okay. We are already
34:53
belong beyond half an hour. So let’s get to the last point, these kind of example formulas. I have three kind of example formulas that I found. And they all have their benefits and limitations.
35:17
and will work in different situations. So the first is kind of achieved result by taking action. Yeah. So that goes specifically to the point that you can show what was the impact and what specifically did you do. Yeah. So very, very short formula. Achieved result by taking action. Next formula is challenges.
35:46
obstacles, steps, steps, and results. So what was the environment? What was the hurdle? What was the situation? What did you specifically do? And what was the outcome and impact? Challenges, obstacles, steps, and results. Last is pretty easy to remember. Star, situation, task, action, result. Yeah.
36:14
also a little bit similar to the challenges, obstacles, steps, and results. But here, it’s more kind of.
36:25
more coming from the framing point of view than what were the tasks. What did you do about the tasks and what was the sense of final impact? But yeah, it’s less the challenges and obstacles and more the actual situation and the tasks you did. But yeah, I think it’s kind of a… I mean, it depends on the situation, obviously, where you can use it as you said, because…
36:52
For example, the first one achieved results by taking action. This would mean that whoever reads this needs to be aware of the frame. So it can be your supervisor, it could be your team that you work with, but it couldn’t be your super supervisor or somebody else. So it’s really then more the ones where you say it’s a situation task, action results. And I think…
37:21
challenges, obstacles, steps and results is more for the medium supervisor ones. Because if you if it’s going up in your company, I don’t think they they’re interested in the challenges and obstacles. They’re more interested in results. So I mean, seriously, I think it’s kind of, you know, whoever you address it to, it’s, it’s but what I you know, the nice things what we talked about what to do, you can kind of very much feed them into these different buckets. Yeah.
37:51
So if you think about the situation, that may include client or compound. What then about the task? What specifically did you do? What were your unique skills that you had? But these kind of things. And then the next thing would be the steps.
38:19
And the outcome, we talked a lot about the outcome, whereas the feedback, what is the impact, what is the, specifically about finances, timelines and quality.
38:34
Is it reshareable? You know, so that it’s not just for your specific project, but it’s, you know, if implemented more widely, it’s actually an achievement across many teams.
38:49
These are kind of big achievements. Yeah. Yeah, excellent. I think it’s a good formula, at least to start with. If you consider selling your achievements, to really have an overview of what are the things that you should consider and then use the steps or what to do, what we talked about, to put them into the right places. Yeah. And as usual, um.
39:18
You will find all these kind of show notes on our homepage. So just go to the effe and to the specific episode. And you will get these formulas there as well. Excellent. Thanks for listening, everyone. And you’ll hear more from us next week. Thanks a lot. Bye.
39:43
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