A feedback that went a long way
I was recently given this feedback by another project manager and instead of feeling sorry for myself and all the opportunities I might have missed, I decided to sit with this comment for a while.
I discussed this feedback with my partner, a couple of close friends, and my father and realized that, beyond this comment being accurate, I didn't know how to quantify most of my achievements.
I didn't know how much my work had improved a company's revenue, efficiency, or speed. So of course I would talk more about my tasks, they were easier to discuss.
Besides that, tasks are also a major part of being selected for an interview or discussing growth in more senior roles. The manager has to know you'll be able to complete the day-to-day tasks of the new position.
Once you are discussing it with a director or C-level person, on the other hand, they also consider your achievements. And you gotta be able to seamlessly talk about them.
This is not to say that I don't think I achieved anything in my career. I'm well aware I have, but I don't have the habit of discussing or even thinking about it in terms of what I personally did to positively impact a company. It was always more of an impact in my personal or professional life.
How would I apply this to my past career history?
For example, as a project manager, I manage several clients at once, I have weekly meetings with them, I update several reports, I'm responsible for managing the project management software we use and making sure it's always on track and overall maintaining a good relationship with the clients and my squad.
I don't do it perfectly, as I think no one does, but I'm pretty good at it. That being said, what are my achievements in doing this?
Did I raise efficiency by 20% doing any of those things? How many clients did I avoid losing because of the reports I update? Can I disclose the ROI or the % of it of the clients I manage? Not sure to be honest.
If you read my last post about how I'm applying OKRs to my life, you should already know that OKRs are goals and objectives that are time-bound, measurable, and challenging.
They came to me as a solution for this lack of achievement-thinking problem. Not OKRs per se, but their concept. Treating my achievements as OKRs and fitting them into the time-bound, measurable, and challenging framework.
How long did it take me to achieve a certain goal? What were the outcomes? Why were they challenging?
And I should have a couple of them for each company I've ever worked at. First and foremost, though, I need to start by figuring out what are my achievements.
This type of internal speech was also never taught to me, as a woman
Whether you agree with this statement or not is up to you, but women tend to downplay their achievements a lot more to take up less space and don't seem braggy.
Talking about achievements has had this cocky connotation to it, ever since my teenage years. Either it was not as big of a deal as I made it seem or it made me look too self-centered when there were people out there that had achieved way more.
The bottom line is that I learned to suppress my achievements. And I still don't feel comfortable talking about them in a way that successfully sells myself. I do know how to elaborate on all the things I was told to do and did, but not what I managed to accomplish. That is great for entry-level or junior positions, but not for more senior roles.
And that has made me very angry these last couple of days, the more I think about it.
Being on this work-life-balance, work-relationship-healing-journey since my burnout crisis at the end of 2022, I've also embarked on a path of trying to be kinder to myself and to validate my feelings and experiences first, before seeking validation elsewhere.
It became clear to me that downplaying my achievements to the point of not being able to think about their impact is a huge point I owe myself to correct.
And that's exactly what I'm gonna do.
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