Promote Your Strengths Getting your strengths recognized is much easier once you have taken inventory (step one). Also, a realistic understanding of one’s opportunities for improvement (step two) will help keep the focus on your strengths. The next step is to begin generating recognition of your value. With your manager or supervisor (in a larger company) or with the upper management team (in a smaller company), begin to take advantage of opportunities to share your successes, especially when they helped lead to generating or saving customer revenue. Also, enlist those you are helping—i.e., the salespeople and customers—to send in positive feedback. Making this happen is a skill that can feel awkward at first but with practice gets much easier.
Remember your last visit to the auto shop? More and more service organizations now take a few moments to inform customers that a satisfaction survey is coming and urge them to rate their service as excellent. This also creates an opportunity for them to address right there any service that was less than excellent. While you may not adopt the exact same tactic, reminding a grateful colleague, salesperson, or customer to share positive feedback about your performance is a valid and useful action. Also pointing out to your managers or supervisors what you have done and how it helped win or save a design helps them see what you have done and more accurately assess your value.
Be prepared, though. Demonstrating you can “deliver the goods” will set expectations that you can do so the next time. This will also lead to further recognition and ever more challenging opportunities to perform. You don’t need to brag, but all engineers need to be able to toot their own horn a little. Additionally, recognizing the efforts of others who have contributed can add even more shine to your own efforts. Being quick to take the blame (and step up to correct an error) and quicker still to share success only goes further to help you increase your value to the company. Of course, these can’t just be empty words. But the point here is that when you are doing the deeds, the words aren’t empty.
Letting others know what you do is important. But in tough times, you have to look at what else you can do. Chances are you already have more to offer and just need to get yourself organized to deliver it.
Take On A Second Role
We all have our hands full with the work we have to do today. If you don’t, that’s your step zero—get fully loaded. Even so, there are numerous opportunities to increase your value simply by looking at what you already do and introducing some formal structure around it.
For instance, if you’re a senior team member, you certainly have helped bring new additions up to speed. In your particular area of expertise, are there additional opportunities to spread similar knowledge? Perhaps another location or group in the company would benefit from learning more about the products, tools, or processes your location or group develops, uses, or follows.
Start with informal brown-bag sessions, and you will be presently surprised how much this improves your own situation. In addition, spreading knowledge spreads the workload as well. You will need to watch out and be careful to have the endorsement of your manager and probably higher management if this has a direct cost or looks like it could introduce risk into a schedule. In most cases, these fears can be allayed by starting small and setting your initial expectations a little lower.
Now look at and characterize your “label” within the organization. Can you adopt a “hyphen,” i.e., a secondary but still important role? If you are a strong individual contributor, can you become a player-coach by putting more formal attention into some junior team members? Perhaps player-manager is more appropriate if you are already in a lead role. In this case, the hyphen might come from taking the informal reports you used to provide your manager and turning them into formal, published reports. You also help your manager by providing ready-to-consume-and-pass-on pre-analyzed data.
If you’re a manager, look around for your hyphen. Manager-mentor is a great opportunity to help others along and get your second role. If you play this card right, you can even hone some new skills of your own. For instance, if you aren’t super savvy on the latest browser or e-mail tips and tricks, get your “mentees” to share their knowledge while you help them negotiate the corporate waters. Look good and do good, and get better at your job too.
One area that everyone should consider as a serious “second job” is documenting. In the early days of ISO9000, the mantra was “write it down and follow it.” This isn’t just ISO9000 anymore. It’s become good practice. However, documenting often takes a back seat when workloads increase. Make a point to look at your roles and responsibilities and make sure important processes and procedures are documented (small and large). Also, look carefully for those critical tasks you really don’t want to keep doing but get trapped doing because no one else has learned how to perform them. Document them and now you can pass the task on and move up to bigger and better things.
In general, progressing through the four steps above will yield a higher profile. But the whole point of this article is taking the bull by the horns. Now more than ever, being your own public relations agent with the ammunition from the above steps is what you have to do.
Increase Your Personal Visibility
Engineers are genetically predisposed to digging themselves deep into a problem and ignoring nearly everything else until it’s solved. This is fantastic for tackling specific problems, but it also tends to reduce one’s visibility. In times like these, though, visibility is essential. When hundreds or thousands of engineers are going to be ranked against one another, one cannot rely upon one’s immediate manager or supervisor to be able to communicate one’s unique personal worth to the company. All engineers must take every opportunity to get specific recognition for their work.
Being a silent high performer is not as good as being a vocal average performer with a strongly documented track record. This applies to anyone at any level. Leave a clear trail of your accomplishments and let people know how to find it. Depending upon your company and industry, your options here may differ.
At my company, we have a formal specification system, Web-based and available across the company globally (but not externally). We use this system to document business practices. We also have a company memo system where every employee has a “folder” for storing memos forever, available to everyone. This system has search and distribution capabilities as well.
Does this really matter? Doesn’t doing great work mean more than anything else? During a recent round of merit performance reviews, I heard this anecdote from a colleague. He was negotiating with another manager for the ranking of his reports within a larger field. When an impasse was reached, this colleague did a quick search in the memo system for his report and for the others in question.
Then, he showed the group of managers considering these reports the comparison of his report’s memo record (not just volume but topics covered) versus the scant offerings of the other reports. It was obvious to all which employee was delivering more value to the company from the evidence of the memos. It’s not just what you do. It is also the impact of what you do for now and for the future. Although past performance isn’t a perfect indicator of future performance, it is usually all managers have to work with.
Your Turn
These are the five steps for success. If you’re going to take a short cut, make sure right now that whatever you’ve done is recognized. To be most effective, this recognition must be not just what you have done but what you can do, are doing, and will do for the company in the future. To provide the clearest picture of your value, begin by taking stock of your assets and work on reducing the impact of your weaknesses. Actively promote your strengths while putting yourself into more situations where you can shine and do more to help the company and others by mentoring and coaching others. Finally, become your own PR agency by documenting the good you are doing and making sure others can find and use it. If you follow these steps, you will not only survive this difficult season, you will also position yourself to reap an unfair share of the rewards during the next up cycle.
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