Managers Need To Learn How To Humblebrag

In order to advance your career, you need to learn how to humblebrag
In order to advance your career, you need to learn how to humblebrag
Image Credit: Thomas Hawk

As a manager, you are responsible for using your manager skills to manage a team of professionals. This means that you have to spend time with each member of your team in order to make sure that they have a good understanding of where they want their career to go and how they are going to achieve it. At the the same time, you need to have a good understanding of where you want your career to go. Likewise, once you know what you want, you’re going to have to know how you can go about making it happen.

Welcome To The World Of Humblebragging

So what is this humblebragging that we talk of? It’s pretty simple really. As a manager you are going to want your management to recognize all of the hard work that you’ve been able to accomplish. In fact, you’d like them to reward you for it. However, you are faced with a dilemma: it turns out that there is a fine line between tasteful self-promotion and being a boastful jerk. There’s no manager training on how to approach this correctly. You need to understand the difference if you want your career to really take off. You are going to have to get good at this humblebrag stuff: you are going to have to find ways to tactfully speak up.

Track What You’ve Done

Listen, we are all living complicated busy lives. What this means is that it’s all too easy for us to accomplish some task and then forget about it. The experts tell us that what we need to do is to start to create what can be called a “brag bag”. This will basically be a list of everything that you and your team have been able to accomplish. Updating this list on a regular basis will be important – once a week at a minimum. This brag bag will become important when your next performance review arrives. You will have a complete list of everything that you accomplished and you’ll be well positioned to ask for a raise.

Update People On Your Status

You need to realize that your management is busy just like you are. What this means is that when you are successful in some task that you tackled, you have the responsibility to share the news with them. They are not going to have the time to come and find out about your accomplishments. Instead, you’ll need to send them a quick email detailing what has been accomplished.

There is another reason that you are going to want to share your wins with your boss. They will want to pass them on to their management also. Remember, your wins are also your bosses wins. When you are telling your management about what you’ve been able to accomplish, you will want to make sure that you do so with a sense of excitement. Even if this is not in your nature, you’ll want to pump things up a bit in order to get your management excited about what you’ve been able to accomplish. Show some passion!

Give Credit To Others

When you have accomplished something, rarely did you do it alone. When you go to tell your management about what you have accomplished you are going to want to be sure to show them that you are a team player. You can do this by taking the time to talk up what the team was able to accomplish – don’t just highlight your own accomplishments. Keep in mind that by spreading the praise around, you’ll be using this as an opportunity to get closer to your coworkers. If you don’t share the credit, then you’ll just come across looking like a big jerk.

Don’t Over Do It

When you are humblebragging, you need to be careful. You are going to want to make sure that you don’t talk up your accomplishments too often. The delicate balance that you are going to want to strike here is that you may not want to humblebrag to your boss every time you have an accomplishment. However, at the same time you don’t want your major accomplishments to go unnoticed. One way to approach this problem is to provide your boss with biweekly updates that you start off with any major accomplishments you’ve had. Do this well and you’ll promote your visibility and set yourself up to be recognized by your management.

What All Of This Means For You

Managers have a number of different responsibilities. Perhaps one of their most important responsibilities is to make sure that they are in control of their career. What this means is that when they have successfully accomplished something, they need to take control and make sure that they tell their management about it. This can be challenging to do correctly. You do want to brag about what you’ve done, but you don’t want to come across as though you are bragging.

The first thing that you are going to have to do is to keep track of your accomplishments. We are all so busy that if we don’t take the time to write things down when we’ve accomplished them, then there is a good chance that we’ll forget about them. Next, we need to make sure that when we accomplish something we quickly let our management know about our accomplishment. They can then let their management know about what we have accomplished. Most of our accomplishments occur as a part of a team, when you are humblebragging make sure that you give credit where it is due – to your team. Telling people what you’ve been able to accomplish is good, but make sure that you don’t do too much of this. Provide your management with regular updates that let them know everything that you’ve been able to accomplish.

Nobody else is going to take responsibility for your career. You need to be the one who will step up and make sure that you take a break from your team building and get the recognition that you deserve. Take some time and get good at humblebragging. You’ll be able to let your management know what you’ve accomplished without coming across as being arrogant.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How much time do you think that a conversation in which you are humblebragging should last?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So congratulations, as a manager you are already a leader. However, if you are like most of us you could probably become a better leader. If you took the time to take a look at all of your manager skills, where do you think that your biggest leadership challenge lies? The way that you can identify this is by spending some time thinking about where you’ve had the biggest challenges – communications? Hiring? Team performance? It turns out that there are three traits that define managers who are good leaders. Perhaps we should be working on getting some manager training and improving all of these…?