This is (unfortunately) great advice for large companies like Google, MSFT, Meta, where the internal mechanics of vying for and achieving promotion tend to drive behavior. Promo packets, calibration sessions, etc. OTOH, this is not good advice for any organization that maintains the capacity to (1) recognize and (2) value great work on merit. Better to spend your mental energy on doing something you and your colleagues deeply value, towards some shared goal.
Not just one document for "achievements". Have a separate section for the big "bar raiser" moments.
If you don't keep this document constantly updated on a daily basis, you will quickly forget what you did and when, and then you won't have a document for any of your achievements.
You need to show this document to your manager and discuss each item on the list during your weekly 1-on-1 meetings.
Failure to do so is pretty much guaranteed to keep you from being promoted. Failure to be promoted is pretty much guaranteed to get you pushed out the door.
The U.S. Military has a concept of "too much time in grade", a.k.a., "up or out". The big companies have a similar process -- if you're not moving up the ladder fast enough in comparison to all the other people at your level, then you need to leave.
My biggest problem is recognizing when I've done anything worthy of writing down as an achievement.
False. This is great for any job. Not saying it will always be successful but its a red flag if you do this and it has no impact on your compensation or promos.
I couldn’t disagree more. In healthy organizations your manager and your peers can observe your impact and and calibrate correctly.
It’s only on teams and organizations that are disfunctional that such artifacts are useful. If I have to keep a document for this I’m already looking for a new job.
This is really interesting to hear; I work in a team & org that I think is pretty healthy, but I've found the yearly "brag doc" exercise useful for several years running, if only to go through and remind myself of everything I worked on. I consistently find that I've done a _lot_ more than I remember, and that's both a boost and also a healthy opportunity to reflect. The artifact is then useful over the next year as a reminder.
This is in fact the focus of Julia's post (she literally says this early on), and I think it's kind of unfortunate that folks are mostly talking about using the brag doc as advocacy in the performance review process.
When the organization is healthy there is no need for a catalog of achievements.
For mental boosts you get affirmation regularly that you are moving the team/product/org in the right direction (or the opposite you recalibrate quickly if you aren’t).
Similarly, reflecting on what has been accomplished is a regular part of the holistic process, not a bespoke individuals task.
If a brag doc is valuable to you personally, great! By all means feel free to build one. But if building one is necessary to excel in an organization that is a very bad sign.
Sure - earlier you said "if this is useful that's a really bad sign", and now you're saying "if it's necessary it's a very bad sign", which are pretty different claims. I'm mostly interested in probing the former, so if you're not making that stronger claim then I think we're on the same page.
I was responding to this claim: “ but its a red flag if you do this and it has no impact on your compensation or promos”
That implies (to me at least) that the brag doc is necessary to get appropriate recognition externally in the org. That’s a huge red flag. If it provides you personally some internal validation then whatever, that doesn’t say anything about your organization.
This really depends on the organization and the manager. I have been in orgs where my manager knows very well what I am doing and my impact. A list like this would be fairly useless in that case.
I have worked for bigger corps where my manager has no idea what I do, especially consulting service companies. If I’ve worked with 7 clients over 3 different account groups, I am the only one who knows what those 7 clients are, and what I did for them. In those cases I do document my accomplishments. I have even gone as far as create a brief presentation for when I get a new manager.
This also differs from a CV not only in being more detailed, but also flagging things like “successfully worked with XYZ account manager, who is widely known to be difficult to work with”.
Managers, especially if they have a large span of control (but even if they don't), aren't all uniformly disciplined at recording every instance of impact. To help your manager and reduce variability (i.e. their perception of your performance should be based on data, not vibes), it's to your advantage to keep your own list.
I've had good managers that I keep in the loop with weekly 1:1's but come promo time, even they need help figuring out what I did over the span of a year. (to be honest, if I hadn't written it down, I don't even remember myself)
As they should. But... you are the driver of your career, not your manager. It's a HUGE risk to rely on your manager only to do it. We get busy and even if were doing that we have a ton of other things were balancing. The risk is that things are missed. Your manager is a support person to your career development.
So untrue.
Creation of this kind of a brag document comes under the "retrospective" process - which is one of the core requirements of any culture that maintains capacity to recognise and value great work.
If you think you are able to do that in your company without a prioritised retrospective process, I would be very curious to know how that happens.
(From my experience of working in 10+ organisations, people who think so usually are lying to themselves that they are recognising and valuing great work. They are (without exception, in my experience) running a very political organisation. But I would love to be proved wrong.)
This is arguably good advice in most circumstances, even in private projects. Like it or not, self-promotion gets you noticed. Getting noticed grants you opportunities. Opportunities let you show off what you can do. Rinse and repeat.
