The Power of Showcasing Accomplishments

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Many people struggle with showcasing or calling their accomplishments out to their peers, teammates, stakeholders, and/or leadership for fear of coming off as arrogant or showboaty. Specifically for this article, we’ll focus on technical work. Let’s start with the dilemma.

A few things need to be highlighted about the above image. Teamwork and collaboration to fulfill a task or objective falls somewhere within this diagram, but the recognition or credit should be attributed to the team as a whole. Additionally, the figure above does not account for someone who champions the accomplishments and successes of others. Having a champion who can call out a teammate can be good or bad, depending on the team dynamic. In all cases, real and true trust is significantly important. Without trust, none of this works. It’s similar to baking a cake. There are plenty of ways to mess it up — you may get the measurements wrong, you may use the wrong ingredients, you may cook it at the wrong temperature, or you may cook it for the wrong amount of time.

So, why is any of this important? Why should anyone take credit for their work? Why should they not? I’ve only worked in the field of Information Technology for the duration of my professional career, and I can describe the importance with an image.

So, what are the possibilities?

1. You do the work, you take the credit, you continue on your path to success.
2. You do the work, you take the credit, you’ve upset someone because it’s transmitted or received as arrogant. Delivery and effective communication matters.
3. You do the work, you don’t take the credit, you risk someone taking credit for your work and/or not being recognized. This happened to me a few times. There is a story for another day, but the TLDR is an Information Security team took credit for vulnerability remediation which they did not plan or execute on, stacked with all the bells and whistles.
4. You do the work, you don’t take the credit, but you have a champion who gives you a shout out to let the world know about your accomplishment. This is tricky, because the champion has to have a guideline for what should and should not be championed.
5. You don’t do the work, you take the credit… many possibilities from here including career growth and breeding resentment by teammates who don’t want to come off as arrogant.
6. You don’t do the work, you don’t take the credit. No harm, no foul.

I recently wrote a LinkedIn post that was similar to all of this and decided to change it up slightly to fit the narrative a bit better:

There are extremes to each level of these and a balance must be struck in order to be effective. If you shout out everything you do, it’s going to have a similar but opposite impact on people as if you shout out nothing that you do.

So, why is any of this important?

1. Different people value different things. Personally, I’m a sucker for external validation.
2. Interviews. I’ve had countless interviews where interviewers have asked the question “Can you expand more on exactly what YOUR contributions were and not on the contributions of your team in total?”. This can play a huge factor in career development.
3. Pride. For some, accomplishing the task is enough. For others, it may be something they want to shout from the rooftop.
4. Trust (or maybe paranoia?). To be brutally honest, trust can be really hard to gain and so easy to lose. I’ve been in plenty of scenarios where someone has openly taken credit for some work I accomplished in the presence of twenty or more people.

Regardless of my role, rank, title, position, or otherwise… I try to be the person in the room that will shout out a teammate on something that they have accomplished that I value and hope that others value, too, even if they don’t recognize that they value it. Everything is great when everything just works, but too often the behind-the-scenes work goes overlooked or unrecognized… and that starts a sad path.

I see so many people do such great work. People deserve recognition for what they do!