How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

SCORE MORE PERSONAL RECOGNITION
Let’s face it: in professional life, it’s not always straightforward how to make
sure you get due credit for your efforts. And yet we all want to feel useful and
valued—as we saw in 
Chapter 9
, getting this basic human need met helps to
keep our brains in high-performance discovery mode. So let me share some
graceful techniques for making sure the trophy has your name engraved
somewhere on it.
Cristine spent the first phase of her sales career working for technology start-
ups in Brazil, but for the past few years she’s worked at a much larger company
with tens of thousands of employees around the world. She’s responsible for
finding and managing clients for their business services division, and she’s good
at her job. But it takes effort to shine in such a huge place. As she says, “I wasn’t
really telling senior people what I was achieving. I felt that boasting about my
successes wasn’t my style. I tended to assume, ‘They know what I do; I don’t
need to tell them.’ But it turns out I 
do
need to tell them. Even if they like you,
people don’t have time to dig into the detail and find out exactly how good you
are. So they won’t know what you have to offer unless you tell them something
positive and memorable about your work. I’m in sales—I should know this!”
A new boss gave her some advice. “She said that every time I met someone
senior, I should tell them one good thing I’d done recently. So I did. Initially it
felt weird, really forced. But then it quickly became natural to say, ‘Oh, you
might be interested to hear that a great opportunity has emerged from a
conversation I had with so-and-so last week.’ It’s more interesting than the usual
small talk, and it turned out not to feel like a ‘hard sell’ at all.”
There were a couple of things Cristine did to make it feel even easier over
time. “First, I learned that the trick was to say something that was interesting
specifically for the person I was talking to. So now I think about how recent

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work of mine might help his or her business, and say something related to that if
I can. And of course that gets their attention. Everyone’s interested in something
that’s relevant to them. You just need to cater to your audience.”
She also invented a simple but powerful process to make sure she always has
good news to hand. “Every Friday afternoon I block 5:00 to 5:30, which is often
dead time anyway, and I write down in a spreadsheet the best thing I achieved
this past week. I block half an hour, but in reality it just takes five minutes. As
I’m doing it, I think about which person might be interested in hearing each
example. And it also means I have a great database to draw on for my annual
performance appraisal, because all the information is right there.” Cristine gives
a recent example. “A client had some confidential information leak, and I went
the extra mile to help them turn the situation around. They were really grateful
and I got a nice message from someone about five levels up from me. But
honestly, in six months’ time, I would have completely forgotten about this.
Writing it down means I won’t.”
And the result? “I have earned the respect of people who wouldn’t even have
heard of me before. I feel like I’m building a personal brand, one that delivers
results. Now it feels second nature to me. And my boss has even adopted my
Friday afternoon process from me.”
When you’re next interacting with someone from whom you’re seeking more
recognition, try drawing on the advice from throughout