In a previous article, I hinted at that writing down your career achievements is an investment that is well worth your time and effort. In this article, I explain why it is such a critical thing to do, and how you can do it.
Which big moments do I mean?
Most of us have gone through tough challenges in their careers. I am not talking about the average daily grind. Rather, the ones that are exceptionally tough. A stressful project, with deadlines that are aggressive or even near-impossible to meet. A major customer escalation that came with severe consequences if it wasn’t handled properly. A last-minute out-of-the-blue request from a co-worker to help with a task that is important for the team or the company. A thorny multi-faceted problem for which you and your co-workers could not agree on a solution. An elusive performance issue that crashes your application in production at the busiest time of the day, leading to frustrated customers and lost business. The list goes on, but you get the idea.
For each of these problems we face, our ability to positively impact outcomes will vary. But, regardless of that, we always get to choose how to react. Do we say Yes, and take the bull by the horns? Or do we say No, and save our time and energy for another day? There always will be plenty of good reasons to say No, and return to status quo. But, if we do say Yes and blow away expectations, we end up with an amazing story to tell. The higher the stakes are, the more powerful the story becomes. And when we win, it's rewarding on so many levels, both personally and professionally. These, are the big moments that I mean.
Why write down our noteworthy stories?
When we make one of these success stories happen, it is like we mined a beautiful, rare gem. We should polish it, keep it in a safe place, and showcase it when others are interested. And the first step towards that, is to write the story down. There are at least three good reasons to do so.
We don't want to forget the great things we accomplished.
If you don't write your stories down, it is unlikely you'll be able to remember them accurately one, two, or three years from the time they happened. But, the odds are that you will need to. For example, in the USA, an employee stays at a job for around four years on average*. A lot can happen in four years. When you are ready to move on to your next job, will you be able to tell your best stories as if they happened yesterday? Yes, if you had written them down.
We want to be able to fluently talk about our personal impact.
Imagine you're in an interview, and you want to share one of your success stories. It is likely that your story involves a lot of details. You need to sort out the important ones from the irrelevant ones. You want to organize what happened following a clear and logical path. You want to make sure to back certain parts of your story with evidence. You want to emphasize the impact of your actions and contributions. Your actions, rather than the team's actions. You want to tell your story in such a way that you capture your audience's attention and imagination. It is virtually impossible to do all of that, on the fly, while in the heat and stress of an interview. You can do all of that and more, however, by writing your stories down before the interview and coming in prepared.
We want to evaluate if our career is on track.
"How many of such impactful stories have I had over the past three years?" Just by asking ourselves this question, it helps us think whether we are satisfied with how things are or we need to make a career change. There is no right or wrong answer. The answer could be "Zero," and it would be just fine if that is what we are looking for.
How should we document our stories?
We discussed the Why. Hopefully, I was able to get you interested in writing down your best stories. Now, let's turn our attention to how you can do it.
Document your best stories just like you would do any long-term investment: gradually and over time.
This is a lesson I learned from years of going through performance reviews, be it for a promotion or for an annual raise. Every company I worked for had its own rituals around performance reviews. The common thread across all of them, however, is requiring some form of documentation of your achievements and impact. If you had documented those as they happened, the performance review process went much smoother. If you had not, you had to spend hours reconstructing history from your memory and from e-mail threads (if you still had them). Then, you had to write it down. Needless to say, it is not pretty.
Documenting a success story within a month or so after it concludes is the best and easiest thing to do. The details are still fresh in your memory, and you have time to collect evidence if you need to. That evidence could be a positive quote from people you helped, or data points that help you quantify your achievements. Two of my favorite kinds of evidence are visuals showing your impact and endorsements on Linked In.
Decide on a consistent format for your stories.
You're about to document your first career achievement. How do you start writing it down? I highly recommend you write it as a story. We, humans, are master storytellers. We also crave listening to great stories. Plus, you'll need to tell it as a captivating story if you want your leaders, your coworkers, and your future employers to listen.
Since you'll be writing a story, one of your first steps is to decide on a story format to follow. Fortunately, story writing and telling is a topic that has been extensively covered. I can say there are as many story formats as there are authors of story telling/writing books and I won't be too wrong. That is why I will just share three formats I came across and found useful.
The STARR format
STARR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result, and Reflection. In a nutshell, you start by describing the situation, or the challenge, that you faced. Next, you describe the task you were expected to accomplish. You follow that by describing, in detail, the actions that you actually took to accomplish your task. Then, you discuss the positive results of your actions, such as how your actions led to resolving the issue or challenge. Finally, there is reflection. This is when you share your thoughts on what you could have done differently.
This format is straightforward and I like it for its simplicity. It covers the important parts that you shouldn't miss while documenting or talking about your achievements. However, it tends to be a bit boring for my own taste. I'm not sure if you can write an inspiring story by simply filling in the blanks of this format. The format is further explained in this article, which includes an example.
The SB7 framework
The SB7 framework is the central idea of the book The Story Brand. The SB7 framework identifies seven components that come together to create an engaging story. The book was written with the intention of helping marketers develop successful brands. Nevertheless, the story format it offers is universal and we can adapt it for our use. For illustration, here is an unrefined adapted version of the SB7 framework.
- A character... – Every story has a main character, the hero or protagonist. Your customer is the hero. No, the hero isn't you! The hero could be an internal customer in your company, or an external one. Setup your story by briefly introducing your customer and their goals.
- Has a problem... – The exceptionally tough challenge that your customer faced, and that you helped them conquer. This is our villain. What was it? How difficult was it? What were the consequences of failure? What were the rewards for success? Setup your story.
- And meets a guide... – Your customer needs a guide to help them solve the challenge. You are the guide. Why did the customer trust you to help them?
- Who has a plan... – Customers trust a guide who has a plan. How did you put together a plan to solve the challenge?
- And calls them to action... – Customers are challenged to take action. How did you influence your customer to take action and adopt your plan?
- That helps them avoid failure – Did your plan help your customer avoid failure? If not, why not? What were the lessons learned?
- And ends in a success – Did your plan successfully solve the challenge for your customer? What was the result of that success for your customer?
The Lead with a story template
This book proposes a story template that is captured by the mnemonic (CAR = STORY). CAR stands for Context, Action, and Result. Context is further subdivided into Subject, Treasure, and Obstacle. This story doesn't include a guide role, only a hero and a villain. Because of that, the hero could be you and the villain is whatever challenge you faced. Here is the format as it is summarized in the book's appendix. Reading the book will help you understand the meaning of the format at a deeper level.
- Context – When and where is the story happening? Who is our Subject (hero)? What is the Treasure the subject is after? What are the Obstacles (villain) getting the in the way of our subject?
- Action – What happened to the hero? Conflict? Temporary setbacks? Ups and downs along the way?
- Result – What happened to the hero at the end? Did he or she win or lose?
Feel free to experiment with these three formats and pick the one you like the most. Once you choose one, it is important to consistently follow it. Consistency makes it easier for you to document, recall, and fluently tell your stories. To improve my story-telling, I also enjoyed reading the book Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences and certain chapters from the book The Story Factor.
Prepare high-quality ingredients for your story.
The story format can be viewed as a recipe to cook an inspiring story. To write that story, you still need high-quality ingredients. Your memory, your email's inbox, and chat history are probably full of raw unorganized bits and pieces about what happened. These are raw inputs. Before you get writing, you need to filter these inputs and improve their quality. Here are four tips to help you do that.
Create a timeline of key events. You can write it down, draw it on a whiteboard, or visualize it in powerpoint. When I write down my stories, one of the first things I need to do is to create a timeline of events. This timeline gives me a structure to attach different pieces of evidence to. I describe each event on the timeline with a simple sentence and a date, from the beginning to the end of the story. "First customer meeting", "Field visit to investigate problem and collect data", "Pulled off an all-nighter debugging the issue" are all example for key events.
Focus on the important inputs and minimize extraneous details. The easy part of applying this tip is not including minor or irrelevant details in your story. The hard part is doing what is known in writing as "Killing your darlings." In our career story-writing context, killing your darlings starts by identifying those parts of your story you believe are super exciting, cool, or must-tell. Then, you take a close look at those parts and remove what doesn't contribute to your end goal, which is demonstrating your effort and impact.
Back strong statements with evidence. When you make a bold statement in your story, you'd better be ready to back it with evidence. The best evidence is quantified, visualized, and verified. For example, have you saved your customer some significant cost? Be specific about much you saved, if that's possible (quantified). Even better, supplement your story with a series of charts or visuals to show your actions and how they resulted in those savings (visualized). Finally, and this might not be an easy one, you could work on obtaining written customer feedback about your work (verified).
Talk and write about your actions, not the team's actions. One of the most common traps is talking about how we did this or why we did that. If you write or tell your story using We, it becomes hard for your audience to tie positive outcomes back to your specific actions. Be clear about what you did versus what the team did. What the team did is usually less relevant.
Iterate on your stories. Write, evaluate, revise.
Finally, you need time to evolve your stories into their best form. This includes preparation, writing a first draft, soliciting feedback on your drafts, and editing until you have your polished story. It'll help to have a fresh eyes read your stories and provide feedback. All of that requires time, which underscores the importance of writing your stories as they happen.
That was a long post and I hope you found it useful. Now go forth and write down your best stories. If you have feedback, feel free to leave me a message here. Thanks for stopping by!
Photo by Dan Farrell on Unsplash
