Chiefs of Staff, it's time to brag

Chiefs of Staff, your job is sometimes thankless. You work long nights and early mornings. To top it off, your colleagues don’t really know what you do. How do you combat this?

Time to brag a little. Show off your accomplishments. Live a little in the limelight!

The result will be that you’ll be recognized for your work. Your peers will also know how to engage you in the future. And you’ll be on a path to promotion and better pay when you exit the role.

In this newsletter, we teach you how to create a brag sheet and share it with your coworkers.

Do a brain dump of your accomplishments

Block off a solid hour on your calendar. Go find a quiet place to begin writing.

Start documenting a list of your accomplishments. Don’t worry about proper grammar or perfect copywriting. The most important thing is getting everything down on paper first.

Focus on the outcomes. Contextualize your impact using the STAR technique.

Example: I led the implementation and adoption of Pipedrive that resulted in 100 new marketing, sales & customer success team members onboarded to the tool, and a 25% increase in forecasting precision for sales performance.

Pull up past project documentation and post-mortems to give you inspiration for accomplishments that you might have forgotten.

Edit your brag sheet

Time to tighten up your document. Edit the accomplishments that you’ve achieved in the style of a resume bullet. Create headlines that use concrete numbers to quantify the impact. Add in qualitative language as well.

Stick the set of headlines into a clean document that you feel comfortable sharing with others. Title the document with something like “Mackenzie’s Accomplishments at Cedar.”

Create an executive summary at the top, listing common themes and the big picture impact of your work.

Maybe you notice that you are a sales ops whiz that increases dealflow or a change management guru that drives multiple cross-functional initiatives to close.

Share your brag sheet

Time to socialize the document. Share it with your manager in your next 1:1. Frame it in such a way that you are making their job easier when they are writing your next performance review.

Mention that you’re keen to share your accomplishments with the company at the next all-hands or in the monthly internal newsletter. Get their buy-in and coordinate with your internal communications director to execute this.

Finally, share it with your peer reviewers. If your company does peer feedback as part of promotion or performance processes, now is the time to share the brag sheet with them. It also makes writing your performance review a breeze.

Update your brag sheet

Revisit your brag sheet every 4-6 weeks. This can feel like a lifetime for a Chief of Staff, so there will be plenty to brag about…!

Repeat the process of sharing the brag sheet with your manager and your peers on a 4-6 month basis.

And watch your peers gain more admiration for your work and the impact you drive across the organization.

Looking for your next Chief of Staff job?

Thank you to the 50+ folks that signed up for my Chief of Staff Talent Network waitlist on Pallet. It’s now live!

I’ve started to review candidate applications and accept them into my talent collective.

And I’m in the middle of outreaching CEOs who want to gain access to my hand-selected candidate database.

What’s the result? I’ll be able to make warm introductions between CEOs and candidates, making personalized matches on behalf of each party.

Ready to get started? Click this link to complete your application to my Talent Network.

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