Celebrating your accomplishments
Written by Sarah Ritchie
AgencyLand is the type of environment where you are more likely to hear if you haven’t done a good job, than if you have, and it becomes easy to adopt a negative or distorted view of your abilities. By writing down all your wins (even if they are small), you will begin to build a more balanced view of your skills, potential and value.
What’s the point?
It arms you for your next performance review
Agency owners want to know that their staff members are valuable and demonstrably contributing to the bottom line of agency revenue. Like any campaign or project that demands an ROI, if you can show your own personal ROI to your manager, you’ll have a better chance of securing a promotion or pay rise.
It helps you to track your goals
How will you know that you are doing well? If you are a goal-setter, you will need some way of marking off goals set vs goals achieved – and achieving goals is certainly an accomplishment.
It helps to give you direction
It’s easy to wander aimlessly through your career, feeling like you are on the hamster wheel of life. Being intentional about planning, tracking and reviewing accomplishments can help to give some direction to your career. You’ll also realise that you do a lot more things of value than you may think!
If you don’t, no one else will
It is highly doubtful that your manager will be keeping a logbook of your work successes through the year, and they probably are not aware of all the good things you do anyway. By tracking your own accomplishments you can monitor your own progress and be ready to talk about what you’ve done if and when you need to.
What accomplishments should you track?
Accomplishments need not be big, nor something you’d necessarily discuss with others. They may be smaller, personal accomplishments that you know will add to the overall betterment of your career (such as reading a particular book). Accomplishments could include:
- Courses or workshops attended.
- New skills learned.
- Articles written for industry publications.
- Books read.
- Campaigns worked on that were particularly successful.
- Times when you went above and beyond your current job description.
- Positive client feedback (verbal or written).
- Promotions received.
- Leadership opportunities taken.
- Events organised.
- Public speaking done.
- Mentoring that you’ve either given or received.
Write them down
It’s easy to forget all of the good things that you have achieved over a period of time, and so it helps to write them down. Whether your achievements are incremental or monumental, it feels good to see them on paper (or in a spreadsheet).
If any accomplishment is tied to a specific goal that you have set, it’s a good idea to show that achievement as a different colour. This will help to give you encouragement that you are moving in the right direction.
Review regularly
Tracking your accomplishments is a great start. To use your list for maximum life and career impact and encouragement, you’ll need to regularly review what you have done — which could be monthly, 6-monthly or yearly. This is your opportunity to look at what you have achieved, assess the effectiveness of your efforts, rinse and repeat.
Celebrate your accomplishments
When you need a reminder of how good you are (or how far you have come) you can open up your accomplishments list and celebrate. You can celebrate your hard work, your talents and abilities, and your determined drive to succeed… and then plan what to do next!
Sarah Ritchie has been in the design and agency world for 25 years. Originally a graphic designer, Sarah has also worked as a design teacher, agency account manager, and now enjoys a wonderful life in recruitment for agencies. Sarah is also the Founder of AM-Insider — a website full of tips, tricks and resources to build account management superstars!
www.am-insider.com
Image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/
