Professionals who have spent any amount of time in executive positions have a long list of tangible contributions they’ve brought to their company. However, many executives—particularly female executives—feel uncomfortable when enumerating their accomplishments. A fixation on past successes can halt the progress on an otherwise promising career, but self-promotion in and of itself has more benefits than drawbacks. To take your executive career to the next level, learn to effectively analyze and promote your leadership skills.
Learning to Self-Promote
Self-promotion is a valuable skill for networking and career advancement. The difficulty in effective self-promotion is learning how to discuss professional skills and successes without alienating your audience. Successful executive self-promotion involves:
- Objectively analyzing your executive skills, measurable successes, relationships with peers and subordinates, and contribution to the forward motion of your company before self-promoting.
- Listening for social cues that would make self-promotion appropriate.
- Starting with basic, quantifiable facts about your job performance and leadership influence. List your accomplishments frankly, without pride or quantification, to refute potential disputes.
- Framing your contributions within the grander narrative of company vision and business success. By incorporating other employees, leadership lessons, and the more humanizing aspects of your success, you can connect with your audience and share meaningful personal contributions without sounding conceited.
The Negative Impact of Unskilled Self-Promotion
Executives shy away from self-promotion because, frankly, so many CEOs do it poorly. Thoughtless self-promotion often comes across as vanity or shortsightedness. When honing your self-promotion skills, take care to avoid these professional pitfalls:
- Isolating yourself from your peers by focusing only on your own achievements.
- Losing sight of upward expansion by leaning too heavily on past successes.
- Creating an artificial vision for the company in the name of self-promotion.
- Failing to ascertain when self-promotion is necessary and when it will undermine the culture of teamwork within your corporation.
The professional resume writers at Executive Resumes Atlanta are experts at executive promotion. Call us to develop your executive resume, build your personal brand, and coach you on executive self-promotion.