How to Articulate Your Contributions as a Senior Leader

When you work as an individual contributor, all your achievements and accomplishments are easy to talk about—products you built, bugs you solved, designs you developed or the ideas that created a huge impact. You can showcase your value by highlighting the goals and outcomes you achieved independently or how your collaboration enabled a smooth cross-team rollout.      

However, this gets tricky as you rise up the ladder and become a leader. You’re no longer writing code, debugging issues or working on architecture design. You are not directly involved in day-to-day execution of tasks or solving problems on the ground. You set the direction, guide your team and enable them to achieve goals while operating from a 10,000 feet view of your organization. 

You set the targets, while others achieve them.

You define the strategy, while others execute on it. 

You lay out the expectations, while others work hard to exceed them.

Your contributions flow through your team, which makes it harder to articulate them. Visibility is important at every level, but it’s even more crucial for a senior leader—your position comes with high expectations and a huge pay-check. Without a solid account of the impact of your leadership, you won’t be able to justify your role or why you deserve to be in that position. 

You need to demonstrate your value without taking credit for others’ work. You need to talk about results without hogging the spotlight. You need to own success without sounding boastful or arrogant.  

Remember, self-promotion isn’t a sin. Sometimes it’s even necessary to get an idea accepted by a fearful or incredulous public. Great leaders don’t hesitate to call attention to their creations.
― Will Peters, Leadership Lessons

When communicating your impact as a senior leader, use these practices to showcase your value, build credibility and earn appreciation for your efforts without being seen as manipulative or insincere:

Stop inflating or diluting your impact

How you frame your contributions makes a huge difference. Do you lean towards calling everything out as a team effort or do you boast about your achievements even though it was your team who did all the work? 

Using “We” to talk about all your accomplishments minimizes your contributions as a senior leader. While it promotes the idea of teamwork, it casts a shadow on your leadership—without stating the unique value you add to the team, you prevent others from acknowledging your leadership skills. Passing all the credit to the team may seem like a humble approach, but it harms your credibility and reputation.

On the other hand, using “me” to describe all your accomplishments makes you come across as manipulative, insincere and untrustworthy. It puts a spotlight on your contributions while minimizing your team’s effort and hard work. Morale and motivation in the team dips down as people feel cheated, invisible and undervalued. Bringing yourself at the forefront of all the discussions while pushing your team to the background does not boost your image or reputation, it makes you come across as narcissist and insecure.   

Instead of leaning on either side of “We” or “Me,” seek a balance. Highlight your team’s achievements, but don’t forget to throw in a mix of your problem solving skills that helped your team implement an efficient solution. Appreciate the quality of the project that made clients happy, but also mention how you handled the relationship when the team faced many challenges and setbacks. Give credit to your team for managing a critical last minute request, but don’t forget to bring up your quick decision-making skills that unblocked the team. 

Combine “We” with “Me” to articulate your contributions in a way that does not minimize you or your team’s efforts. Use words like guided, coached, oversaw, empowered, steered, navigated, advised and influenced to describe your value creation. 

For example:

Instead of: “We were able to successfully meet Q1 goals.” or “I was able to successfully meet Q1 goals.”

Say: I am very proud of the team for achieving Q1 goals successfully. Everyone did a tremendous job of staying on top of their goals and taking responsibility to meet the desired objectives. One thing that enabled this was a clear goal-setting exercise. Before we started execution, I ensured that all teams had a good clarity on their goals. I also often reminded them of the big picture to enable all decisions done independently were still aligned with our long-term goals. Empowering teams enabled them to move at a faster pace without being blocked on every small decision.  

Instead of: “The clients were very happy. My team did an excellent job in handling the projects.” or “The clients were very happy. I ensured all projects met their expectations.“

Say: The teams did an excellent job in delivering projects on time and with high quality. We had a few issues raised by our clients during the development phase, but I managed by providing them with key updates on a regular basis and assuring them that their concerns will be addressed. I also guided the team on how to incorporate client’s requests without impacting the overall deliverable. In the end, the clients were very happy with the team’s work.  

Don’t inflate with “I.” Don’t dilute with “We.” Own your contribution without erasing the team. 

Show strategic thinking

As a senior leader, you aren’t expected to know all the execution details, but you’re required to own strategy—proactively identifying problem areas, thinking about the future and its needs and detailing out the changes that are required to build a resilient organization.

Strategic thinking involves challenging assumptions, questioning conventional methods, identifying areas that are no longer serving the org well, staying attentive to the shift in market trends and formulating a plan that’s aligned with the future growth and expectations. It requires challenging the status quo, taking bold risks and incorporating a feedback loop into the process to audit outcomes and adapt to the changes around you. 

Strategic thinking isn’t just about creating big plans and expecting others to execute on it. It shows up in small and big decisions, the guidance you provide to your team and the initiatives you take to build a high performance team—coaching people to make decisions, creating opportunities to build new skills, building a solid hiring pipeline and coming up with creative ways to keep employees happy with a sense of progress, purpose and belonging.   

When articulating your value as a senior leader, focus on strategic contributions—killing a project that was no longer valuable and instead assigning the resources to new opportunities. Org restructuring that’s better aligned with future expectations. Bridging talent gap through internal coaching and external hiring. Automating work to reduce manpower. Solving communication problems through better processes to reduce wasted time and increase productivity. All these and many other strategic initiatives stay invisible unless you explicitly bring them up.

For example, you can say:

Here’s an update for everyone. I have decided that we’re no longer going to be investing in [xyz] because [state the reason]. Instead, by having these people work on [abc], we can [state what you wish to achieve].

To start some of the new projects next quarter, we needed to close a few critical hiring positions. By doing [state your plan], I was able to meet our hiring targets. 

I re-examined the current org structure and made some changes for efficient collaboration and execution. Here’s the new structure that will enable us to meet our goals… 

Strategic thinking is the set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities to focus attention, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward.
― Michael D. Watkins, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking 

Don’t just focus on the outcomes. Own your contribution by highlighting the strategic initiatives that made success possible. 

Use metrics and data

As a senior leader, the impact of your work can’t be described using guesswork or hunches. You can’t rely on your intuition and call it facts. Your claims about adding value to the organization has to be backed up by data—better retention, revenue growth, higher engagement, improved customer satisfaction, faster deployment cycles. Using vague language to describe your contributions or not sharing the numbers to substantiate your claims can prevent you from being taken seriously. It can also harm your credibility as others see you as someone who does the talking without showing results.

To get others’ attention and ensure they take you seriously, use data and numbers to add weight to your words—share metrics, explain why they’re relevant and then describe how you’ve improved these metrics to bring value to the organization. Providing context and supporting your arguments with visible improvements can instantly get others to appreciate your efforts. 

For example, you can say:

Our systems can now handle 100 million QPS. Earlier, we were limited to only 20 million, which prevented us from catering to peak volume during the holiday season.

We closed hiring 2 senior leads and 1 architect this month. It will enable us to ramp up our efforts on the system rearchitecture and finish it within 6 months instead of 1 year.

Our attrition dropped from 13% to 9% this quarter through a new employee engagement program that enabled us to retain more employees. 

We have created a data automation pipeline which allows us to view business metrics in real time. Using the dashboards, business users can make better real time decisions. Earlier, they had to wait 24 hours before getting any insights.   

The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. 
— Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Numbers add weight to your contribution. Shift from sounding conceptual to showing concrete results. 

Share learning lessons 

As a senior leader, you make hundreds of decisions throughout the day—some big, others small; some urgent, others important; some with a huge impact, others with a small pay-off; some that solve long-term problems and others that address the immediate need. Each of these decisions have learning lessons that you’re uniquely positioned to tell. 

Analyzing your decisions and drawing useful insights from both your successes as well as your failures not only improves your decision-making skills, sharing them with others prevents them from making the same mistakes or leveraging your successful strategy to their own line of work. Your value is seen not only through the outcomes you deliver, but also the process used to get there.  

Here are some of the ways to articulate your contributions:

My decision to build our own CRM solution in-house to reduce dependency on a third party vendor has resulted in tremendous cost savings for the company. While the team did an excellent job in rolling out the product on time, one big mistake we made was not aligning the rest of the organization with it. This resulted in last minute collaboration efforts across different functions which impacted our other planned deliverables. Going forward, I recommend we include cross-team collaboration efforts as part of our planning. 

My team has created a single dashboard that collects data from the various sources and displays all important tech and business metrics in one place. This has significantly reduced the time it takes to resolve issues. While building the product, we made many mistakes. Some critical ones are: [share your lessons]. I suggest we leverage it and implement it for all tech systems. 

I recently resolved a common concern that was impacting team productivity—missing product requirements or last minute changes was causing a lot of confusion and rework. I sat down with the product teams and identified what was resulting in those gaps and how we can minimize changes after the requirements have been locked down. I learnt that [share your learnings]. I think we should make this a mandate across all teams before starting implementation. 

All leaders find it easy to take responsibility for success. Few have the courage to take responsibility for setbacks.
― Jo Owen, Leadership Rules

Your failures and mistakes are as important as your successes. Don’t hide them. Turn them into valuable learning lessons.  

Summary

1. It’s hard to articulate your contributions as a senior leader because most of the work you do is either invisible or does not lead to an immediate impact. 
2. Instead of highlighting every contribution as a team effort with “we” or making every success about you with “me,” combine the two. Appreciate and acknowledge your team’s work while also sharing how your leadership enabled the team to be successful. Don’t inflate or dilute your impact. Seek a balance. 
3. While execution is what gives life to a strategy, the effort that goes into building a good strategy and refining it to keep up with the future cannot be overlooked. This is where you must shine as a senior leader. By talking about your strategic contributions, big or small, you can make your thinking, decision-making and planning skills visible. 
4. Your impact as a senior leader is difficult to measure without data and metrics to back it up. By sharing actual numbers, you can make your contribution indisputable. 
5. Sharing your success as well as your failures helps the organization in improving processes, implementing better practices and reducing costly mistakes. It creates tremendous value by leveraging lessons learned. Don’t limit your contributions by highlighting only success stories, show real leadership by talking about your mistakes as well as failures. 

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