An American high school senior who applies to college asks teachers and the school counselor for letters of recommendation. The student first fills out a brag sheet. It lists the student’s accomplishments, so that the people writing the letters know what to say.
CFNC, a college planning service in North Carolina, explains the purpose: “A brag sheet provides families with an opportunity to personally highlight students’ accomplishments.”
Engineers at Google usually nominate themselves for promotion. Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of people operations, described the system in his 2015 book Work Rules! Google found that women “weren’t nominating themselves as often as the men around them.”
Alan Eustace, then head of engineering, wrote to the engineers: “We’ve noticed that women aren’t nominating themselves and, hey, you should be!” According to Bock, it worked. They sent the email “for about three six month periods and then Alan forgot to send the email.”
In the Army’s 2012 guidance for officer evaluations, the rated officer drafts a support form. The officer writes a duty description and a list of major performance objectives.
At the end of the period, the officer documents “how well he or she accomplished the major performance objectives,” “focusing on the most significant objectives and other contributions made.”
In her 2010 TED talk, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook described a meeting with a senior government official. Two senior women from his staff sat at the side of the room. “I kind of said to them, ‘Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table,’ and they sat on the side of the room.”
She also told of a young woman at Facebook who had noticed something after Sandberg said she would take two more questions: “all the women put their hand down, and then you took more questions, only from the men.”
Toot your own horn. To toot your own horn is to talk about your own achievements.
Give credit where credit is due. The speaker names the person who did the work.
Take credit for. A person who takes credit for something claims the work, sometimes work that someone else did.
Steal someone’s thunder. This means to take the attention that another person had earned.
A feather in your cap. This is an achievement that adds to your record.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The person who speaks up gets the attention.
Visibility. In office speech, visibility means being seen by the people who decide on promotions.
Humblebrag. This is a boast that is disguised as modesty.
In 1960 Katherine Johnson and the engineer Ted Skopinski wrote a NASA report on equations for orbital spaceflight. According to NASA, it was “the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.”
Before his orbital flight, the astronaut John Glenn asked the engineers to “get the girl.” He wanted Johnson to check the computer’s numbers by hand. In 2015, at 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Taraji P. Henson played her in the film Hidden Figures.
In June 2019 Julia Evans advised the readers of her programming blog to keep a “brag document.” She started from a common belief. “There’s this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognize that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay.” In practice, she wrote, “it’s often more complicated than that.”
Her advice is to write down your own work before performance reviews. “And if you don’t remember everything important you did, your manager (no matter how great they are!) probably doesn’t either.” Work that is hard to see belongs in the document too, “because it’s the most likely to fall under the radar!”
In 2003 Warner Books published Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It, by Peggy Klaus. Klaus is a communication and leadership coach who works with Fortune 500 companies.
A summary of the book describes its target as a “venerable performance myth”: “A job well done speaks for itself.” Those who believe it, the summary warns, will find that others “will never know” what they can do. According to Publishers Weekly, Klaus teaches readers to keep a “bragalogue.” This is a short story about their own achievements that they update regularly.
American schools grade it, from elementary through university, and it appears on the syllabus as a percentage. A student who has understood everything and said nothing receives a lower mark than one who spoke up and was partly wrong.
A persuasive curriculum vitae (resumé) in the American context stresses achievements, awards and areas of special competence. It is not an official document produced by a neutral party such as a government agency or an educational institution, but rather a testament to how what was learned has been applied in the real world.
Resumés in the U.S. are in a way (self-)marketing documents. Americans highlight not only their subject area expertise, but also their character strengths, such as persistence, discipline, teamwork and, of course, leadership. Every American reader of an American resumé knows that they are carefully written subjective statements aimed at a specific effect.