How can I take credit?

Writing about performance reviews I talked about how difficult it can be to talk about your achievements if you’re ruthlessly honest about what’s down to you alone. Selling yourself means saying “I did this” but almost everything in life is down to a team of people not one individual. If you’re an honest and literal minded autistic you quite probably won’t be able to take credit for anything because it wasn’t yours alone.

I may have (say) written a report, but I’m not responsible for a major efficiency saving as a result of new ways of working that might have flowed from that report – lots of people will have played a part. So an autistic person like me is much more likely to tell a performance review meeting or an interview panel “I wrote a report” than “I delivered transformational change”. The first is literally provable – I know on which days I sat at my computer and wrote the report – I gave it a file name, it’s saved on my computer, it’s mine. But the transformational change – well that’s down to a whole range of people who contributed. There are likely to have been people communicating, explaining, persuading, convincing as well as analysts setting out the evidence, the costs, the benefits etc. Early adopters may have been absolutely essential to getting the transformational change done. Senior leaders may have championed the change – junior colleagues may have done the actual hard grind that made things different. There’s no way I feel I can say “I delivered transformational change” because it really wasn’t just me.

Going even broader (autistically overthinking it) it may be that the time was just right in culture and society for this transformational change (whatever it was). Maybe the technology had suddenly become available, or society had got used to a new way of doing things in another industry that could be just brought over to my. Possibly the political context meant this change was exactly what people were going to support. Maybe even global events made it more likely to work. It’s not literally, honestly possible to say that you’ve achieved something all by yourself unless you’re living on a desert island all by yourself. “No man is an island” as John Donne said. Except for the purposes of interview examples.

Reading back what I’ve written, it jumps out to me as a senior manager that “autistic overthinking” in this context can also mean “a really rigorous analysis of the big picture in which the change needs to take place, taking account of all the resources and stakeholders who will need to be taken into consideration to make it a success”. Which is a good thing at work – you need to know the big picture you’re operating in. There must be a way to be able to use this autistic strength rather than it just serving as a difficulty in selling ourselves!