Should You Brag About Yourself at Work?

Be a Loudmouth to Get a Raise

The conventional wisdom about work is that you should be a polite and cordial worker. But a news study suggests that the opposite may be true: grow as big of an ego as possible if you want to succeed. That means bragging about yourself constantly so people remember your talents.

Yahoo Shine reports:

A new joint study from Northwestern University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago found that people who talk themselves up are more likely to be chosen for leadership roles. And, get this: Since women usually aren’t braggers, we tend to fall short.

In the study, researchers divided male and female MBA students into groups and asked each group to select a leader. Each leader would compete against leaders from the other groups in a task that everyone in the group had done in a past experiment together.

The outcome: Women were chosen less frequently for the leadership positions than men, even if they had already proven in the previous experiment that they were great at the task.

Why? Scientists discovered that men were more likely to brag about how great they were-and convinced their group that they would be better leaders in the process.

So, yeah, you obviously don’t want to stand up in a meeting and give a PowerPoint presentation on how awesome you are. But if you get good response from a client, don’t be afraid to email your boss with the message, “Just thought you’d want to see this great feedback.” It’ll get the message across.

What do you think—is this true in your experience?

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