If leadership can't see your value, does it count?

The last time your name came up in a meeting you weren't in, what did the person talking say about your work?

If you don't know, keep reading. If you think something was said along the lines of, “They are doing great” then that's a bigger problem.

Doing great makes you a great and never gets you a raise or promotion. And let's be honest, it doesn't help when layoffs are commonplace either.

Your work helps the company whether anyone sees it. The people who decide your pay and/or your next job can only decide based on what they know. If they don't know what you did, it doesn't factor into their decision about you.

Your boss's boss has no idea what you did

When no one knows what you did, they fill the gap with whatever they happened to see or hear. My case in point, a senior vice president asked for advice recently about one of her direct reports. She called him one of her most reliable people and said she'd be upset to lose him. Then after explaining an incident to the CEO, he told her it was obvious the employee was jealous and wanted her job. The example the SVP gave: a customer pushed back on an email she wrote, and in the meeting afterward, the employee smirked.

Nobody asked him what the smirk meant. Some of the replies to her question told her to fire him for disrespect and insubordination. Meanwhile, this employee has no idea any of this is happening, and the CEO now knows him as the guy who wants his boss's job instead of the guy his boss relies on most.

In your case maybe your direct reports saw what you did. Your peers saw part of it. Your boss knows what you told them. Your boss's boss knows nothing.

Example: for 8 months, customers kept getting invoices with the wrong amount. You traced it through several handoffs to a field nobody owned. You sat through 3 meetings where finance said it wasn't their problem until they agreed to change their process. Then you retrained your team. Billing complaints dropped from 20 a month to 2. By the time that reached a VP, it sounded like "billing is better now." Two months later, the VP picked someone else to lead the new billing project, because nobody had ever connected your name to fixing billing. The VP has no idea it took judgment, persistence, and a fight with another department to get there. They can't reward work they don't know about.

It's worse when your best work was stopping something from going wrong. When an employee doesn't quit, a customer doesn't complain, or a deadline doesn't slip, there is nothing for anyone to point to. Leaders notice the person who fixes a crisis. They rarely notice the person who kept the crisis from happening. If most of your value comes from prevention, you are likely underrated.

Why aren't you telling them?

A lot of managers don't explain their impact because it feels like bragging or showboating. Be honest with yourself about whether that's the reason, or whether you're hoping someone else will make the case, so you don't have to.

If you're waiting for your boss to speak up on your behalf, you've handed your career to someone who may not know what you did and may not have time to find out. Or you may be in the hands of someone like that CEO, who heard a story about a smirk that may have meant nothing and decided it was who you are.

Compare 2 ways of describing the same work:

"I spent 6 months improving our onboarding process."

"New managers kept reaching day 30 without knowing who owned several key decisions. We rebuilt onboarding around those decisions, and that confusion has stopped showing up in first-month reviews."

The first sentence tells leadership how you spent your time. The second tells them what changed because of what you did. Only the second one gives your boss something to repeat when your name comes up. If you can't describe your own work this way, don't expect anyone else to.

If you manage people, you're leaving their reputation to chance too

Your employees aren't in the budget meeting, the talent review, or the conversation about who gets promoted. You are. What you say there is often the only information anyone has about them.

That SVP was the one person who could have told her CEO how reliable her direct report is. She spent her energy wondering whether he was loyal to her.

If all you say is "she's doing a great job," you've told them nothing they can act on. When she gets passed over, part of that is on you.

Before your next talent review, write 2 sentences for each person on your team: what they changed, and what is different now because of it. If you can't write those sentences, you don't know their work well enough to speak for them.

Your work helped whether anyone saw it. Raises, promotions, and your next job still get decided by people who only know what they've been told. If you say nothing, they get nothing. Say more about your own work and say more for the people who report to you, because they're counting on you to do it.

Field Notes

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