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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Are you being asked to take on more?

It rarely starts as a new job.

Someone leaves, and you cover the gap. Your team grows. A project that used to belong somewhere else lands with you. Your boss asks you to take ownership of something because you are good at it.

You start attending meetings you were not in before. Making decisions you did not used to make. Carrying relationships, problems, or outcomes that once belonged to someone else.

‍ At first, it may make sense. The work needs to go somewhere. You can handle it. Maybe you even want the opportunity.

But then a few months pass, and the temporary responsibility is still there. The project has become part of your normal work. Nobody has taken anything away. Your title has not changed. Your job description has not changed. Your compensation has not changed.

You are doing more.

The question is whether your job has changed.

‍More work is not always a bigger job

There are seasons when almost every manager carries more.

A busy quarter. A colleague on leave. A difficult launch. A short-term vacancy. A project that needs temporary leadership.

That can mean more hours, more pressure, and more work without changing the underlying value of the role.

‍There is another kind of "more."

You become accountable for another function. Your span of responsibility increases. Decisions that once belonged above you now belong to you. You inherit a team, a budget, a customer relationship, a process, or an ongoing business result. The complexity or consequence of the decisions you make increases. Work that was supposed to be temporary becomes permanent.

‍The shape of the job is changing.

‍And when the organization permanently changes the job, the agreement around the job deserves to be reconsidered too.

Start by locating what changed

Before deciding whether you should ask for more money, get specific about what has actually been added.

Look back six months.

What are you responsible for now that you were not responsible for then? Not just tasks.

Look for changes in:

Scope. Are you responsible for more of the business?

‍Accountability. Are there new outcomes you are now expected to answer for?

Authority. Are you making decisions that previously belonged to someone at a different level?

Span. Are you responsible for more people, locations, customers, vendors, budgets, or functions?

Complexity. Are you coordinating across more parts of the organization or solving problems with greater consequence?

Risk. Are you carrying decisions where getting it wrong now costs the organization more?

Those changes tell you much more about the job than the length of your task list does.

Then find out why

This is the conversation managers often skip.

They accept the additional responsibility and try to prove they can carry it. But you need to know what leadership thinks is going on.

Is this temporary coverage? Is it a developmental assignment? Is the company redesigning the role? Are you being prepared for promotion? Did another position disappear and its responsibilities move to you? Or has the work simply migrated toward the person most likely to make sure it gets done?

Those are different situations. And they should not have the same agreement around them.

If the answer is temporary, ask for the end point. If the answer is development, ask what you are being developed toward. If the answer is a permanent expansion of the role, it is time to talk about the role itself.

A useful distinction: Temporary work has an end point. Developmental work has a learning purpose. Permanent expanded work needs a new agreement.

Without those distinctions, "Can you take this on?" turns into "This is yours now."

Pay attention to what did not move

When responsibility changes, several other things may need to move with it.

Your job description. Your decision rights. Your title. Your goals. The resources available to you. What comes off your plate. And, yes, your compensation.

Organizations do not always move those pieces together. You can receive more accountability without more authority. A better title without better pay. More people without more support. A "development opportunity" without any defined destination. Or a permanent increase in scope that is still treated as temporary because nobody has made the change official.

That mismatch is the thing to look at.

Field Notes

Read your own terrain, every Sunday

One leadership signal a week, read through the map, so you know where you're standing and what to do next.

Get the weekly Field Note

One email a week. Unsubscribe anytime.

So, is a raise warranted?

Ask for a review when the job itself has gotten bigger, not when the week was hard.

Ask yourself:

Has the additional responsibility become ongoing? Has the scope or complexity of my role materially increased? Am I accountable for outcomes I was not previously accountable for? Am I making decisions at a higher level of consequence? Would the organization have to hire at a different level if it were filling the job I am actually doing today?

If the answer to several of those questions is yes, you have a reasonable basis for asking the organization to review both the role and its compensation.

A raise here is recognition that the organization is now asking you to perform a job with greater value, responsibility, complexity, or consequence than your current agreement reflects.

Bring the changed job into the room

This does not have to be an adversarial conversation. Your job is to make the change visible.

Instead of: I've been doing so much more and I think I deserve a raise.

Try locating the terrain: When I look at my role compared with six months ago, several responsibilities have become permanent. I'm now accountable for ___. I've taken ownership of ___. And I'm making decisions about ___ that weren't previously part of my role. I'd like to review my job description, level, and compensation against the job I'm actually performing now.

Then stop.

Let them respond to the actual change.

Maybe there is context you cannot see. Maybe the responsibility really is temporary. Maybe a promotion is already being considered. Maybe compensation cannot move immediately. Maybe leadership does not realize how much of the abandoned work has accumulated with you. Or maybe you find that leadership expects you to keep carrying the expanded role indefinitely without changing the agreement.

That is information too.

You do not have to decide what to do with it in the same conversation. But now you know where you are standing.

One thing to carry

Being capable of carrying more does not automatically make the additional work yours.

Before the extra responsibility becomes normal, read what changed.

What was added? Why was it added? How long is it supposed to remain? What authority came with it? What left your plate? And what changed in the agreement around your role?

Because if the organization has permanently changed the job, it is reasonable to ask why the agreement around the job has not changed with it.

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If this is the terrain you're standing in, where the job got bigger and the agreement stayed the same, the next move is the conversation with the person who can change the agreement. Managing Up maps how to bring the changed job to them so they can act on it.