G8 Career / Visibility Without Self Promotion

The People Deciding About You Have Not Seen Your Work

Decisions about roles and projects are made by people relying on second hand impressions.

When a role opens up, or a project needs a lead, or a team is reshaped, the conversation happens among a handful of people. Perhaps one of them has worked closely with you. The others are drawing on fragments: a presentation you gave, a document they read, something a colleague said in passing eight months ago. They are not being lazy. They cannot personally observe the work of everyone they make decisions about, and they know their picture is incomplete. They fill the gaps with whatever is available, and what is available is largely determined by what has been said and by whom.

This changes what is worth doing. It means the occasional piece of visible, well prepared communication is disproportionately valuable, not because presentation beats substance but because it is one of the few direct signals those people receive. It means that when someone else describes your work in a meeting you were not in, the accuracy of that description matters, and the way to improve it is to make sure the colleagues you work with understand what you are actually doing and why. Most people cannot describe their teammates' work in any detail, which is a gap you can close cheaply.

It also means being findable. If you have depth in something specific, let it be known that this is what you know, in ordinary ways: answering questions in that area, being the person who writes the summary, offering to review the thing that touches it. Being associated with a defined capability is what causes your name to arise in conversations you are not present for. That is the whole mechanism. There is nothing more sophisticated happening in those rooms than people trying to remember who might be good at this.