“You need to be more visible”
If you’ve heard those words – in a performance review, a promotion conversation, or maybe just within your own head because you know it’s what you need to do – you may also have felt them land with a mixture of recognition and mild dread.
Recognition, because somewhere you already knew it, and dread, because the advice that usually follows rarely gives you much that’s actually useful about how to do it in a way that feels right for you.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this feedback myself, and I used to respond to it in the ways I thought were expected – pushing myself to speak up in meetings, adding my voice to conversations, saying yes to opportunities to speak in bigger forums. If I’m honest, in many of those moments I hadn’t properly thought through the value of what I was contributing, it felt uncomfortable, and I suspect it showed.
What helped to change things was moving away from the question “how do I speak up more?” towards “where do I actually have something genuinely useful to say?” – and then properly preparing to say it. That shift, from input to value, made a real difference both to how it felt and to how it landed.
I think about this a lot now that I run my own business. Without an employer brand or an internal reputation doing some of the work, visibility matters in a way it never quite did before, and I’d be lying if I said that posting on LinkedIn every day comes naturally. Some mornings it takes more effort than others, but what makes it manageable is starting from how this might be useful to someone reading it, rather than how it makes me look. Anchoring on value and purpose changes the feel of it entirely.
The part that doesn’t get said enough
Having sat in senior leadership conversations myself, I know that decisions about who’s ready, who gets considered, who gets put forward, are rarely made in the moment and rarely made on complete information. They happen in calibration meetings and promotion discussions, where your name – and the narrative attached to it – either carries weight or doesn’t. The people advocating for you are working from what they’ve seen and heard, and if your contribution hasn’t been visible to them, they’re filling in the gaps themselves.
That means staying quiet about your contribution doesn’t just feel modest, it can quietly cost you. The risk isn’t invisibility exactly, it’s being categorised as trusted and reliable but not quite ready for the next level, valued for delivery but not yet associated with strategic thinking or wider impact. It’s being known by your team, but not by the people whose view of you matters most for what comes next.
The goal isn’t to become someone who’s out there bragging about their achievements to anyone who’ll listen, it’s to make sure the value you’re creating is actually visible to the people who have influence over your next role, promotion, rating or pay rise. If you don’t shape that narrative, others will shape it for you.
It’s not about being seen more – it’s about being seen for the right things
The most effective approach to visibility I’ve found, both for myself and in working with others, isn’t about doing more of it. It’s about being more intentional about where and how your value is visible to the people who matter.
Two questions I’ve come back to regularly as a starting point:
What kind of support could increase the impact or visibility of what you’re already doing? An executive sponsor, a senior stakeholder involved earlier in a project, a broader audience for work you’re already producing – people often appreciate being asked, and it naturally expands who sees your contribution without requiring you to do anything fundamentally different.
What have you learned that could be genuinely useful to others? Many of us are navigating challenges that colleagues elsewhere in the organisation are also facing, just in different forms. Is there an opportunity to share that thinking – through a session, a short piece of writing, a conversation – in a way that adds real value to others while also making your expertise more visible?
Neither of these is about personality. They’re about making it easier for the value you’re already creating to reach the people who need to see it.
What it looks like when it works
I was working with a senior manager recently who had been told, again, to raise her profile. She’d heard it before, felt the familiar anxiety about what it actually meant in practice, and got back to delivering because at least that felt concrete and within her control.
When we looked at it together, the issue wasn’t that she was invisible, it was that her work wasn’t connecting to the people who most needed to see it. She was updating her immediate team through regular project reviews. The senior stakeholders who needed to understand the strategic implications of her work were one layer removed and rarely in the room.
One relatively small shift – turning a standard project update into a broader knowledge-sharing session and inviting two of those stakeholders to join – changed things considerably. Within a few months she was being asked directly for her perspective in strategic conversations she’d previously been excluded from, and her name started appearing in discussions about a significant piece of work she was well-placed to lead. She hadn’t developed new skills, she’d just made it easier for the right people to see what she was already doing, and to associate her with strategic thinking rather than delivery alone.
A natural next step from the last post
The last edition was about knowing and articulating your distinctive value – understanding what you’re specifically known for and being able to explain it clearly. This is the natural next question – once you know what you bring, how do you make sure the right people are actually seeing it?
It’s worth asking yourself whether your promotion panel, executive sponsor, or whoever makes decisions about your next opportunity in your organisation, is close enough to your work to understand the value you create, and if not, what one thing could start to change that.
If this is something you’re working through, whether in your current role, ahead of a promotion conversation, or as you think about what’s next, it’s something I work on with clients regularly. You’re welcome to book a call or just send me a message.