Why Visibility is Key to Career Advancement

Why is visibility so important for career advancement? Today I want to have a fireside chat with you. And the reason why this question came up was because there are members of my community who are asking for how can I be more visible in front of my higher apps? How can I be more invisible in front of my C-suite? Visibility is so important. The first question I ask them in return is visibility in front of who? To whom do you want to be visible? And that very first question is important to answer because the strategy to be visible in front of different people in your organization, the strategy is different depending on who you want to be visible in front of. And that's not the scope of today's discussion. I'm not going to be talking about the strategy on how to become more visible. I'm just going to focus on why visibility is important. You're listening to Career Revisionist. The podcast where ambitious professionals pursue mastery, breakthrough invisible ceilings, and accelerate into leadership. And now to guide you on the journey. Dr. Grace Lee, neuroscientist, executive mentor, and your trusted voice in career leadership. So I'm going to give you an example of someone I spoke to a client that I was working with who was a director of sales in a health care industry. And he came to me because he's been in sales for more than 20 years, worked his way up into a director. It was a senior director role in this company. And he told me that a lot of his KPIs were really metrics that he was measured on depending on how his team performed. And he led the whole sales department. It was his business function very familiar with it as well, especially in that health care space. And he said, well, team members have come and go. Sales representatives have come and go. And larger counts came and went. But his KPIs were solely on how he was visible in front of the organization. And he was struggling to be able to demonstrate his potential, his potential to be escalated and advance into VP positions and VP roles. And what we really earlier on came to realize was that as a sales director, it was very difficult for his senior leaders and his direct manager to know exactly what he was doing day to day. In fact, the only thing he was measured on was his KPIs. And if you think about this, even if you're not in sales, it doesn't matter what department you're in. It doesn't matter what business function is your primary business function or what job level you're at. KPIs are lagging metrics. By the time you have your KPIs to report to your managers, a lot has happened before that. KPIs are the further downstream. It's what happens in the upstream. That's really interesting. It's interesting to you because you had to solve complex problems in order to produce those KPIs. You had to have foresight. You had to demonstrate insight. You had to be really efficient in your operations. You had to have intelligence to be able to navigate challenges that were expected and unexpected in order to produce those KPIs. And all of those things that happened before that lagging metrics of KPIs, nobody sees them. You do. And maybe certain select team members do if they work really closely to you. But the ones that our decision makers, the ones that had influence on your career advancement aren't there with you day to day. They aren't there to see what you've done. How you have applied your intellect. How you had demonstrated foresight to save the company from things, to save the company from losses, to save the company from further dangers. They weren't able to see that. Sure, you could report on those things. But a lot of times I hear executives, one of the biggest complaint is that the KPIs, there's such an inertia around the KPIs in how they are reported and how much emphasis and weight that they have on those lagging metrics. So when it comes to visibility, that's exactly why visibility is so important. How can you create transparency around the leading metrics? The leading metrics, there's multiple of them that as a consequence to those leading metrics done well and succeeding and making progress, that's when you can produce a winning KPI or a winning set of KPIs. And that's exactly why, especially in larger organizations, conglomerates and matrix organizations, it's harder and harder to become visible because you're farther and farther removed from those decision makers. There's more layers between them. You take a director level, job level, and now there's associate director, senior associate director, director, and then there's senior director. They create intricate more layers just on that one job level. And whenever a new layer is introduced or even a new team member is introduced, visibility becomes even more filtered and becomes even more difficult. And that is exactly why visibility is the key to career advancement when you can create those channels of transparency, when you can create those channels of communication, when you are strategic in how you are visible in front of the right people at the right time, then you have an opportunity to advance your career. You have an opportunity to increase your deservingness or your perceived exertiveness at that next level. And you have the ability to increase the perception of your ability to succeed at that next job level of as well. So then as soon as I showed, great back to the example I shared with you on that senior director of sales, as soon as I showed him how to create those channels of visibility, to identify and prioritize who he needed to be visible in front of, create the channels of visibility in front of them, and then the roadmap on how to become more visible, just starting with those people, those individuals first, then it took on a snowball effect. And then his leading metrics became more visible. And the ability of him to produce those lagging metrics, KPIs, made more and more sense. They had more thinking behind it. They had more of a solidification behind it, and then he was able to advance his career. So I just wanted to give you this as a source of inspiration. If you're noticing, if you're already feeling it, if your instincts are already telling you that you need to become more visible, think about how and who and where to create your strategy of visibility. In this day and age where the business landscape is changing rapidly and the rules of the game are changing, it is really important for your operations, the way that you operate your career and your career path to change needs to evolve. And one of those arms of evolution is to become more visible. And how can we become more visible? It starts with your communication. It's not just the words you say. It's the strategy on when you say it, how you say it, to whom you say it, and the strategy of when you're going to say those things, and what order. So this is, now this is not about strategy of communication. It's just to impress upon you that your visibility not just within your teams and your drug reports, but the visibility that you have with the managers and the key decision makers and the stakeholders of your influence or your potential influence in the organization will help you to advance your career and give you the next level opportunities that you're vying for. If one I said here has confirmed your suspicions or it has affirmed your belief set, the importance of visibility, then I invite you to work with me. I have a mentorship where I guide you on the steps on how to develop your strategic communication, how to position yourself to the next career level, the job level that you are doing, having your career goals. And more importantly, how you can position yourself and how you can build the skills to have that executive presence. And more importantly, how do you know who to choose to be invisible in front of and prioritize based on your situation and based on where you want to go? So if you are committed to yourself and that type of growth and you want that breakthrough personally and professionally, then I invite you to click the link below this video. That link will lead you to a very short questionnaire just so that we can understand you and then you'll have an opportunity to speak with one of my expert career advisors. And then if we in that conversation, if we are the right match, then I will look forward to working with you and being your mentor, your coach and your guide. So click the link below and I hope to look forward to see you on the inside.