Why the Advice to be More Visible Backfires

Most advice about being seen at work sounds the same: post more, speak up more, make sure people know what you did. So people try it. And it splits two ways.

Some people can’t make themselves do it. Speaking up about their own work feels like bragging, like something other people do easily and they don’t. So they stay heads-down, doing work that is genuinely good, and quietly assume someone will notice. Usually, no one does.

Other people push through the discomfort and say it anyway, and get told they are overdoing it. Too visible. Too much. Trying too hard. Which is strange, because five minutes earlier the problem was supposedly that nobody could see them at all.

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud: neither group is doing it wrong. They are both following advice that was never built for the actual problem. The problem was never how much you say. It’s what the people deciding already believe about you before you say it. The same sentence lands as insight from one person and as overreach from another, and the difference is the read, not the volume.

I am walking through how to change that read, live, on October 1, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Free, an hour, and it is the kind of thing that is hard to see on your own from the inside.

→ Register for the October 1 workshop

Onward, Laurie