A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager’s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly true when you’re leading a team, the more that your success is measured in terms of others’ perceptions of you. You cannot wait for recognition to come to you. You have to tell others why you deserve recognition.
I know that this is not easy. It’s hard to know where to start. It’s sometimes hard to know when you’re being successful. It feels like getting people to understand the impact of your great work is taking away from you being able to do more great work. Not being able to concentrate on doing more great work makes you worry that you really are selling snake oil. But that’s not true. What you’re doing is enabling people to discover your great work and build on top of it. Help them understand why it’s great. Help them understand how it contributes to them doing great work.
In user experience, we know that one of the common challenges of any product or service is discoverability. I’ve experienced this many times. You get user feedback that says that the one way that you could make your product or service better is to do this thing really awesome. “But it’s already there! I spent months delivering that feature!” Not only is your user frustrated that they think they can’t do what they want to do, but also you’re frustrated that you spent all that time and energy developing the very feature that they need and they’re not actually using it. You’ve got a discoverability problem. You’ve got to figure out how to fix it so that your engineering effort isn’t wasted and your user can accomplish what they want to do. Fix your discoverability problem, and you’ll fix two different frustrations.
And it’s the same with your great work. It’s not enough to do great work. You’ve got to make it possible for other people to discover your great work, to understand it and how it’s a contribution, to be able to build on it. Don’t think of the time that you spend changing perceptions as a waste of time. Think of it as solving the discoverability problem in your career.
What are soft skill set that can help promote your presence even though you might not have complete picture of the end target state.
If you’re not sure of where to start, public speaking is an excellent choice.
T H I S
Seriously, it’s a critical thing, one I learned in the military (they had a lot of training on “managing your career” that talked about this.) There’s a lot of ways to do it, public speaking is a big one, not just for the usual perception of a conference or similar, but being comfortable talking in front of team members, or people from other teams.
But if you don’t tell people what you’re doing, what your team is doing, and you expect them to “just know” that’s kind of asking for them to read your mind. It’s a variant on a bad manager thing called “if you loved me, you’d know.” People won’t know unless you tell them.
and if you’re reporting to someone or someones who have a lot of other people reporting to them, there’s almost no way for them to be able to keep up with what you’re doing, what your team is doing unless you tell them.