Invisible Wins

In some types of work, your successes and accomplishments are very visible. In others, they’re almost totally invisible. Knowing which is which changes the ideal strategy when it comes to benefitting from those wins.

What do the professions of sales and landscaping have in common? Being good at them is highly visible. When a sales professional is good at their job, everyone sees it – from “ringing the bell” to leaderboards to just the fact that a bunch of money is coming in the door. When a landscaper is good at their job, people stop and stare, ask for cards, and admire the whole area. In both cases, being good at your job alone is a source of advertisement for your skill.

Not every profession is like that! Take IT, for example. Most people who aren’t in IT have zero idea what the IT people do. To everyone else, their successes just look like “everything is as it should be.” Nothing is broken. And of course, if there’s so much as one small problem, it’s because of “those incompetents down in the IT department,” isn’t it?

That’s a problem in human nature, but you can’t solve that. What you can do is be aware of it and plan for it. And that means if you work in a field where the successes don’t advertise themselves, it’s on YOU to advertise them. If you’re in one of those fields, just “being good at your job” isn’t enough. You need to do three things:

1. Explain what your “being good at your job” looks like, and how you can prove it to an outsider.
2. Explain how that proof provides value to another person, especially someone who doesn’t work in the same profession.
3. Capture that proof consistently and share it with your broader network.

This isn’t easy! But it’s definitely possible. Creating your own “visible success” is a matter of consistent documentation and understanding what other people are looking for. Often you have to look at what would happen if you weren’t good at your job in order to figure out how being good at it is valuable to a broader team or organization. But once you understand how other people perceive the value of what you do, you can consistently track and communicate that value.