Doing Good Work Is Not Enough

Episode transcript

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Opening

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're listening to How Work Really Works with Steve. Practical advice to help you communicate better, lead with confidence, and advance your career. Hi,

Doing Good Work Is Not Enough

SPEAKER_00 0:13

I'm Steve, and this is how work really works. Here is one of the most frustrating things you can hear at work. You're doing a great job. It sounds encouraging, and sometimes it is. But when it is followed by we've decided to give the opportunity to someone else, it rather loses its sparkle. You did the work, you met the deadlines, you helped other people. You stayed late when something went wrong. You probably attended several meetings that could have been emails, and at least one email chain that somehow became a meeting. Then somebody else gets promoted. Perhaps they were not as technically strong as you. Perhaps they did not seem to work as hard, perhaps you are now being asked to help them settle into the role you thought you were ready for. That one is particularly character building. So what happened? The uncomfortable answer is that doing good work is essential, but it is not enough on its own. That is not because organizations are always unfair, although some certainly make a determined effort. It is because work is judged by people, and people can only judge what they understand, remember, and trust. Good work that nobody can see, connect to a result, or explain to someone else is easy to overlook. Many of us learn the opposite lesson early in life. At school, the rules are fairly clear. Do the assignment, answer the questions, get the grade. Your work sits there on the page, waiting to be marked. Work is not like that. There is no neutral examiner quietly reviewing everything you did during the year. Your manager has their own job, their own deadlines, and usually a calendar that looks like somebody has been playing Tetris with it. Senior leaders are even further away from the detail. They may see the final result, but not the judgment, persistence, and problem solving that produced it. This means your contribution has to travel beyond the work itself. People need to know what changed because you were involved. They need to trust how you think. And when an opportunity appears, somebody needs to be able to describe your value when you are not in the room. That last point matters. Most important career decisions are not made while you are sitting there giving a flawless explanation of why you deserve the role. They are made in conversations between other people. A leader says, who could take this on? Somebody mentions a name, then the room starts exchanging stories, impressions, and examples. If your name comes up, what can people say? Not what do you hope they say, what evidence have you given them to use? That is the real subject of this episode, not office politics in the worst sense, not turning yourself into a walking advertisement, and definitely not speaking about yourself in the third person, which should remain the preserve of professional wrestlers and unusually confident football managers. This is about making your value clear, building credibility, and helping the right people understand what you are capable of doing next. You still have to do good work. There is no clever communication technique that can permanently disguise poor performance. But good performance is the foundation. It is not the complete building. Can this

How Career Decisions Really Work

SPEAKER_00 3:26

person deliver results? Can they handle more ambiguity and responsibility? Can they communicate with different audiences? Will other people trust them? And will putting them into the role make life easier or considerably more exciting for everyone involved? Your current performance answers only part of that. If you are excellent at your present job, people may conclude that you are excellent at your present job. That is positive, but it is not the same as seeing you in the next one. To advance, you need to show evidence of the capabilities the next role requires. If the next role involves leading people, can others see you helping colleagues succeed? If it involves senior communication, can you explain a complicated issue clearly and briefly? If it involves judgment, do you bring sensible options? Or do you simply deliver problems with the enthusiasm of a courier? I have seen very capable people become frustrated because they assume their effort was obvious. They believed the hours they worked, the problems they solved, and the quality they delivered would naturally lead to recognition. Sometimes it did, often it did not. The problem was rarely that nobody valued them. The problem was that the organization had an incomplete picture of them. A useful way to think about this is through three things performance, perception, and positioning. Performance is the work you actually do. It is the quality, reliability, and outcome of your contribution. Perception is how other people understand that contribution. Do they see you as dependable, strategic, calm under pressure, difficult, helpful, invisible? The perception may not be perfectly fair, but it still influences decisions. Positioning is whether people can imagine you handling the next level of responsibility. It is the bridge between doing your current job well and being trusted with something larger. People sometimes react badly to the word visibility because it sounds like self-promotion, and bad self-promotion is irritating. We have all met the person who provides a live commentary on everything they do. They send an update when they begin the work, another update when they consider the work, and a final update celebrating the courageous completion of a task that was due last Tuesday. That is not what I mean. Useful visibility is simply making the outcome clear. Instead of saying, I attended six meetings and completed the analysis, say we identified the cause of the delay, agreed the decision with operations, and brought the schedule back by two weeks. The first version describes activity. The second explains value. Senior leaders tend to remember outcomes, risks, decisions, and consequences. If you want your work to be understood, translate it into that language. You do not need to make it grander than it is. In fact, please do not. Every routine improvement does not need to be described as transformational. Just explain what was different, because the work happened. There is another part of visibility that is often missed, helping other people connect your name with good judgment. That happens through the questions you ask, the way you handle pressure, and the way you communicate when things are not going well. Anyone can look composed when the project is green and the presentation has reassuring arrows pointing upwards. Credibility is built when the news is awkward. If something slips, say so early. Explain the impact. Offer realistic options. Recommend what should happen next. Do not hide the problem until it has developed its own project code and steering committee. Leaders remember people who make difficult situations clearer. They also remember people who make them more confusing. Relationships matter for the same reason. This does not mean collecting contacts or treating every conversation as a transaction. It means understanding the people affected by your work and earning their trust before you urgently need something from them. Talk to colleagues outside your immediate team. Ask what they are trying to achieve. Learn what creates pressure for them. Follow through when you offer help. Over time, those people become part of your professional reputation. They have experienced how you work, not merely read your profile. A mentor can help you think through your career. A sponsor does something different. A sponsor uses their own credibility to advocate for you when an opportunity is being discussed. You cannot walk up to a senior leader and announce, congratulations, you are now my sponsor. Sponsorship is earned. It grows when influential people see consistent performance, sound judgment, and the ability to operate at a broader level. There is also a trap that affects some of the strongest performers, becoming indispensable in the wrong way. You know the person. They understand every detail. They fix every crisis. They are the only one who knows how the monthly process works, where the important file lives, and why the system behaves strangely every second Thursday. The organization depends on them. That sounds like excellent career protection. Unfortunately, it can also make people reluctant to move them. If promoting you creates an immediate operational problem, somebody may decide that the safest option is to leave you exactly where you are. Nobody will describe it quite that honestly, of course. You may hear that you're too valuable to the team, which is flattering, right up to the point where you realize what it means. The answer is not to become less valuable. It is to make your value scalable. Document what only you know. Develop someone else, improve the process so it does not depend on heroic intervention. Show that you can build capability, not merely provide it personally. That is evidence of leadership. It also removes one of the quietest barriers to advancement, the fear that everything will fall apart if you leave your current seat. Your manager is part of this. But your manager cannot carry the entire responsibility for your career. A good manager should give feedback, create opportunities, and help you develop. But they may not know exactly what you want. They may assume you are happy, they may be focused on keeping a strong performer exactly where they are because moving you creates a rather inconvenient vacancy. So have the conversation. Do not say only I want to be promoted. That tells your manager the outcome you want, but gives them very little to work with. Try this instead. I would like to be considered for a larger role over the next year. What would you need to see from me to feel confident recommending me? That question is useful because it turns a vague ambition into observable evidence. Then listen carefully. If the answer is unclear, ask for examples. If they say you need to be more strategic, ask what strategic behavior would look like in your role. If they say you need more visibility, ask with whom and around what work. Vague feedback is difficult to act on. Your job is to make it specific enough to test. So how

Making Your Value Visible

SPEAKER_00 10:41

do you become more visible without becoming unbearable? Start with a simple habit. Keep a record of outcomes, not just tasks. At the end of each week, write down three things. What changed? What did I contribute? Why did it matter? This is not a diary of every email you sent. It is a short record of evidence. Perhaps you reduced a delay, prevented a risk, improved a customer experience, helped a colleague make a decision, or found a simpler way to do something. Capture the result while you still remember it. Six months later, everything tends to become worked on several important initiatives, which is accurate but not especially persuasive. Next, create a sensible rhythm for communicating progress. This might be a short weekly note to your manager, a project update, or a regular one-to-one conversation. Keep it brief. Focus on progress, decisions, risks, and what happens next. A useful update can be four sentences. Here is the outcome we are working towards. Here is what changed this week. Here is the risk or decision that needs attention. Here is what I recommend we do next. That structure makes you easier to manage, which is more valuable than it sounds. You are showing that you understand the work, the wider objective, and the decisions that matter. You are not asking your manager to reconstruct the story from 17 status items and a color-coded spreadsheet. Then look at your relationships. Choose a few people whose work connects with yours. Not necessarily the most senior people. Often the strongest professional relationships begin with peers, partners and colleagues in other teams. Ask them what they are trying to achieve and where your work creates friction or helps them. You may learn that something your team considers a minor detail is a major problem for somebody else. Solving that kind of problem builds a reputation quickly because the value is experienced, not advertised. You should also look for work that demonstrates the next level, not merely more of the current level. This is where many strong performers become trapped. They respond to ambition by taking on a larger quantity of the same work. They become the most overloaded version of their current role. More work can prove stamina. It does not always prove readiness. Instead, look for an opportunity that requires a broader skill. Lead a cross-team discussion. Present a recommendation, coach someone, resolve a disagreement, take ownership of an unclear problem, and bring structure to it. The objective is to create evidence that people can use when they discuss your future. And ask for feedback before the annual review. Annual reviews have a remarkable ability to contain information that would have been far more useful eleven months earlier. Ask a focused question after a meaningful piece of work. What did I do that helped? Then ask, what would have made me more effective? Those questions are easier to answer than do you have any feedback? Which often produces the deeply actionable response, No, you're doing great. You are trying to build an accurate picture of how other people experience you. Some feedback will be useful, some will be vague, occasionally some will be complete nonsense delivered with impressive confidence. You do not have to accept every comment as truth. Look for patents. If different people are giving you similar feedback, pay attention. It can help to perform a simple reputation check as well. Write down the three qualities you would like people to associate with you. Perhaps calm judgment, clear communication, and reliable delivery. Then ask yourself a harder question. What have I done recently that would cause somebody else to use those words? Intentions do not create a reputation. Repeated experiences do. If you want to be seen as strategic, bring a thoughtful recommendation that considers the wider business. If you want to be seen as a leader, help another person succeed. If you want to be seen as dependable, communicate early when a commitment is at risk. Choose the reputation you want, then create honest evidence for it. One final point visibility cannot be occasional. If you suddenly begin promoting your achievements two weeks before a promotion decision, it feels like a campaign because it is one. Reputation is built through a steady pattern, good work, clear communication, reliable judgment, helpful relationships, evidence of readiness. None of this requires you to become louder, more political, or less genuine. It requires you to stop assuming that your work explains itself, because it usually does not.

Put It to Work

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Here is your action for this week. Take one piece of work you are proud of and describe it in three sentences. First, what was the situation or problem? Second, what did you contribute? Third, what changed as a result? Keep it factual, keep it brief. Then use it in your next conversation with your manager, your next project update, or your own career notes, for example. The team was losing time because ownership of the approval process was unclear. I brought the affected groups together, clarified the decision points, and agreed a single owner for each stage. Approval time fell from 10 days to four. That is not boasting. It is a clear account of value. Do this once a week, and within a few months you will have something many people reach review season without evidence. That is your put it to work for this week. If this episode was useful, follow or subscribe to How Work Really Works

Closing Thoughts

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with Steve. Next time we are going to talk about how to communicate with senior leaders, including why more detail is rarely the answer and what they actually need from you. Until then, keep doing good work, just don't make it a secret.