In my last newsletter I wrote about the competence trap. The trap is the easy part to recognise. The harder part is what to actually do about it on a Monday morning when your inbox is on fire and you've got three deliverables due.
Most career advice on visibility is rubbish. It tells you to "self-promote" or "build your personal brand", which to most senior professionals sounds like becoming a slightly worse version of a LinkedIn influencer. Nobody at Director or VP level wants to do that. And rightly so.
The truth is, visibility at senior levels has nothing to do with self-promotion. It has to do with making your work legible to the people who decide what happens next.
There's a system I teach for this. It has three parts. Signal, Document, Share.
Signal
Signalling is about leaving a verbal breadcrumb in the rooms you're already in. You're not adding meetings. You're using the ones already on your calendar.
Once a week, in one of your existing meetings, name a piece of strategic work you're doing. One sentence. "We're closing in on the supplier consolidation work, should land about £2.4m in annual savings." That's it. Don't elaborate unless asked. Don't pad it. Move on.
This sounds trivial. It isn't. Most senior managers go entire quarters without saying anything specific about the outcomes of their work in public. They report status. They flag risks. They never quite say what they're producing.
If you start doing this consistently for six weeks, your boss will start repeating your numbers back to you. After three months, their boss will start using your numbers in their own pitches. That's how it spreads.
Document
Documentation is the receipt that makes the signal sticky.
Once a month, on the last working day, write a half-page note to your manager. Three sections. What landed. What's in flight. What you need from them.
Make it shorter than they expect. Make it specific. Use numbers wherever there are numbers. Keep the structure identical every month so they can scan it in forty seconds.
The "what you need from them" section is the most important and the one most people skip. It's where you turn your manager into an ally rather than a passive observer. Asking for something specific (an introduction, a sponsor for a project, air cover on a decision) makes them feel useful. Useful managers advocate for you. Comfortable ones forget you exist.
I had a client in financial services who started doing this three months ago. Her last note ended with "I'd like to sit in on the steering committee for the cost transformation programme, even just as an observer for the next two cycles." Her manager said yes within twelve minutes. Six weeks later, she was presenting in it.
Share
Sharing is the bit that scares people, because it sounds like bragging. It isn't, if you do it right.
The rule is simple. Share outcomes, not effort. Share with people who have a legitimate reason to care, not with anyone who'll listen. And share once, cleanly, then stop.
When a project closes, send a four-line message to the three or four senior people whose work intersected with yours. "Wanted to close the loop on the customer onboarding work. We've cut time-to-first-value from 22 days to 9. Happy to share what worked if it's useful elsewhere in the business. Thanks for the air cover on the data access piece."
That message does three things at once. It tells them you delivered. It positions you as someone who shares useful knowledge. And it gives them something concrete to mention if your name comes up in a conversation you'll never know about.
What this looks like over a year
If you run Signal weekly, Document monthly, and Share at every project close, you'll generate roughly two hundred small moments of visibility across a year. None of them is a big move. Cumulatively, they rewrite how the senior layer of the business perceives you.
The people who get promoted aren't the ones who shouted the loudest. They're the ones whose work was easiest for senior people to talk about.
"Don't compete with people. Make them obsolete." Alex Hormozi puts it sharper than I would, but the principle is the same. The point isn't to outwork. The point is to make the system unable to ignore you.
If you only do one of the three this week, do Signal. It costs nothing and you've already got the meetings on your calendar.
