You’ve had a good career. You’ve progressed fast, and the people around you have recognized your potential, work ethic, and talent. Compared to some of your friends, you’ve been lucky.
Except now you don’t feel so lucky anymore. You’re not being recognized for the work you do. It feels like the effort’s not really paying off. Worse, the people who ARE recognized are not substantively better than you. It’s demoralizing. You don’t think you’re less talented or hard-working than you used to be. If anything you’ve gotten better. But why have things stalled?
Sometimes it even feels like people who started out behind you — who didn’t go to the schools you did, or have the early success you did — are catching up and maybe even getting further than you.
This is bewildering. “I feel like I just haven’t shaken the right hand,” one person told me. “I haven’t been noticed by the right person yet. I could get lucky, too, but how do I do that?”
Another client said, “It’s like the crane machine — you’re waiting for the big crane to spot you and grab you and pull you up to the next level.”
(Crane machine photoby Nlan86, used via a Creative Commons license.)
There are a couple of things that get in the way of progress when you’re past a certain point in your career. One is that all the people around you are good, too. The not-so-good people have left, or been filtered out. Well, not all of them. But many. It’s harder to distinguish yourself. Still, that doesn’t explain it, because you’re objectively really good.
The second explanation is often talked about as “visibility.” Sometimes “executive presence” or “leadership.” I can get pretty grumpy pretty fast at the ways some of these words are deployed. But instead of getting salty, instead let’s bring a more constructive frame to this point. As you move upward in a demanding career, with high-perfomers around you and hard problems to solve, the people above you in the organization have full plates and fragmented attention. Watching you closely, identifying your potential and skill, and assessing you thoughtfully and thoroughly and objectively is probably not high on their to-do list.
If your professional identity was formed early by succeeding in school, or in up-and-out environments, you’ve gotten opportunities because attentive authority figures were specifically charged with assessing you compared to a distinct peer group. And if you’ve ever been stung by an unfair review, you’ve felt the betrayal that comes when a person who you believed was doing a thorough, impartial evaluation was careless or incomplete or biased. School and many early career environments are built to identify and reward specific behaviors and indicators of potential.
That’s imperfect even in environments where it’s an articulated focus. But after a certain point, the people above you in the hierarchy are mostly thinking about the problems they’re called to solve. You stand out when you reduce their cognitive load, not when you wait for them to concentrate on you and your potential. Making it easier for them to see what you’ve done, to feel how things get done faster, better, or with less friction when you’re in the room, and to understand the places where you’d like to contribute more — that’s how you’ll get to the next level.
Another client recognized it was time to adjust his approach, and step into the kind of leadership he was hoping someone would hand him. After a tiny experiment in the way he ran a meeting, he reported, “I felt a semi-seismic shift in how this team could function, and how I could steer the ship.” I love that phrase: “semi-seismic,” because it’s so honest. It takes more than one small decision to change everything, no matter what Instagram tells us. And yet, the adjustments you make and the things you can do when bring an internal locus of control to your situation rather than waiting to be noticed, well, it can make a real difference in your outlook.
You can’t keep waiting to be chosen. It stops working after a certain point — not because you’re in the wrong place, but because you’ve reached a new level. Step into your own agency, and feel the ways you can steer your own career.
If this sounds like where you are, I’d like to hear about it. Book a discovery call, and let’s see together how this might look for you.
