Your Work Doesn’t Speak for Itself
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Your work doesn't speak for itself.
I coached a Senior Director of analytics — let's call her Priya. She'd been in the role for four years. She ran a team of twenty-two people. She'd built the analytics practice from scratch, created frameworks that were now used firm-wide, and consistently delivered results that exceeded expectations. By any objective measure, she was one of the highest-performing leaders in her division.
And her boss barely knew she existed.
I don't mean that literally. He knew her name. He attended her quarterly reviews. He signed off on her budget. But when it came to the informal influence that shapes careers — the hallway conversations, the mentions in leadership meetings, the recommendations for high-visibility projects — Priya was invisible.
She was furious when she realized it. "I've been delivering for four years. How does he not know?"
"He knows you deliver," I said. "He just doesn't have a narrative for you beyond 'she's solid.' And 'solid' doesn't get you into the room where decisions are made."
This is the trap. You can be the highest-performing person in the building and still be invisible — because your work, by itself, doesn't tell a story. It just sits there. Someone has to narrate it.
I asked Priya a question that stopped her cold: "If your boss had to describe what you do and why it matters — in two sentences — to someone deciding your next opportunity, what would he say?"
She didn't know. And that was the whole problem.
We built what I call a Strategic Narrative. Not a pitch. Not a brag. A clear, two-sentence version of what she does, why it matters, and where it's going — framed in a way that someone else could repeat in a room she's not in.
Here was the shift: Priya went from hoping people would notice her work to making sure the right people understood her work. Those are two very different things.
The simplest tool we implemented was something I call the Friday Update. Every Friday, she sent her boss a brief note — three things accomplished this week, one thing coming next week, one thing she might need from him. Five minutes to write. No fluff. No self-promotion. Just clarity.
Within six weeks, her boss started referencing her work in leadership meetings. Not because she asked him to — because he finally had the language to do it. She'd given him the narrative.
Your work doesn't speak for itself. It never did. The question isn't whether you're doing enough. The question is whether the people who decide your future have any idea what you're doing and why it matters.
If your boss had to tell that story in two sentences, what would they say? And if you don't know — that's the gap to close this week.
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