We for Visibility
How to increase your team’s visibility at work
Driving visibility for your team’s work can often be misunderstood as ‘showing off’ or criticized for ‘missing the boat’. Is it possible to do it in a way that’s authentic, productive, and motivating for others as well as the company?
Recently, I got the opportunity to share some of these learnings during one of the fireside chat events that Enrich organized, and dig into how we can do this effectively especially as we move from adjusting to thriving while working from home. I’m always motivated by the level of engagement from everyone in this community and how we are invested in continuously learning and sharing. Check out the other talks they have organized, and you’ll know what I mean!
This is my attempt to share more broadly what’s worked and what can hinder progress and team morale, while you build more visibility for your team. I’m also grateful to my peers who were generous to share their tips and advice. Also included are my 3 indicators of success that you could also use to see if your efforts are indeed helping. I hope you’ll find something that you can try out for you and the team in 2021!
Raise your hand (your mental hand will work for now) if you have either said or heard one of the following statements:
I’ve often struggled with the concept of blowing one’s own horn. Then again, I’ve also been disappointed when my work or my team’s work was not duly recognized. Over the years, I’ve realized why I didn’t like the idea of clamoring for visibility. It’s because there weren’t too many good examples of building visibility around us. The detrimental effect of having too many poor examples is that we tend to believe that’s the norm, leading to hardworking team members feeling demotivated and burnt out.
Instead, what if we think about this in terms of driving awareness for your work, your team’s initiatives, as well as how these contribute to and align with the overall company and business goals?
We for Visibility starts within your team first
During the early days of adjusting to #WFH in 2020, my team and I tried out some ideas to make working remotely a bit more engaging, highlight what we were all working on, as well as make meetings more purposeful.
- Aligning team members to work on 1–2 joint projects with others on the team, helped develop new skills and build mutually appreciation.
- Managers, if you are speaking for more than 60% of the time, then it’s not a “team” meeting, because you could have just sent an email for what you had to share widely. Rotate meeting owners and have different project owners present their work.
- Highlight progress against goals regularly. Proactively encourage discussions on how everyone feels they are contributing to company goals.
- Proactively seek feedback from cross-functional teams on projects your team has been driving. Share it back with your team.
We used to have a practice during weekly team meetings on one of my teams at Google, called Dukes and Whoops. Folks give Dukes to others in the team who have helped them on specific projects the past week. Team members highlight their own Whoops moments in the past week that involve something silly or light-hearted. They helped drive more awareness on smaller projects, and a healthy exercise to recognize others’ contributions.
Within the leadership team and broader company
The leadership team is not always going to be aware of every team member’s contributions. And if your company all hands looks anything like this image, you gotta get creative.
Get comfortable with building awareness for your team. Your team depends on you to represent their work wherever possible, open doors of opportunities, and unblock hurdles for them!
- Highlight progress against team goals and alignment regularly, highlight team members.
- Invite team members to present on projects they are leading
- Organize immersion weeks, demo days, skip-level meetings with senior leadership and executive team members so that they can connect with your team members first hand.
- Practice what you want others to do for your team — As managers, make sure you too highlight others team members’ accomplishments to their managers
- Check in with your leadership team on how they perceive the work your team members are driving. Share back with your team.
- Tools can help too, invest in them and build up the culture to give public and private kudos, peer awards, ring virtual gongs 🔔 when your sales team closes a deal or customer support gets 5 stars from a client, etc.
What if my team or org is not responsible for revenue generation, and visibility seems to be reserved only for those who launch products or bring revenue?
Maybe you are heading up the content/quality operations team or the customer support team and your team is not directly responsible for revenue in the company. Think deeply about why is your team important in the overall functioning of the business and and see if you can build awareness around concepts like:
- The TechCrunch or NYT article (or heading) we avoided this week/month!
- The relationship we sustained for the business (and thereby the partnership we deepened and revenue sustained) by working on a tough escalation!
Is visibility only important when it’s within a team or company? Success and recognition does not always mean the same thing to everyone. We often think of visibility as spreading awareness within the company, but for many of my team members, it has also been about building presence and credibility outside as well . If our team members feel respected and recognized in a way that aligns with their career goals, they are more likely to stay motivated and productive for the longer run.
- Provide opportunities to those in the teams who are looking to speak or participate at events and extend thought leadership.
- Motivate team members to participate and contribute in relevant forums and networking communities.
- For those of us in business development, partnerships or sales, work with your team members to expand their influence to senior leadership/C-level executives at the client companies. This will go a long way to enhance business relationships as well as build executive presence for those team members.
Avoid creating poor examples of what efforts you build visibility around and drive awareness towards. If you decide to recognize team-wide someone’s contributions over the weekend, be extremely clear what you are specifically recognizing and why it was important for the business. Otherwise, you risk setting the wrong example of the culture you are trying to build, and your team is bound to be either confused or frustrated of what is considered success.
- Be deliberate of what you and the leadership deem as worthy of recognition and the way you want to recognize. And especially of the tone you are setting for the rest of the team and organizations.
- Be consistent with what you’re sharing with your team individually and as a group. I find it both amusing and frustrating when leaders don’t realize that our team members are not working in silos, and they talk to each other. If you are not consistent in what you share, your team will slowly and surely stop trusting you and interpret your actions differently.
Time to wrap up my thoughts, but not before I address the most common question I’ve received about visibility — How do you know all this is working well??
These are some my directional indicators that I’ve anchored around over the years, both from a personal and professional standpoint:
Indicator #1: Team members feel more empowered to speak about their work in a way they want to be recognized
Indicator #2: Other team members/managers/leaders start reaching out to your team members directly to collaborate on projects. I am no longer the bottleneck and there is no hierarchy when good folks want to work with each other.
Indicator #3: My personal moment of joy has been when I’ve heard cross-functional team members and managers speaking about the contributions of my team members, with details. I’m super grateful for these, especially during calibration and performance evaluation meetings with leadership!
I’d love to hear about what is working for you and what you’ve learnt does not yield good outcomes. Free to share your tips as well in the comments section so that we continue to learn and represent our teams in the best possible way!
