Managing Up
Most of what your manager knows about you arrived secondhand
Believing that good work speaks for itself misunderstands how information about junior employees actually moves through an organisation.
By Julien Perrot3 min read
The comforting belief and its flaw
A great many capable people hold the view that quietly doing excellent work is sufficient, that visibility-seeking is unseemly, and that anyone worth working for will notice eventually. It is an attractive position and it contains something true: chasing credit while producing little is transparent and generally fails.
The flaw is in the model of how noticing happens. Your manager spends only a fraction of their week on you, sees a small sample of your output, and mostly encounters second-order evidence — a comment from a colleague, a document with your name on it, the absence of complaints. Between one review and the next, most of what they will say about you is assembled from fragments.
Attribution is the actual problem
The failure mode is not usually that good work goes unseen. It is that it gets seen without a name attached. A fix lands and nobody knows who made it. A messy process becomes smooth and the improvement is attributed to time passing. Prevented problems are the worst case of all, because a disaster that did not happen leaves no trace whatsoever.
This has an unpleasant consequence for anyone whose value is largely preventative. If your work consists of catching things before they break, your reward for doing it well is that nothing observable occurs. The only defence is to make the invisible visible occasionally — noting, without drama, what would have happened otherwise.
What travels upward, and what does not
Certain artefacts move through an organisation on their own. A written document with your name on it can be forwarded. A demonstration in front of several people is witnessed by several people. A number that goes into a report goes wherever the report goes. Meanwhile, effort, difficulty and hours worked do not travel at all, because they leave no artefact and nobody can verify them.
This is why two people of equal ability can end up on very different trajectories. It is not that one is a self-promoter. It is that one produces work in forms that propagate and the other produces work that has to be described by someone else to be known about at all.
Doing this without becoming insufferable
The distinction that matters is between claiming credit and supplying information. Credit-claiming is comparative, retrospective and about you. Information is factual, useful to the recipient, and about the work. Nobody minds the second, and most people can tell them apart instantly.
Concretely: a short written summary at the end of a piece of work, sent to the people affected, is information. Mentioning in a one-to-one that a change reduced a recurring failure is information. Naming the colleagues involved costs you nothing and makes the whole thing land better, because a person who distributes credit is trusted with it more readily than one who hoards it.
Keep a private record too. Not for anyone else — for you, because when a review or a pay conversation arrives you will otherwise remember only the last six weeks. A file with dates and what happened turns a vague claim of a good year into something specific, and specific claims are the only ones a manager can repeat in a room where decisions are made.
The room you are not in
In many organisations, decisions about ratings, promotions and pay involve managers comparing their people against each other. Whatever your manager can say about you in that room is the entire input. They cannot use what they do not know, they cannot use what they cannot describe, and they are arguing against colleagues who came prepared.
That is the practical case for visibility, and it has nothing to do with ego. It is that the quality of the argument made on your behalf is bounded by the material you supplied. If you leave your manager with nothing but a general impression that you are fine, a general impression is what will be presented.
It is also fair to say that some organisations are simply bad at this — where the calibration is a formality, or where advocacy depends more on your manager’s standing than on your work. In that case the same record still helps, but its main use may be external, in the conversation where you explain to somebody else what you have actually done.
Common questions
Is it self-promotion to send a summary of my own work?
Not if the recipient has a reason to want it. Test it by asking whether the note would be useful to someone who did not care about you at all — if it tells them something they need, it is communication. If it exists only to be admired, it is not, and it will read that way.
My manager takes credit for my work. What do I do?
First establish whether it is deliberate or the ordinary compression that happens when a team’s work is reported as the team’s. If it is deliberate and persistent, the practical countermeasure is producing artefacts that carry your name and reach the affected people directly, since that bypasses the retelling entirely. Persistent misattribution is also a legitimate reason to leave.
Deputy editor, After the First Job
Julien covers first months, managing up, money at work and the questions readers actually send in and would rather show the working than assert the conclusion.
