The Visibility Paradox: Strategic Visibility for High Performers
You can be exceptional at your job—and still become strangely “quiet” in the organization’s mind.
Not because you lack impact.
But because your impact isn’t legible when it matters most: promotion cycles, restructures, high-stakes projects, leadership transitions.
At ARYS, we see this pattern repeatedly: careers advancing while energy erodes, and then—at the precise moment visibility is required—high performers fade into the background. Not in reality. In perception. And perception is what promotion committees, succession discussions, and sponsors act on.
The uncomfortable truth: performance is necessary, but insufficient
In complex organizations, performance is necessary, but insufficient. What moves you forward is the combination of:
- value creation (your results),
- value recognition (what decision-makers remember),
- value advocacy (who is willing to back you when trade-offs are real).
If you’re missing the second and third, you can work harder and still stall.
McKinsey and Lean In continue to show how fragile advancement remains—especially at the “first step up” where representation compounds over time. In the latest report, only 93 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men (and the gap is larger for women of color).
You don’t beat a structural pattern with effort alone. You beat it with strategy—specifically, strategic visibility.
Why high performers go invisible
1) You become “reliable” and get optimized for delivery—not progression
High performers often get rewarded with more responsibility, more fixing, more “can you just…” work. You become essential to execution.
But execution is not always the currency of advancement. Sometimes, it becomes the reason you’re kept where you are: you’re too useful.
This is reinforced by what research calls low-promotability work—tasks that help the organization but do not reliably translate into recognition or promotion. A widely cited American Economic Review paper documents gender differences in who gets asked to do these tasks and who accepts them.
HBR has written for years about “office housework”: the glue work that keeps teams functional (notes, coordination, emotional labor), but rarely shows up as promotable value.
Invisibility often starts as helpfulness.
2) You over-invest in quality and under-invest in signal
When stakes rise, leaders don’t have time to inspect quality. They operate on signals:
- What’s the pattern of impact?
- What’s the scale of influence?
- Who trusts this person with ambiguity?
- Who’s already betting on them?
HBR’s guidance on visibility is blunt: hard work needs to be seen—credibility requires both results and visibility.
If your work is excellent but your signal is weak, you’re depending on someone else to translate your value upward. That is rarely a safe strategy.
3) Women face a double bind: visibility can trigger backlash
Many women were taught that “being excellent” will speak for itself—and that self-promotion is risky. That instinct is not irrational.
Research on gender and impression management shows that self-promotion can increase perceived competence while also producing social penalties—a backlash effect. Related research in Journal of Applied Psychology highlights how women can be penalized for success in stereotypically male domains due to an “implied communality deficit” (perceived warmth/likeability trade-off).
So many high-performing women choose a “safe” visibility strategy: stay heads-down, let others talk, avoid appearing political.
The problem is: senior progression is inherently political—not cynically, but because power is allocated through narrative, sponsorship, and risk decisions.
What strategic visibility actually means (the one that actually works)
Forget performative visibility. Forget posting, networking for the sake of it, or being louder.
Strategic visibility is clarity. It answers three questions for the organization:
- What do you reliably deliver—at your level?
- What do you change—beyond your role?
- Why should someone take a risk on you—now?
Here is the simplest framework we use:
Strategic visibility = Signal + Sponsor + Storyline
Signal (what leaders can repeat in one sentence)
Your signal is the short, repeatable proof of value. Not your tasks—your outcomes.
If your work cannot be summarized without a long explanation, it will not travel upward.
Build your signal around:
- scope (what size of problem you handle),
- stakes (risk, money, reputation, complexity),
- consequence (what changed because you were there).
Practical test: can a senior leader describe your value in one sentence without you in the room?
Sponsor (who is willing to say your name in the room)
Mentors advise you. Sponsors advocate for you.
HBR is clear that sponsorship is decisive, and that organizations often confuse the two—especially for women and underrepresented talent.
A sponsor is not a friend. It is someone who has seen you deliver and believes your performance will protect their credibility if they back you.
That only happens when your impact is visible to them, not just to your team.
Storyline (the narrative that makes your next step feel obvious)
Promotion decisions are risk decisions. The storyline reduces perceived risk.
A strong storyline sounds like:
- “She consistently delivers in ambiguity.”
- “He turns conflict into alignment.”
- “They scale teams without burning people out.”
A weak storyline sounds like:
- “She works hard.”
- “He’s dependable.”
- “They’re great to have.”
Hard work is not a storyline. It is a baseline expectation.
The visibility audit: 10 minutes, no drama
If you want to know whether you’re becoming invisible, answer these quickly:
- If I left tomorrow, what would break immediately?
- What do senior stakeholders rely on me for—specifically?
- Who two levels above me can describe my impact accurately?
- What outcomes have I created that are measurable or repeatable?
- What am I doing that is useful but not promotable? (Be honest.)
- When was the last time someone senior advocated for me unprompted?
- If promotion discussions happened next month, what would be the “case” for me in one paragraph?
If #3, #6, and #7 feel thin, you don’t have a performance problem. You have a visibility strategic visibility problem.
What to do next: three moves that do not require personality change
Move 1: Convert work into “promotable proof”
Once per week, document:
- the decision you influenced,
- the risk you reduced,
- the outcome you shifted.
This becomes your promotion case and your sponsor briefing.
Move 2: Stop donating your time to low-promotability work
This does not mean “say no to everything.” It means: stop being the default.
The research on low-promotability tasks is clear: these assignments accumulate, and they quietly tax the people who say yes most often.
Practice a neutral reframe:
- “I can do it, but it will replace X (revenue/strategy/critical deliverable). What do you want me to deprioritize?”
This forces trade-offs into the open—where senior leaders live.
Move 3: Build a sponsor loop (not a networking habit)
A sponsor loop is a repeatable system:
- deliver high-stakes value,
- make it legible,
- create proximity to decision-makers,
- ask for the next stretch aligned with your storyline.
This is not self-promotion. It is decision hygiene.
The point
The paradox is not that high performers become invisible.
The paradox is that the better you are, the more likely the organization is to use you—without necessarily advancing you—unless you manage visibility strategic visibility intentionally.
If you want ARYS to help you understand where invisibility is forming (signal, sponsor, storyline), that is exactly what we do: a structured diagnostic before you invest another year pushing uphill.
Signed, Dr. Rodica Zerguine
