Every year, at performance review time, I seem to get the same question from my clients.

“How can I be more ‘visible’ at work?"

Let’s take the case of Karen. Karen was a high performer in her organisation. Karen was capable, committed and ready for the next step in her career. The only trouble was - Karen was not visible enough. During a discussion with her boss, he had told her that he had to ‘go into bat for her’ in the talent review forums because most of his peers didn't know who she was, or what she was capable of. He found it hard to fight for her bonus, and recommend her for a promotion, because no one else really knew of her talent and potential. So his developmental feedback to her was to work on her personal branding, and become more visible, in order to fast track her career opportunities.

This has been a journey for me in my professional career, and a lesson brought home to me in my dance class last night. It appears I have come a long way since I was 12. :)

It was an adult jazz class. It started off well. Warm up, tick. Isolations and body rolls, tick. Stretching and limbering, tick. Then, on to the performance part of the class – the routine. We learn it section by section. Section one goes well. The moves are easy, funky, and I’m loving it. Section two, the pace picks up but I keep up. I’m connected to the music and my body. I am at one with the routine. And then, slowly but surely it begins to go downhill from there. Section three and four are not beyond my technical ability but the pace increases and I fall behind. I can’t remember the steps, I start to miss bits, then I become confused. I’m officially lost. 

Do you work with that person? You know the one. The one who always picks holes in your work, points out errors or rejects your ideas offhand. Well you’re not alone.

If hours of youtube bloopers and blunders videos are to be believed, it appears that humans love to take great delight in others’ misfortune. We love a good laugh at someone else’s expense; usually secretly glad it’s not us. Most people try to avoid mistakes and looking silly, particularly in a professional setting, as they fear it will detract from their reputation and, on a deeper level, cause shame and embarrassment.

More and more people are swamped at work. With companies restructuring, merging, and downsizing, many professionals are ending up with more than one job, more than one boss and more pressure to get everything done, regardless of shrinking capacities and competing priorities. 

Our reputation is important. People use it as a guide to short cut their thinking about who we are, what we are capable of and how they will interact with us. These reputations are not always accurate, but they are always there, for better or worse.