Visibility Starts With a Problem Worth Solving

When I was a frontline leader, I knew I wanted to grow. I wasn’t as sure that I was ready to be an Operations Manager. Those two things can exist at the same time. I wanted the opportunity, but I needed experience that would help me understand what I could handle beyond my own team.

I also knew that most of the people who saw my work were the people closest to it. If I wanted broader responsibility, I needed to contribute somewhere that gave others a chance to see how I approached a different kind of problem.

Employee engagement was one of the areas I started paying attention to. There were concerns about morale and inconsistency in how feedback was gathered and addressed. It affected more than one team, and leadership was paying attention to it. I could see work that needed to be done and a way to get involved.

I built a committee, organized conversations, and worked on turning employee feedback into operational adjustments. Over time, leadership gave me a yearly budget to support the work. For almost two years, I was working across functions and taking responsibility for something that extended beyond my regular team.

I wanted to help with the problem. I also wanted to grow. I don’t think I need to leave either part out to make the experience sound better. Taking on that work gave me an opportunity to contribute and an opportunity to be evaluated more broadly. Both were useful.

What mattered was whether there was substance behind the visibility. People had concerns. Organizing a committee didn’t resolve them by itself. There had to be a connection between what we heard and what happened afterward. Otherwise, I could be busy, and people could know I was busy, without the work giving them much reason to trust me with more responsibility.

The budget was significant to me because it meant leadership was willing to put resources behind what I was doing. It also gave me something else to be accountable for. I was getting experience coordinating work, responding to feedback, and using resources outside the scope I’d started with.

That’s part of what I mean when I talk about making your work visible. Someone who only knew my team’s results had a limited view of what I could do. Through the engagement work, other people could observe how I worked across the organization. I had more experience to draw from when discussing a larger role, and they had more than my description of myself to consider.

I still had to explain the work. That can feel uncomfortable when you associate talking about your contribution with bragging. But if someone doesn’t understand the purpose of what you’re doing, a list of activities won’t tell them much. They need to understand what you were trying to address, what changed, and what still needs attention.

I don’t take from this that every person who wants to advance needs to start a committee or volunteer for every assignment. That was a problem I could contribute to in the organization I was in. The experience mattered because it gave me actual responsibility and a chance to learn from it.

I began that work knowing I wanted to grow but still questioning how ready I was. Being involved gave me more evidence to work with. It helped other people understand my capability, and it helped me understand it too.