“Your competence is mostly not as visible as you think”

I’m obviously delivering great results. So, why am I not getting the recognition I deserve?”

The frustration expressed in this question, though rarely formulated this directly, is something I have heard many times from hard-working, ambitious business professionals. And it frequently stands in the way of effective career management.

So, let’s look at how to replace the feeling of frustration — which, by the way, is very easy for others to detect and just as easy to dislike — with a more productive strategy for professional growth.

Your greatness may be unrecognized for a variety of reasons. The most tempting reasons revolve around the incompetence of your boss (an idiot for not recognizing your brilliance). And the most uncomfortable reasons would mean that you should critically reassess your own performance (maybe you’re not as brilliant as you think you are).

But instead of compiling a list of possible reasons, I would like to look at the question again and focus on a word that may indicate a faulty understanding of your interaction with the world around you. (Let’s assume two things here: first, that your boss, like most people, is basically OK and, second, that your results are indeed great.)

The word I am talking about is “obviously”. Even if your results are great, thinking they are obviously great is risky. It can make you complacent and cause you to sit back when you should be getting up and pushing forward. The fact is that your competence is mostly not as visible as you think. You may hope your results speak for themselves, but they rarely do and generally need a little help.

Accepting this can be difficult. Your modesty and good manners may get in the way. So might noble ideas of meritocracy or complex fears of being seen as boastful or pompous. But the sooner you understand that doing your job is only half the job — and that part of creating results is making sure the results get recognized — the sooner you can get to work on one of the most overlooked skills in business life. And that skill is this: how to talk about your results in ways that don’t make you sound like an insufferable blowhard.