how to raise your team’s visibility

by Alison Green on March 19, 2015

If you know that your team does great work but aren’t always sure that the rest of your company knows that, read on.

Even teams getting great results can sometimes feel like their work is invisible to the rest of the organization – especially if they have the sort of projects that are crucial to others’ success but aren’t high-profile in and of themselves. As a manager, you can play an important role in ensuring that your team’s work gets noticed – which will pay off for you and your staff in terms of reputation, ability to get resources, and general morale.

Here’s what you can do to raise the visibility of you, your staff, and your work.

1. First and foremost, talk to your own boss about what your team is doing. If you only go to your boss with problems, make a point of starting to tell her about victories too – goals that on track or exceeded, tricky customers that you made happy, money the team saved the company, and crises you averted. If you’re worried that that will feel like bragging, it’s not – part of your boss’s job is being in touch with what’s going on beneath her, and that very much includes successes (which will reflect well on her too, by the way).

2. Give team members public credit for their work. Make sure that when you’re talking about successes or progress toward your goals, you specifically call out people by name for the contributions they’ve made – whether it’s that Karen came up with an innovative solution to a programming bug that had everyone stumped or that Marcos worked weekends to ensure you made your launch date.

3. Include your staff members in meetings with higher-ups when you can. Not only will this help them build relationships beyond your team, but it will also assist in their professional development, since they’ll be exposed to a wider range of issues and be able to observe discussions and decision-making processes that they otherwise might be out of the loop on.

4. Look out for opportunities to recommend people on your team for leadership roles and promotions, and advocate for them when you truly believe they’d be a good match. Yes, no manager wants to lose a good employee, but if you become known as a manager who helps her people move upward, great employees will clamor to work with you.

5. Don’t forget about visibility outside your organization either. Encourage your team members to attend industry conferences and to network and mentor others, and cover their membership fees for professional organizations in your field, which will help raise their profiles externally.

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{ 15 comments }

{ 15 comments… read them below }

  1. Grammarness*

    “which will pay off for both them and their stafsf in terms of reputation, ability to get resources, and general morale.”

    Staffs :P

  2. maggie*

    #3 is so incredibly important for folks do truly understand how the operation works, and they can then mitigate those issues when created or fixing processes ‘in the trenches’. I wish more leaders would do this.

  4. I am now a llama*

    Speaking of visibility, the mobile ads have been acting up again (see what I did there?). I’m using an iPhone and get redirected to the app store at almost every page.

      1. TNTT*

        Must be such a relief for you, Alison, to finally find it wasn’t being caused by you/your ad network!

  5. Coffee, Please*

    #5 is so important and helpful. I love my past employers who found ways to send me to industry training events, conferences, and networking opportunities.
    I try to bring at least one team member to every event I attend so they can have the same experience.

  6. ali*

    Wow, I’m on a really small team (2 people and our manager, who also manages 4 others people) and we have zero visibility whatsoever in both our product that we work on and the company as a whole. I’m happy to say that my manager does all of these things except #5 (and that’s for lack of funds to send us, not because he doesn’t try).

  7. Christina*

    So basically the exact opposite of everything my manager does, and then she gets defensive/territorial when people don’t know what we do. Love it.

  8. AndersonDarling*

    I was just meeting with my boss and he mentioned what a great job our team has been doing. And I was all, “Hey, I just read a great article about raising your team’s visibility. Let me send it to you!”

  9. AnonManager*

    Being anon just in case a coworker reads this and my normal handle reveals just who’s been helping people leave the company sometimes!

    Re: #4, what about when you can see that you have a great employee who deserves to move up, but there’s something blocking the way in your organization (and you can’t do anything to remove that block, or you try and you fail)?

    I haven’t always done this, but I am now comfortable in such cases having a conversation with the employee about whether it’s time to look elsewhere, and I’ve even served as a reference more than once. I care more about my obligation to the employee, as someone I care about, to look out for her best interests, than I care about my employer wanting me to retain good people as long as possible without paying them what they could get elsewhere.

    1. AndersonDarling*

      I was in a situation where I was in line for a promotion but some weirdness happened and it went to someone else. The VP had a casual sit down with me and said she recognized my accomplishments. She wanted me to have the promotion but politics got in the way. It went a long way to know I was appreciated.

  10. Oreos*

    What do you do in a situation where your manager has limited ability to increase your team’s visibility? My manager does not have a great relationship with her manager. Their strained relationship has resulted in the team as a whole losing visibility. While my manager tries to reward me for a job well done, there is only so much she can do when upper management leaves us out of important meetings, etc. What power do I have here as someone further down the hierarchy chain?

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