How to Get Comfortable with Visibility

For most of your career, you may have been taught that your work should speak for itself.

Work hard. Do excellent work. Do not brag.

That is perfectly good advice when you are starting out. But at some point, it stops serving you.

As you become more senior, fewer of the people who matter have direct experience with your work. Potential customers, partners, investors, employees, board members and other people who could open doors for you may know very little about you.

If you stay invisible, they are unlikely to assume you are quietly brilliant. They simply do not know what you have to offer.

Sometimes humility is really discomfort

We have worked with a lot of very accomplished people who were initially uncomfortable having a public presence.

They did not want to brag. They did not want everything to be about them. They did not want to look like one of those people constantly promoting themselves.

But there was something else going on too: visibility was outside their comfort zone.

Putting your ideas out publicly makes you vulnerable. People can disagree with you. Talking about your accomplishments can feel awkward. And when you become more visible, more people are paying attention.

But these are people who have stepped outside their comfort zones over and over again throughout their careers. They have taken on bigger jobs, made difficult decisions, led through uncertainty, and learned things they did not know how to do before.

Visibility is simply one more thing they needed to get comfortable doing so they could accomplish their goals.

We have found that the best approach is to ease into it. Start with topics that feel natural. Talk about your industry, your customers, your team and the work you are excited about. As you get more comfortable, you can talk about more personal things – if you want to. It isn’t required.

The important thing is to not let discomfort make the decision for you. 

If greater visibility would help your company, your team, your customers or your career, staying quiet because it feels safer means letting your insecurities hold you back.

Stop making visibility all about you

One of the easiest ways to get past the discomfort is to stop asking, “Do I really need to talk about myself?” 

Ask a different question: Do I have something to share that would bring value to other people?

• Do I know something that would help a customer make a better decision?
• Have I learned something from building my company that another founder could use?
• Am I seeing changes in the market that my network should understand?
• Has my team created something genuinely useful?
• Do I have an experience, perspective or insight that could save someone else time, money or frustration?

If the answer is yes, why would you keep it to yourself?

You are not doing anyone a favor by staying invisible. In fact, I would argue that if you have information that can genuinely help people, you owe it to them to share it.

Holding back keeps more than you small

There is a personal cost to staying invisible. You miss opportunities. People who would value your expertise do not know you have it. Someone else gets the invitation, referral, partnership, board seat or conversation because they are known and you are not.

But the cost is not just yours:

• Your customers miss ideas that could help them.
• Your employees lose some of the visibility that comes from working for a recognized leader.
• Your company has to work harder to establish credibility.
• People who could benefit from what you have learned never get access to it.

I do not think of visibility as self-promotion. It is communication. And when you are a senior leader, communication is part of the job.

You do not have to become an influencer

Being visible does not mean posting every day, telling personal stories you do not want to tell, or turning your life into content.

Instead of making every post about yourself:

• Talk about your customers.
• Highlight people on your team.
• Share something happening in your industry that you find genuinely interesting.
• Explain why your company is investing in a particular area.
• Talk about a problem you think deserves more attention.
• Celebrate something your team accomplished and give them the credit.
• Share what you are learning.

The advice changed because your role changed

“Let your work speak for itself” is not bad advice. It is just incomplete advice for someone whose work now depends on influencing people beyond the small circle who see that work firsthand.

At a certain level, being excellent is not enough. People need to know what you see. They need to understand what you stand for. They need to hear your ideas.

If you are holding back because visibility feels uncomfortable, ask yourself what is really driving the decision.

Then ask the more important question: Do I have something useful to share?

If you do, share it. Keeping it to yourself does not make you more humble or a better person.

It just keeps you smaller than you need to be and keeps other people from benefiting from everything you have learned.