Many of us, ahem, professionals of a certain age, were given the same advice early in our careers:
Let your work speak for itself.
Focus on the work.
Good work gets noticed.
No one sat me down and delivered those exact words, but it was definitely in the air. And at the time, the advice made sense. Managers could literally see people working. Same office. Same floor. Same air. Visibility was built in.
Given how much work has changed, I assumed that advice vanished sometime around the last sightings of big hair and shoulder pads.
Apparently not.
During a recent Forté International Women’s Day session, leadership expert Melody Wilding asked the audience if they had heard phrases like these at work. The chat exploded. Within seconds, more than 270 people, many early-career, weighed in with their own version of: ‘Unfortunately, yes.’
So apparently that advice is still alive and well.
But the workplace it was designed for is gone. Organizations grew. Teams scattered. Information multiplied. And somehow, time compressed. Today, in a world of limited attention, work rarely speaks for itself.
Most of the time, it barely even whispers.
The old advice assumes that performance naturally turns into recognition. But in large organizations, almost no one sees the full picture of anyone’s work. Managers observe pieces of it. Colleagues notice moments in passing. Senior leaders encounter only summaries — a presentation, an update, an outcome that reaches their level.
From those glimpses, people form judgments about capability, readiness, and potential.
This is the part career advice hasn’t kept up with: careers don’t move on the work itself. They move on how the work is interpreted.
That’s the gap many people are feeling now. We are working harder than ever and producing better work, yet progress often feels strangely slow or unpredictable. It can feel like the rules of the game changed without anyone explaining the new ones.
The issue isn’t effort or performance. It’s that when you produce work and people only see parts of it, they interpret the parts that are visible. And those interpretations shape opportunity, influence, and advancement.
So if work no longer speaks for itself, the goal isn’t simply to talk about it more. It’s to help others interpret what it shows about you.
if work no longer speaks for itself, the goal isn’t simply to talk about it more. It’s to help others interpret what it shows about you."
Try This
Make the thinking behind the work easier for others to see.
One way to start is by briefly explaining the reasoning behind a decision when you share an update or outcome.
Instead of simply saying: “Here’s the final version of the presentation.”
You might add a short line of context: “We structured the presentation this way because the audience will likely care most about X and may push back on Y.”
That small addition does something important. It shows how you think.
Over time, those moments accumulate. Colleagues don’t just notice your good work. They begin to recognize patterns in how you approach problems, weigh trade-offs, and make decisions.
Making that thinking visible helps them interpret those signals more accurately.
And it gives your work a much better chance of being understood the way you intended.
This is the third piece in the Forté Signals series exploring how careers actually move inside modern organizations.
