A few years ago, I was coaching a woman who’d been a senior specialist at her company for more than a decade. Deep expertise. Quiet competence. The person the whole department called when something broke.
In our second session, I told her, “You’re the best-kept secret in your organization.”
She smiled. She thought it was a compliment.
It wasn’t. It was a diagnosis.
Because the people who decided her next promotion, the ones who signed off on budgets and assigned strategic projects, couldn’t tell you in one sentence what she did, why it mattered, or what she wanted next. (I asked some of them. They couldn’t.)
She had visibility where it didn’t move her career. She had no visibility of where it did.
The gap between who you are and who they see
In Nordic workplaces, a specific fiction runs deep. The belief that good work speaks for itself. That if you deliver results, the right people will eventually notice. That promoting yourself is a little unseemly. A little too American. (And that Jantelagen will find you if you try.)
So you keep your head down. You deliver. You assume someone is keeping score.
Nobody is keeping score.
What there is instead is a mental map. Every senior person you work with is carrying a short, sticky description of you in their head. Two or three words. That is the entire budget you have in their attention.
Reliable. Detail-oriented. Bit of a perfectionist.
Smart. Keeps to herself. Probably not management material.
Solid operator. Not sure where she wants to go.
These sentences live in your manager’s head, your skip-level’s head, the head of the stakeholder two departments over, who will one day decide whether you are on the shortlist. You did not write those sentences. But you will be promoted, or not promoted, on the basis of them.
(And if you have not noticed it yet, your sentence is probably not what you would write about yourself.)
Why internationals get this wrong
I see two mistakes in my work with professionals who have moved to the Nordics from other cultures.
The first is assuming that the quality of the work is the message. It is not. The work is the substrate. The message is the story someone tells about the work when you are not in the room. (And if you haven’t told them a story, they will make one up. It will be generic, and it will not be flattering.)
The second is mistaking visibility for self-promotion, then deciding that self-promotion is distasteful. Visibility is not a pitch. It is not a LinkedIn post with a selfie and three hashtags. Visibility is the simple, repeated act of letting the right people know what you are working on, what you are seeing, and where you are trying to go. Said with normal human warmth. Without a megaphone.
Most of the internationals I coach, the talented ones especially, are carrying a belief that goes something like this: “If I do excellent work and I am a good colleague, someone senior will eventually pull me up.”
That belief is a career tax. You are paying it quietly, every quarter.
What visibility actually looks like
Visibility is not extraversion. Some of the most visible people I know are introverts. (The loudest person in the meeting is not the most visible. Often, they are the one everyone has learned to tune out.)
Visibility is a few specific things, done regularly.
- You have a sentence. Two or three words you want people to associate with you. Not a job title. A direction. The person who connects engineering to finance. The one who unsticks stuck projects. The leader who is quietly building our AI readiness. You know yours. The people around you should too.
- You show the thinking, not just the output. When you send a status update, include one line explaining why you made the call. When you finish a project, you share one thing you learned, not just what was delivered. Thinking is the asset. The deliverable is just the receipt.
- You are in the rooms before the rooms. The meeting is not where decisions are made. The one-on-one, the coffee, the short check-in the day before, that is where decisions are made. Visible people understand this. They do not wait for the invite.
- You ask for feedback you can act on. Not “how am I doing?” That gets you a polite nod. Specifically: “If you were going to argue against promoting me in the next round, what would you point to?” (The answer is almost always something small and specific. And fixable. Once you know it.)
None of this is self-promotion. All of it is professional clarity.
A small experiment
This week, ask three people you work with to describe what you do, in one sentence, to someone outside the company.
Then listen to what they say.
If the three sentences sound roughly the same, and they sound roughly like the career you are actually trying to build, you are visible. Keep going.
If they sound different from each other, or different from how you see yourself, you have a visibility gap. (And you now know where to start. Which is not a small thing. Most people never find out.)
You do not have to become louder. You do not have to become someone you are not. (You could not sustain it, and they would notice.) You need to become more deliberate about the signal you are already sending, and a little braver about sending it to the right people.
Because the alternative is exactly what many internationals are living. Excellent work, but no traction. Promotion decisions that felt like the weather, arriving and departing without explanation.
You are allowed to be the person who is known for what you are actually good at. It is not a pitch. It is a professional service you provide to the people who have to place bets on you.
I am working on a book about this. The gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you. And what to do about it, without turning into someone you would not want to be.
But before the book, there is something sooner.
On June 10th, I am running a live working session called Trapped in the Middle – What nobody tells you about managing from the middle. Two hours. Forty people. Before you show up, you complete a short self-assessment that maps where your pressure points sit across six structural gaps. During the session, you see the aggregate data from the room. You discover that the pattern is not personal. And you leave with one specific thing you can do about it this week.
The visibility gap, the one that kept my client a best-kept secret for a decade, is one of those structural gaps. If you ran the three-sentence experiment above and did not like what you heard, that discomfort is worth doing something with.
June 10, 17:00 CEST. Live on Zoom.
Details and registration: florinlungu.com/trapped
(And if it is not for you, that is fine too.)
More to come,
Florin
P.S. Next in the series: The Org Chart Is a Fiction. On how decisions actually get made in matrix organizations, and why the meeting before the meeting is the one that counts.
