Your Company May Have No Idea What You’re Capable Of

Your company may have no idea what you are actually capable of.

Look at what consumes your week. The report has to be submitted. Somebody has to update the spreadsheet. The follow-up email needs to go out, and apparently you are the person responsible for making sure the project board stays current. That work is visible. It is easy to count and easy to point toward during a performance review.

The skills that change your career are harder to measure, because they only show up when the answer is not sitting in the SOP. Can you make a sound judgment when the situation is unclear? That kind of work only becomes visible when somebody gives you the breathing room to do it.

As you move up the corporate hierarchy, the work changes. Closer to the cash register, most of the job is production. Closer to the C-suite, more of the job is judgment, strategy, creativity, and empathy. Those abilities often develop much lower in the organization than the org chart suggests. The problem is finding enough room to let anybody see them.

Your paycheck depends on the assigned work getting done. Your career trajectory depends on people discovering what happens before, between, and after those trackable things.

This is where handing the $9-an-hour work to AI stops being about efficiency and starts being about visibility. Every hour you claw back from production is an hour where the judgment nobody sees can finally show up somewhere someone notices.

What do people keep asking you to help with even though it is nowhere in your job description?