You know your team does great work. But does the rest of your company know it?
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 are 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 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.
