Eleven-oh-five, Thursdays.
That was when the one-on-one was scheduled. A young engineer I work with told me about it this week. For a few months at his last job, he'd walk into the meeting room he'd booked, sit down, and wait. Sometimes his boss would be at his desk. Sometimes he'd be across the floor talking to someone else. Once, my client watched him through the glass for ten minutes before realizing the meeting wasn't going to happen.
He rescheduled. His boss didn't show for those, either. A few months later, he was laid off.
He said it plainly, the way people say things they've already turned over many times: "I can't keep the ball rolling if I'm looking over my shoulder."
I wrote it down. Then I said, "That could be a book title."
I'll come back to that.
What interested me was what he noticed next. Another engineer on the same team kept his one-on-ones. Every other week, like clockwork. That engineer is still there.
As far as my client could tell, the difference wasn't the quality of their work. The other engineer built dashboards: graphs, colors, things a boss could glance at and understand. My client built what sat underneath them. Tables, pipelines, tests that took an hour to rerun because someone wanted a table renamed. Just as important. Much harder to see.
"Shiny bells and whistles," he called the dashboards, "versus the non-sexy work."
In his new job, he's trying something different. He sends his boss the smallest update as soon as he has something to share. "I want to be the one updating my boss," he told me. "Not my boss asking me."
Later that week, another client described a different approach to the same problem.
She manages a produce department, a role she took as a favor. After a regional manager walked her department and handed her a list of changes, she spent the weekend working through it. Sunday night, she sent one long email with photographs. Displays rearranged. A minute-by-minute plan for the overnight crew. A list of where the waste was coming from.
Within days, her supervisor texted to say the big boss had pulled him aside to compliment her.
She knows this move. Little updates annoy people, she told me. One big list of everything you've done "shuts them all up. For an amount of time."
His steady pings. Her one big email. Different tactics, same discovery: the work doesn't speak for itself. Someone has to make sure the right people see it.
Here's where it got more complicated.
As she described the walk-through, she let me hear what she'd been thinking while the regional manager encouraged her. He was kind. He kept translating his advice into the language of her old department so it would make sense to her.
And she stood there thinking: You're so sweet. This is humiliating, and you don't understand that.
Being seen isn't always the good part. Sometimes it's being seen struggling. Sometimes it's having someone explain something to you in the kindest possible way when what you most want is for them not to see you needing the explanation.
And telling the people above her that she doesn't want this role feels like the kind of visibility that follows you. "That stuff does stick," she said. "For whatever reason."
A third client, who's looking for work, put it more simply. She's been putting off applications. When I asked what the putting-off might be protecting her from, she said rejection. When I asked what avoiding rejection was costing her, she paused for a long time.
"Playing small."
Three people. One trying to make his work visible before someone decides it doesn't count. One making her work visible while hiding what she actually wants. One avoiding the possibility of being seen and rejected altogether.
I'd been treating these as three different problems. I'm beginning to wonder if they're different ways of managing the same risk.
Back to the book title.
During sessions, I keep a shared board on screen. Goals, action items, a habit tracker. When the engineer told me he'd made a new connection at work that week, I clicked the habit as done and the screen burst into confetti.
"Cute little fun thing," I called it.
When he said the line about looking over his shoulder, I typed it into the insights section while he watched.
I've always told myself that's for the client. A record. A small celebration.
But sitting with these three sessions, I started wondering whether I needed him to see it, too. Not just to know I'd heard him, but to see the evidence that I'd heard him.
The confetti wasn't only for him.
I do the same thing with advice. I told the engineer that when you ask people for their opinion, they start rooting for you. They want to see their advice prove out. I've used that strategy myself.
I also caught myself passing along something he'd taught me about hardware and software to another client, then saying, "I'm not smart, I don't know things."
I was borrowing his knowledge while making a point of disclaiming my own.
Making the invisible visible. Asking for advice to build allies. Showing up with pictures.
I'm not watching this from outside. I do it, too.
And I don't think that makes it false.
Years ago, a man named Rob worked for me. He got stuck with the work everyone hated, the kind that was always behind and impossible to get anyone to contribute to. He made it reliable, communicated before anyone had to ask, and ensured no one was ever caught off guard. People started showing up to his meetings. He rose.
His reliability was real. So was his deliberate effort to make sure people saw it.
Both things.
What I can't settle is where the line is. When does making the work visible become the work? When does the confetti start standing in for the thing it was meant to celebrate?
The produce manager's email bought her time. I'm not sure it bought her anything she actually wants.
The engineer may get better at making his work visible. The job-seeker may learn to risk rejection. I may get better at making sure my clients know I've heard them.
All useful, perhaps. But getting better at a strategy doesn't necessarily answer the question of what we're trying to make possible in the first place.
What I do know is smaller.
The engineer sitting alone at 11:05 needed someone who would show up. The woman listening to kind advice needed someone who could recognize what that kindness cost her. The job-seeker needed to find a way to risk being seen without treating rejection as a verdict on who she was.
Every one of them is managing how they're seen.
So am I.
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