Don’t keep your head down, it’s your time to shine and the world to see what you’re made of.
There may be times when you feel you’re not being acknowledged in your workplace, and it may be easier for you to just go to the background of your office, comply with your schedule, and then leave. Even when you want to push yourself forward and challenge yourself for something better, you end up worrying about what other people may say or if you come up too arrogant by being in the spotlight.
The lack of work visibility leads to frustrated and anxious managers, scrambled priorities, less productivity and more long hours, workload imbalances among your creative team, missed due dates, and ultimately, chaos all over the place.
When teamwork fails and everyone is looking in different directions, things might get out of their course. Missing goals make people feel unmotivated and performance suffers with low performance comes dissatisfied team members and not taking advantage of their skills to a better resolution of the job at hand.
The rise of remote and hybrid work has further complicated visibility. While there are new, exciting possibilities for collaboration, innovation, and flexibility, a lack of communication may arise, and the possibility to fall through the crack is real.
So before you start begging for headcount or budget, take a closer look at your team’s workflow as a starting point and see if you can identify these key visibility gaps.
With all that has been said and understanding what lack of visibility can do, how can you increase your visibility at work, in the most professional way possible? We’ll be undergoing these throughout the article.
What would visibility be?
When we talk about workplace visibility, we need to first separate the requirements and impacts of visibility at a project management level and then at an individual contributor level.
As a leader, visibility is having the tools to quickly digest resource requirements, identify deadlines, assign duties to your staff and help projects push through by meeting up with deadlines. Being able to get a snapshot of active projects in real-time and connect tasks to the larger department or company goals is key to keeping those beautiful artworks of your team going and keeping them motivated.
As for team members, visibility empowers them to be more efficient with their tasks and communication. Having dashboards let them see both their direct tasks and the bigger picture, feeling more confident in pushing a project forward, Without clarity, it’s easy to feel unmotivated and lose confidence. They want to know that what they do makes sense and that their work matters.
To sum up, then, good visibility means seeing the broader picture as a whole, while also being able to zoom in on the minute details of individual tasks. When you start to look at the optimization of the workflow, you´ll want tools that help you:
- Keep everyone accountable for their work by assigning them to projects and tasks.
- Prioritize goals and identify how you’ll measure progress.
- Set up project milestones and timelines to help you spot roadblocks.
- Set up z central hub for all projects and keep processes clear and consistent.
- Monitor resources and workload so that no one feels overloaded. Figure out what a resource plan in project management means.
Why would you want to be more visible?
The answer to that is too easy.
To go ahead in your career, it pays to be visible, when people know who you are and what can you do, they’re more likely to consider you for promotions or interesting assignments. And those who keep their head down often miss out, despite their hard work.
You can’t always rely on others to increase your visibility for you. Instead, you need to figure out how to maximize your exposure so that you’ll be in the running for new opportunities that may arise. This is especially important if you work remotely and don’t often see others in your organization.
Increasing your visibility is one way to get noticed. It’s really important to do this “click” in order to get out of the shadows. You must credit your ideas and get credit from them. Take more responsibilities in your work whenever you can and track your accomplishments where everyone can see them.
How to improve your chances of being noticed in your workplace
Use these strategies to improve the visibility within your agency.
Ask for high visibility projects
Don’t wait for anyone to give you the project of your life, ask to work for them when you find out about them. They’ll help you build relationships with people in other parts of your agency, and get the right exposure for the ones that make the big decisions. You never know whose watching.
Strengthen the bond with your boss
If you have a good relationship with your boss, this can be invaluable to grow because he can be your most trustworthy ally. U see the time to discuss what’s going on, ask for suggestions on how you can add more value to the team, and find more opportunities to raise your profile.
Volunteer to represent your team
If your team sends a representative to cross-departmental meetings, there you have it, grab the opportunity, and ask the one in charge if you can participate and attend. You can also volunteer for project or committee meetings.
Start by giving presentations to colleagues or in small team meetings. As you develop your way and your confidence grows, your audience will increase too. With planning and practice, you’ll grow in confidence and your public speaking and you’ll see how your skills sharpen dramatically.
Speak up in meetings
Share your ideas in meetings, don’t be shy about it, and don’t worry about little things like how others look at you. No one really cares.
Meetings are a great opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and increase your visibility within your team or department. If you don’t speak up currently, work on developing your self-confidence, which is crucial in every aspect, especially in a work environment. This will help you to cope with the idea of being the center of attention. Learn to speak to your audience and how to be a more engaging speaker, so you can make an impact and be memorable for the right reasons, and then don´t sit through, push yourself for more and more.
To plan what you could say in a meeting, read the agenda beforehand and think about the questions you want to ask or the points you want to make. This preparation will give you the confidence to speak up.
Demonstrate your Knowledge
When you are seen as an expert in your agency, you’ll develop a reputation as someone who others can come to for help. This type of power can lead to really interesting work projects and opportunities coming your way, which can increase visibility.
First, choose an area in which you want to build your skill. For instance, you may have a talent for dealing with unhappy customers. Or, perhaps you’re great at managing your priorities. Choose an area that excites you and that you already have some sort of knowledge of.
You can raise your profile further by sharing what you already know. for example, you could write a regular blog for your organization or contribute to a newsletter. You could also offer to train people or speak about your area of expertise at different events.
Take part in learning experiences
Company-wide training events, such as seminars or workshops, provide more than what you can tell. It´s a great opportunity to become better known in your agency. When you attend them, make an effort to contribute to discussions, and partner with people you don´t already know in “break out” sessions so that you can build your network.
Grow Your Network
Take your time to nurture and build relationships and you’ll create a strong network of allies who can help you get assigned to interesting, significant, or eye-catching projects that might otherwise go to someone else. They may also recommend you to other departments, which can open up opportunities that might not otherwise have been available to you.
Although colleagues may be advocates for you, a personal support base should extend well beyond your immediate team. In order to grow your network, further, be smart, be strategic: write down your networking objectives and think about how the best way to reach the people you are interested in and build relationships with them. Build relationships outside your work niche too, and find ways to link up your connections with each other.
Also, try to build your connections outside of office hours. Socializing with colleagues after work can make everyone feel more relaxed and open to new friendships. If appropriate organize an informal after-hours meet-up and invite people from other departments as well.
Form a Mastermind Group
If your organization doesn’t offer many opportunities for you to connect with other people in other departments, create your own mastermind group based on a common interest. For instance, you could set up a group of people who are in the same stage in their career as you, or you could meet with people who want to learn a specific skill.
This will demonstrate your leadership ability to help and build even more new relationships.
Highlight colleague achievements
Finally bear in mind that you don’t just have to focus on yourself to raise visibility in your agency. Be humble, always. Highlight other people’s achievements and always share the credit with those who have helped you along the way.
Nurturing the creative process
Being creative is essential to career success no matter what you do for a living. Creativity can manifest and respond to human beings in so many ways and forms, it’s amazing. IT means looking at the world in your own way and trying to find your own way of solving things and being unafraid to conjure possibility unto the unknown. Creativity unlocks innovation and changes the most common and mundane thing into something interesting and new. Everyone can benefit to challenge and tackle a problem from that point of view.
Now more than ever, design is recognized as delivering value. But while design´s business side is all about results there is a lack of information about the behind-the-scenes, that is to say, the process, and the creativity to actually accomplish those outcomes.
How important is it for creatives to stay in touch with other creatives? Very. Talking about creativity, what gives other people inspiration, and practice is essential to stay fresh. BY sharing a creative process and a creative product people gain confidence and self-esteem, and building a community to give space for this practice is key, a community where empathy, curiosity, and similar systems think alike.
Creativity is praising oneself individual qualities, but when shared and used to connect with people, that’s where the real beauty in all of this emerges. One can truly find authenticity when connecting with other people, inspiration takes hold, and ideas flow.
But there’s the other side also, one that can be toxic for everyone if not channeled correctly.
Toxicity in Creativity: 5 ways to deal with it
1. Do our creative path has to make any sense?
That kind of logic leads to a dead-end, and carve that inside your skull. Many of the things we like and enjoy doesn’t make sense, so why give your creative path that burden? It only generates pressure in something that must be taken as a game, playing like when we were children. That’s the only way to go through a creative path.
If you give in to those ideas it certainly can drain you out. The sweet spot lies in allowing a process to continue just beyond where you start to feel uncomfortable. It’s in that place where you’ll finally feel loose and open to new ideas being born.
2. Do we have to pursue our creative path without a clear intention or plan?
The creative process can be part of a strategy but can be planned as a whole. As with everything in life, people with success are organized and achieve goals by spending time doing what they like and having a schedule and discipline. Your goals have to be stated so there is a solid foundation to design from, a rich starting point indeed is needed.
3. Don´t let your inner self think creativity is something unnecessary
It’s normal to have dealt with these thoughts in any instance of your life. Guilt or regret for spending too much leisure time. Get that out of your head quickly, fight your inner critic and let yourself dive into the pond of creativity. Creativity is jumping to what is unknown to us. Time spent on creative thought can inspire powerful action and innovation, and lets us feel fresh. It can ignite unique connections between seemingly unconnected ideas and lay the groundwork for the new and original.
4. Be always on the move
Looking in the same places or at similar projects for insight and inspiration yields a homogenized style that will bore the viewer and won’t allow the product or brand to stand out against the competition. Seek adversity, choose to feel uncomfortable. Dig deep and wide outside the box where you’re working for new exciting experiences that feed your inner self.
5. Be Humble
If your ego drowns out new insights or ideas, the creative process will indeed suffer. It’s always good to receive feedback and share what one has developed. Stay in touch with other creative people who know that giving feedback has to always be in a constructive way, there is something very delicate when showing off our work to someone, especially when it comes to a creative product. Practice delicacy when giving out your opinion to someone in the middle of their creative process.
Silence your ego and be open to alternative viewpoints and nuggets of wisdom that might help you get to the next stage.
Conclusion
Getting noticed in your work environment is believing in yourself and your true potential and ambition. Is noticing that you can do better if you step out of the shadows if you decide to not be one of the bunch. The same can be applied to creativity, a path that can be built if you take yourself and your ideas seriously. Creativity can be applied to everything we do, not only in the art department. It grants us a weapon when dealing with problems and is indeed a way to nurture ourselves and enhance self-esteem, that’s why it is important to nurture it with love.
