Why your boss isn’t noticing your work
Have you ever felt like your boss or your peers aren’t noticing your work? Have you received feedback that you felt was unfair or not grounded in reality? Worked really hard on a project, but then didn’t get recognised for it? Or, have you been told that you’re not making progress on goals which you’ve actually been working really hard on?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, it might be that you struggle with other people’s perception or impression of your work. This is a topic that’s challenging for a lot of people, but there are concrete steps that you can take to address it.
This article is part one of a two-part series. In part one, we review how other people’s impression of our work is created, which factors play a role, and why this can be such a difficult topic. Part two covers concrete steps that you can take to change how others view your work.
If you prefer to listen: We discuss this topic in depth on the Dev Interrupted Podcast: “Getting the Respect Your Work Deserves”. In this episode, the hosts discuss the neuroscience of perception in detail and run a live coaching session for a leader who’s struggling with getting the respect that his work deserves.
Why you should consider actively addressing how others think about your work
The way that people think about your work isn’t about the work you do, but about how they perceive it. This is an important distinction. A lot of people believe and hope that “good work will be seen and rewarded”, and as much as I wish this were always the case, it’s not.
Perception is baked into every aspect of our work:
Feedback is subjective perception, and so are performance evaluations.
In most companies, a positive perception of your work is the prerequisite for receiving bigger work opportunities, promotions, raises, or role changes.
The reputation you build and your ability to be impactful will likely depend on the perception of your work.
The more senior you are, the more all the above is true, and the more you will have to actively take ownership for creating and managing the perception of your work.
Perception is the delta between how we view ourselves and how others view us. It’s always subjective and there’s no single, objective truth. Perception is not reality. It’s not a reflection of you, or of your worth, but a signal that can contain useful information.
Why this is a difficult topic
Building perception is about marketing your own work, and many people struggle with this. You may find thinking about perception difficult for some of the following reasons:
It feels weird to “brag” about your work. Many of us are socialised to be humble and with the mindset that good work will always get the recognition it deserved.
It feels confusing to realise that other people don’t see the good work that you’re doing, and may be hard to understand why
You struggle with imposter syndrome
It feels personal and unfair,triggering our core need for equality.
The perception issue may not affect you directly, but e.g. your team(s) or organisation.
It’s hard to accept that we can’t control what others think of us.
Working on how others think about your work can be impactful, but has its limitations: You may be in a toxic environment, or have a bad boss and coworkers that seem impossible to please. Perception challenges rarely exist in isolation, so I always recommend checking in with yourself on whether this is still something you want to work on, or if a change of environment may be better for you.
Also, it’s worth noting that due to their inherently biased nature, perception issues affect members of underrepresented groups more frequently, and/or more severely.
What’s perception, and how is it created?
In order to change perception, it’s helpful to understand how it works.
As humans, we need to make sense of the world, so we identify, organise, and interpret information: What we see, hear, feel, or smell, stimulates our sensory system. The way we process this information is impacted by several factors like our attention, memory, expectation, learning, attitude, values. In addition, we all have biases: Cognitive shortcuts that help our brains process a lot of information, faster.
There are three crucial factors in perception:
Your actual work: Let’s get this out of the way and assume that you’re doing your best to do a decent job.
The environment that you’re in: The same behaviours will be looked at very differently in different environments. An engineer who ‘move[s] fast and break[s] things’ would have been praised in Meta’s early stages, and fired at many other companies for ‘going rogue'.
Other people: People’s own expectations, attention, memory, values, and biases play a HUGE role in how they perceive us. The famous “door study” showed how oblivious most of us are to changes, even when they’re (seemingly) obvious. Another study showed that people who held hot drinks rated others’ personalities as warmer than people with cold drinks.
Continue to part two of this article to learn about practical steps that you can take to change how your colleagues or your boss think about your work. If you’d like to work on this topic with a leadership expert, contact me for one-on-one coaching.
