Someone is filling in your blank right now

I want to start this week with something that I think will reframe how you think about the rest of your week.

One in three employees says their contributions go unrecognized at work. Not people who are underperforming. People who are contributing and still feeling invisible.

According to SHRM's 2025 State of the Workplace report, 34% of US workers say their contributions go unrecognized. For 15% of them, the reason was unfair performance evaluations.

And then there is the AI layer that makes this urgent right now.

Nearly 3 in 10 companies have already replaced jobs with AI. Business leaders say that employees who lack visibility into senior decision-making face the highest risk when cuts happen.

Amazon. Salesforce. Microsoft. These were not random draws. When leadership has to make a call about who stays and who goes, they fall back on the same thing they always have: who do they know, what do they stand for, and what story comes to mind when the decision gets made.

AI did not create the narrative problem. It just made the cost of ignoring it catastrophic.

I was at Google. Numbers were good. Customers were happy. Heads down, executing, delivering.

But my leadership kept cycling. New GMs every 90 days. And without realizing it, I had stopped doing the one thing that mattered as much as the work itself.

I stopped telling my story.

I assumed the results would speak for themselves. They did not. Because when you go quiet, someone else fills in the blank. And the version of you that gets told in rooms you are not in is only as good as what you have given people to work with.

By the time I understood what had happened, I was already against a wall.

That experience is why I now call this the narrative problem. It is sitting underneath almost every stuck, high-performing leader I work with.

After working with hundreds of leaders in transition, I have found this almost always takes one of three forms.

You are so focused on the work that you have stopped telling people what the work means. Visible inside your team, invisible to the people a level above who make decisions about your future.

You are waiting. For a new manager, a new reorg, a moment when advocating for yourself feels less awkward. Meanwhile, the narrative window is open, and no one is speaking into it.

You wake up one day being perceived in a way that does not match who you are. And you do not know how to correct it without looking defensive.

Before I give you the tool, I want to leave you with the question I ask every new client before we do anything else.

Are you fighting to stay in the right room?

Because if the answer is no, if you are performing harder and harder to hold onto something that was never fully aligned, the narrative problem is not the real problem.

The room is the problem.

That is a different conversation. And it is exactly the conversation I have with my clients inside the Activated Leader Transition Program, where we do this work in a structured, six-month container that moves you from invisible to undeniable.

But you can start right now, with this.

One new conversation per week, outside your immediate team. Not a formal meeting. A coffee chat, a Slack message, a five-minute hallway conversation.

Track who you talked to, what they now know about your work, and what happens next.

Four weeks of this and you will feel, and be, measurably more visible.

The tracker is the start. But the narrative problem, especially if you are already living in The Story Someone Else Told, needs more than a spreadsheet.

That is what I do. I work with high performers in corporate who are doing everything right and still feeling stuck, overlooked, or misaligned. We find the core issue, build the narrative, and create the visibility strategy that gets you on the right list before the next reorg, not after.

Reply to this email.

I read every message personally.

Or start smaller: comment NARRATIVE on this week's Thursday LinkedIn post and I'll send you a personal voice note with the question that usually cracks this open in the first five minutes.