The invisible work

In general, I’m curious about the concept of readability of work. Take a look around your workplace. You can find documents, messages, presentations and design files. Evidence of the work of people. While it may seem like a lot, there is a whole other type of work that is very difficult to see. The invisible work.

When a large project starts, one or two people usually take the lead. They set up the Slack channels. They write the document that shapes the thing. They plan the daily synchronizations so that the work gets a boost, something that keeps people moving together instead of drifting. If a new person joins late, they will be notified. In theory, anyone could do this. It’s just logistics. But I’ve noticed that the people who do it are usually the same people who go on to do a lot more.

Because as usual the project becomes more complicated over time. Scope creeps because a senior stakeholder had a great idea during a meeting. Stakeholders are multiplying because people don’t want to be left out of something that could matter. The original idea dilutes a bit as it passes through more hands. Timelines shift, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. I’ve seen this happen so many times that it feels like gravity. Projects simply drift towards chaos unless someone actively holds them together.

And that’s what those same one or two people end up doing. They see what is happening, often earlier than others, and start working harder.

They write the one-pager that forces clarity on a sprawling mess. They sit patiently with stakeholders one by one until each person’s context gap is closed. They build the tracker that ensures that forty workflows do not drift apart. They assign work to people who didn’t even know they had to do it yet. They prepare the assessment so thoroughly that the management meeting almost becomes a formality. I’ve seen people do this, and it’s really hard. It requires judgment, patience, and a kind of care that’s hard to fake. Somehow they keep it all together.

This is real work. It takes hours and days and weeks. It produces artifacts: documents, trackers, agendas, roadmaps. But even though the artifacts exist, the work that produced them becomes invisible almost immediately. I think about this often because it seems so unfair.

It disappears

I once worked on a project that shipped on time, on budget, and with quality intact. People knew that it had gone exceptionally well, you could feel it. At the closing, people thanked the engineers, the Prime Minister and the main sponsor. But there was one person who quietly did about 40% of the actual coordination. She had written the strategy document that aligned the team in week one. She had built a tracker that six teams relied on every day. She had conducted dozens of one-on-one conversations to close the context gaps before they became conflicts.

When the project succeeded, her work was absorbed into the project’s infrastructure. The doctor was just ‘the doctor’. The tracker was simply ‘the tracker’. The coordination was exactly the way things were. People forgot that things had ever been different. That’s the beauty of good coordination. I have realized that if it works, it goes away. You can’t tell exactly because it worked.

A founder I know once described his most valuable employee this way:

“She’s the reason everything really works here. She just makes sure everything happens. She writes the documents. She leads the meetings that matter. She talks to people. Somehow, everything she touches stays on track. I don’t know how I would describe what she does to someone outside the company. But if she were to leave, we would fall apart in a month. Maybe less.”
– A friend of the founder

That is the invisible work. Not invisible because it leaves no traces. It leaves many traces. Invisible because the traces are not glamorous. A well-maintained tracker doesn’t make people think “this is extraordinary.” An alignment document doesn’t let people say, “This is why we succeeded.” The artifacts simply become infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, they are only noticed when they are missing.

The slide wins

The problem is that recognition follows story. When a project succeeds, the credit flows to the people whose contributions are easy to describe. The person who presented to the board. The person whose name is in the launch email. The person who submitted the last attribute. These contributions are real, I am not downplaying them. But they are no more real than the work that made them possible. They’re just easier to point out. Easier to place in a slide. And I think that’s where the dishonesty starts, slowly, without people really noticing.

The invisible work is often where the real leadership happens. Leadership as a position, not a title. Thinking hard about a problem until it becomes clear. Bridging the gap between people who don’t even realize they are out of alignment. Writing the document that shapes a project. Orchestrate complexity so that others can focus on their own piece. That is leadership. It just doesn’t seem like outside leadership. It looks like someone who is “helpful” or “organized” or “really on top of things.” I’ve seen people described this way for years doing work that actually held entire programs together.

Most performance systems can’t capture all of this. They reward what is measurable, and the invisible work stands up to measurement. How do you quantify “brought clarity to a vast mess”? What is the metric for ‘preventing the strategy from diluting in six months’? There isn’t one. So you end up with systems that reward the visible and ignore the essential. Not because someone designed it that way. That’s exactly how it works out when you try to evaluate people on a large scale. I don’t think there’s any malice in it, just a kind of structural blindness that’s very difficult to overcome.

This gets worse as organizations grow. In a team of five people, people see what is happening. The person holding things together is obvious. But add layers and distance and the divide widens. The people at the top start to rely on proxies: titles, presentations, stories. The correlation between doing the work and getting credit for it weakens. Sometimes it disappears completely. I’ve seen it happen year after year with good people doing essential work and wondering why they’re stuck.

Some leaders know it

There is no framework that solves this. You can’t design a rubric that reflects “kept the project together.” But you can also pay attention to it differently.

When you lead people, learn to see the work that doesn’t announce itself. See who people actually trust when something important needs to be done. Notice who wrote the document that people keep referring to, who is leading the meeting that actually moves things forward, who seems to be in the room when something crucial is being figured out. The work is there. It’s just quiet. You have to want to see it.

And about the invisible work itself: under the right leader it is finally being seen for what it is. In my experience, it is the fuel that keeps organizations running. I’ve worked in places where invisible work abounded, and you could feel it in the way things moved. Decisions were made without endless back and forth, projects were executed without drama, people knew what they were doing and why. I’ve also worked in places where it was scarce, and that felt very different. Lots of activity, lots of meetings, lots of talk about work, but underneath it all, things were quietly stuck. Nothing really moved until someone rolled up their sleeves and did the unglamorous work of setting it in motion.

So look for a leader who has an eye for this. They exist. They have done invisible work themselves, they know what it looks like, they can look beyond the organizational chart and see how things are actually done. Under a leader like that, they put you on the things that matter. They fight for your compensation. They tell other leaders what you actually do. Your work becomes taxing in a way that is difficult to relax.

If you’re good at the invisible work, the first step isn’t to get better at visibility. It’s about finding the leader who doesn’t need you to be visible.

Then produce like crazy.