I thought delivering was enough

For years I believed I should not have to market myself or my team. I thought that if you deliver, and deliver quality, the work should speak for itself.

That cost me.

I have watched excellent technical leaders get passed over, defunded, and slowly sidelined for holding the belief I held. Good work does speak for itself sometimes. More often the budget goes to the leader who explained their work better.

That belief is not wrong. It is half of one. Work nobody can see still gets done. It just doesn’t get funded, defended, or repeated.

Delivering is one half of the job. Making sure the work is understood is the other. The second half is what people call managing up, and the name is most of the reason it gets avoided.

What the second half looks like:

• Translating what your team built into the language of the business, before anyone asks you to.
• Naming risks early, while they are still cheap to fix, so people see your judgment and not only your output.
• Knowing what keeps your CEO and CFO awake, and connecting your team’s work to those concerns in plain terms.
• Telling your peers in other functions what your team is working on, before you need anything from them.
• Making sure the people who decide budgets and promotions can name what you and your team delivered.
• Putting your team’s names on their work somewhere beyond the room where it happened, like a leadership review, a newsletter, a customer story.
• Writing or speaking about your own thinking now and then, not only reporting on what your team delivered.
• Volunteering for the visible assignments, the ones with your name on the outcome, not only the safe ones done quietly.

None of that is extra. All of it is the job.

Most of us are good at one half and have to work at the other.

That was me. The building came easily. Making sure other people understood what we had built did not, and I had to work at it extensively.

For a long stretch, I blocked thirty minutes on my calendar every Friday morning just to think about how I was managing up and marketing my team. It took conscious effort before it became subconscious.

First published on LinkedIn on September 16, 2026.