There are few topics more annoying for employees, high potentials, or existing leaders working in large organizations than visibility – or, in other words, "the visibility factor."
This topic is timeless; everyone struggles with it, at every level, regardless of power dynamics, position, organizational culture, or even the size of the company once it has more than 500 employees.
“It's enough if I do my job well. If I have truly good bosses, they'll notice me on their own.”
“I'm not going to suck up or flash around what I've done; let those who care about it take notice.”
“As long as it's not mandatory, I won’t attend any events. That's the last thing I need.”
Sound familiar?
Of course, it does. Everyone reaches this point, but not everyone moves past it. However, once and for all, it would be good to accept the fact that, regardless of what kind of boss you have, your visibility is your responsibility. Only yours. Not the responsibility of the one who doesn’t notice you.
It would also be useful to accept that it doesn’t matter if we're talking about company A, B, or C with 500, 1,500, 30,000, or 150,000 employees—within large groups, the same dynamics apply. Sure, there may be cultural differences, but they're so minor that it's pointless to dwell on them until you understand the forces that actually drive the masses—the masses where you need to succeed.
Barabási's most successful book, The Formula, lays out all the rules from A to Z that you need to follow. The book is top-notch; I think the other three are even more thought-provoking, but this one is by far the easiest to digest, packed with fantastic stories and examples. So if you haven't read it yet, it’s time to dive in.
Meanwhile, let’s break down what you can learn from the five laws of success if you want to work on your visibility. And by this, I mean: if you've accepted that to be successful, you need to work on your visibility.
First Law: Performance drives success. But when performance can't be measured, success is determined by networks.
Now, place your hand on your heart and say that this doesn’t apply to you because your performance is perfectly measurable. If that's true, you're incredibly lucky, and without any research, you can believe that you're in 0.0001% of the labor market. A lot of people’s performance is measured individually, but finding someone whose performance can be measured in such a way that everyone knows it’s their own, unaffected by other factors, is incredibly rare.
As Barabási beautifully illustrates with great examples, it’s not an elite school that makes your child smart, but the smart kid that makes the school elite. Or, unless you're a competitive athlete, it's completely futile to hope that your performance alone will determine your success. Don’t get me wrong—outstanding performance is essential. But between two almost identical performances (and since performance is immeasurable, how could it be "almost identical"?), the one with the stronger network will be more successful.
And yes, it’s perfectly valid to feel frustrated or angry about this—you absolutely have the right to. It’s sad in a way, and I fully agree. But it's also a fact proven time and again by network researchers, so it’s pointless to argue about it.
Second Law: Performance has limits, but success is limitless.
This is the law you’ll most often hear referenced by futurists. This is where the famous power law comes into play. And to cement this idea about visibility in your brain, think of a colleague who, annoyingly young, climbed annoyingly high, and you could only find valid reasons for their first two promotions. Those were the times when there was still some connection, but as time went on, there was less and less.
These are the people who soar up the power law curve—those that everyone watches in disbelief, wondering how much higher they could possibly go when there’s hardly any space left for their car in front of the office. You get the idea, right? Which means that the CEO of a company with 120,000 employees at age 42 didn’t get there because their IQ is one point higher than yours. They could have had exactly the same abilities and performance as you, but they built their network more wisely, making more people notice what they brought to the table.
Third Law: Capability x past success = future success.
If you have trouble accepting the laws of visibility (and that was politely put, right?), this point will probably hurt the most. It’s nothing other than Robert Merton's Matthew Effect: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from the one who has not, even what they have will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29). We learned about this in university, but no one understood why it mattered.
Now we get it. If you seem successful, you attract more success, regardless of your actual performance. If you're curious why, Google "preferential attachment." You leverage this law correctly when you celebrate your promotion with fanfare, even if no extra money is involved. Instead of grumbling, “I’m not going to post it on LinkedIn or print new business cards,” act like it’s a big deal.
Because it is—and if you believe it, others will too. But not the other way around. As the book’s main message goes: Success—in this case, your promotion—isn’t about you; it’s about what others see in it. It’s not about how you feel about it.
Fourth Law: While team success comes from diversity and balance, the credit always goes to one person.
Through Nobel Prize prediction processes, this finding emerged: the recognition for teamwork isn’t based on performance, but on perception.
A team’s success clearly stems from collective intelligence (which itself is worth a few more articles), but the key takeaway here is that no matter how the team achieves success, one person will always take the credit. So, if you spend too much time (define “too much,” right?) in someone else’s shadow, it may overshadow your own achievements.
It’s fine to have a mentor, a role model, or a leader who helps you grow, but it’s your responsibility to gradually widen the spectrum of your own performance beyond theirs. Learn something that others don’t, so you can step out of being seen as someone’s right-hand. That’s a valuable and useful role, but don’t get stuck there!
Fifth Law: If you persist, success can strike at any time.
Lastly, here’s a law that you’ll read with a peaceful smile, even if you’re already tired of this whole topic—especially now that you’re starting to believe it, seeing that actual scientists are saying this, and none of them are British. A scientist has a 13% chance of publishing their most impactful paper in the first three years of their career. This chance stays roughly the same for the first two decades but dramatically drops after twenty years.
If you’re sitting there, near 45 or 50, and starting to feel melancholic, stop. What they found is that the likelihood of a scientific breakthrough doesn’t drop dramatically because the scientist becomes less creative, smart, or brilliant.
No, it drops because they become less productive. They simply publish much less. In other words, if they kept at it, if they produced as much as before, they’d have exactly the same chance of a breakthrough. As Barabási's team concluded: “If we persist, success can strike at any time.”
So, if you’ve thought this whole visibility topic is just for show-offs, thinking that your performance will be recognized by life itself—you're wrong.
Or rather, life did recognize it. It just didn’t recognize it where you expected it to—only where it mattered.
And yes, I used the IQ example intentionally, because as a former Mensa member, it’s one of my favorites, no matter how trendy it’s been over the past decade to question its validity. Barabási writes about it too and references it frequently in his other books: “Intelligence tests, despite the debate surrounding them, are still the best predictors of someone’s future academic or professional success. (...) The IQ test remains, to this day, the best reflection of how we solve problems in modern workplaces.”