Every membership organisation has someone who quietly gets things done. They know the members, remember why that slightly strange process exists, spot problems before they become actual problems and are often the person colleagues turn to when something needs fixing quickly and without fuss.
They're dependable, knowledgeable and consistently good at what they do, and yet when the next promotion comes around, sometimes it goes to somebody else.
Not necessarily somebody who is better at their job, but somebody who is simply better at being seen doing it.
This is what we're calling The Visibility Gap: the space between the value someone creates for an organisation and how much of that value the people making decisions about their career actually see.
And in the membership sector, where so much brilliant work happens collaboratively and behind the scenes, we think that gap could be particularly interesting.
Imagine two equally capable people working in the same membership organisation.
The first quietly delivers brilliant work week after week. Members trust them, projects run smoothly when they're involved and colleagues know that if something lands on their desk, it'll get done properly. They don't talk much about their successes because, to them, delivering good work is simply part of the job.
The second person is also good at what they do, but they're much more visible while doing it. They speak confidently in meetings, volunteer for cross-functional projects, have relationships with senior stakeholders and make sure the outcomes of their work are understood by the wider organisation.
A year later, when a more senior opportunity becomes available, which one feels like the more obvious candidate?
The point isn't that the second employee doesn't deserve to progress, nor is this necessarily about favouritism or office politics. It's about something much more ordinary and human: we find it easier to recognise and remember the value that we can see.
That's where actual performance and perceived performance can begin to drift apart.
"I was always the person people came to when something needed fixing, but I eventually realised the people making decisions about progression probably had no idea how much I was actually doing."
Membership professional
There is something about the way membership organisations operate that makes the Visibility Gap especially interesting, because success is rarely the work of one person or even one department.
A brilliant member experience might involve Membership, Marketing, Communications, Events, Policy, Digital and Operations, with dozens of small interactions happening behind the scenes before the member ever sees the finished result. When something goes brilliantly, the organisation celebrates the outcome, but it can be surprisingly difficult to identify all the individual contributions that made it happen.
Some of the most valuable work in membership is also the least glamorous.
It might be keeping a difficult member relationship on track, spotting that a process isn't working before it causes complaints, retaining years of institutional knowledge, coaching a new colleague or simply dealing with the hundred tiny problems that prevent one very large problem from eventually landing on the CEO's desk.
Nobody, unfortunately, presents a quarterly PowerPoint entitled "37 disasters I quietly prevented."
Perhaps they should.
"The strange thing about being dependable is that when you do your job really well, everything just works, which means people don't necessarily see everything you've done to make it work."
Membership manager
There is another dimension to this conversation that feels particularly relevant to the way we work now.
When most people occupied the same office five days a week, professional visibility happened almost accidentally. Senior leaders encountered junior colleagues in kitchens and corridors, managers overheard positive conversations about someone's work and people physically saw the effort that went into delivering an event, responding to a member issue or getting a major campaign over the line.
In a hybrid environment, much of that ambient visibility has disappeared, which means being visible increasingly requires someone to do something intentional.
You contribute in the Teams meeting. You volunteer to present the project. You share the results. You build relationships outside your immediate team. You make sure the right people understand what you've achieved.
None of those behaviours are bad, in fact, they're valuable professional skills, but they potentially create an advantage for people who are naturally more comfortable doing them.
The person presenting the project can easily become associated with its success, while the person who spent three months doing the painstaking work that made the project successful might barely feature in the conversation.
That's not really a remote-working problem.
It's a recognition problem.
This is where the Visibility Gap starts to become slightly uncomfortable, because many of the qualities we instinctively associate with leadership happen to be highly visible ones.
Confidence, communication, presence, influence and decisiveness are relatively easy to observe, particularly in meetings and senior forums, and all of them can be genuinely important qualities in a leader.
But other indicators of potential are quieter.
Judgement isn't always loud. Neither are empathy, consistency, curiosity, deep member understanding, technical expertise or the ability to make everyone around you perform a little better.
Someone can be extremely good at articulating their contribution without necessarily being the strongest performer in a team, while somebody else can be outstanding at their job but uncomfortable explaining why they're outstanding.
If progression relies too heavily on employees making their own contribution visible, there is a risk that self-promotion quietly becomes an unofficial promotion criterion, even if nobody intended it to.
"I used to think that if I worked hard enough, somebody would eventually notice, but over time I realised the people progressing weren't necessarily working harder; they were often much better at making sure people understood what they'd achieved."
Trade association employee
Not everybody wants to build an internal personal brand, speak first in every meeting or manufacture opportunities to get in front of the CEO, and for some people the advice to "talk more about your achievements" feels uncomfortably close to being told to brag.
So they assume their work will speak for itself.
The problem is that work doesn't speak. People do.
That raises an interesting question about where responsibility for closing the Visibility Gap actually sits.
There is undoubtedly a responsibility on employees to communicate their impact, build relationships and help people understand what they're capable of, particularly if they have ambitions to progress. However, there is an equally important responsibility on managers and organisations to make sure career progression isn't simply easier for the people who are naturally best at attracting attention.
If your talent process only discovers somebody is brilliant once they've learned how to tell you they're brilliant, then it isn't doing all of its job.
There is another slightly cruel irony hiding inside the Visibility Gap, particularly for long-serving employees who have accumulated deep organisational knowledge.
Sometimes people become so reliable in their existing role that the organisation stops imagining them anywhere else.
They're the person who understands the membership database, knows the history of the key accounts, remembers what happened the last time the organisation tried something similar and has relationships with members that have taken years to establish.
Without anyone consciously deciding it, their competence becomes part of the infrastructure.
And infrastructure is something organisations generally don't want to move.
"I don't think anyone deliberately overlooked me. I think I'd become so reliable in my role that people stopped imagining me doing anything else."
Senior membership professional
That is perhaps one of the more uncomfortable manifestations of the Visibility Gap, because being brilliant at your current job can inadvertently make it harder for people to picture you doing the next one.
For membership organisations, getting this wrong isn't simply disappointing for the individual; it can become a retention problem.
If someone repeatedly watches colleagues progress while their own contribution goes largely unnoticed, they will eventually form a view about what the organisation values and what their future within it looks like.
The particularly dangerous part is that your quietest high performers may not be the people who tell you they're unhappy.
They may not demand a promotion, issue an ultimatum or tell their manager every few weeks that they're ready for something bigger. They might simply keep doing excellent work while gradually becoming more receptive when somebody outside the organisation approaches them.
Eventually, they resign.
Only then does everybody suddenly become extremely articulate about their value.
"They're going to leave such a gap."
"The members absolutely love them."
"They know things nobody else knows."
"How are we going to replace them?"
Which begs a fairly obvious question:
If their value becomes so apparent when they're leaving, why wasn't it apparent when they were staying?
The answer isn't to tell quieter employees to become louder, nor should organisations suddenly treat confidence or visibility as suspicious qualities. Being able to communicate ideas, influence stakeholders and build relationships matters enormously, particularly as people move into more senior positions.
The challenge is making sure visibility helps us understand performance rather than becoming a substitute for it.
That might mean asking managers to identify the people delivering exceptional work that senior leadership rarely sees, creating opportunities for employees at different levels to present their work directly, looking at individual contribution within collaborative projects and making sure managers actively advocate for the people in their teams rather than assuming everybody will advocate effectively for themselves.
It could also mean changing the language used in succession and promotion conversations.
Rather than simply asking:
"Who looks ready for the next step?"
Perhaps organisations should ask:
"What evidence do we have that they're ready, and whose evidence might we be missing?"
It's a subtle difference, but potentially an important one.
There will always be people who are naturally good at being seen, and that's not something organisations should discourage. Visibility, influence and the ability to communicate your contribution are legitimate professional skills.
But the people with the biggest profiles shouldn't automatically be assumed to have the biggest potential.
Somewhere in your organisation there may be somebody delivering extraordinary work, building brilliant member relationships, retaining knowledge you don't realise you've become dependent on and quietly making everybody around them better at their jobs.
They may not be asking what's next yet.
They may not be knocking on the CEO's door.
They may not be particularly good at telling you how valuable they are.
But somebody outside your organisation might be very good at spotting it.
And perhaps that's the real danger of the Visibility Gap: sometimes organisations don't discover how highly they valued somebody until that person has decided to take their value somewhere else.
So maybe the question for membership leaders isn't simply "Who are our high performers?"
It's a slightly harder one:
Who are we not noticing?