Managing Up and Getting Visible: Making Sure the Work, and the Judgment Behind It, Actually Gets Seen

DAY 3 | The Four Moments Worth Flagging - A quick-reference framework for what earns visibility, and what should stay quiet

The fastest way to make managing up feel like self-promotion, both to yourself and to the person receiving it, is treating every task like it deserves a spotlight.

Most of what happens in a working week is routine, and routine work should stay in your own notes, not in a message to your manager. Four specific moments genuinely earn a flag, and the entire skill is recognising them accurately rather than either over-flagging everything or under-flagging the moments that actually matter.

Moment one: you prevented a problem before anyone else saw it coming

This is the single most undervalued category of work in any organisation, because by definition, if you caught it early enough, nobody else ever witnesses the disaster that did not happen. A requirements gap fixed before development starts. A stakeholder conflict defused before it reached the steering committee. A defect caught in review instead of production. None of these generate a visible event for anyone to notice, which means the only way they become visible at all is if you say so.

Moment two: you made a real judgment call under ambiguity

This is exactly the kind of decision the Certifications series argued no exam can test, and it is the clearest evidence a manager can get of your actual capability rather than your recall of a framework. A judgment call worth flagging is one where a different, reasonable person could plausibly have decided differently, and you can explain why you chose the way you did. This is not about reporting every small decision. It is about the ones with real weight behind them.

Moment three: a difficult relationship shifted because of something specific you did

Managers rarely see the day to day texture of stakeholder management covered in the Difficult Stakeholders series, only the eventual outcome, a project that used to be stuck now moving, a stakeholder who used to escalate now working directly with you. Connecting that outcome back to the specific move you made, the diagnostic question you asked, the boundary you held, is often the single highest value thing you can surface, because it demonstrates a skill that is genuinely hard to fake or teach quickly.

Moment four: you need a decision or resource, and they need lead time

This one is different from the first three, because it is not about reporting past work, it is about protecting a future outcome. If a decision from your manager, or a resource only they can approve, is coming up in the next few weeks, flagging it early is not visibility for its own sake, it is basic project management. A manager blindsided by a request with no lead time makes a worse decision under pressure than one given proper notice, and the flag itself demonstrates the same forward thinking covered in the weekly habit from yesterday.

What does not belong on this list

Completing routine tasks on time. Attending meetings. Doing the baseline work the role already expects of you. None of this is unimportant, and none of it belongs in a specific flag, because flagging routine work as if it were exceptional trains your manager to tune out everything you send, exactly the way an alert system that pages on every minor event gets ignored by the time something serious actually happens. The value of these four moments depends entirely on them staying rare enough to mean something when they show up.

The point of this framework is not to force something into every weekly update from yesterday's habit. Some weeks genuinely will not have anything from these four categories, and that is fine, the quiet-week example from yesterday covers exactly that case. The framework exists as a filter you run events through as they happen during the week, not a list you have to fill by Friday regardless of what actually occurred.

A quick way to test whether something qualifies

When you are not sure whether something from your week fits one of the four moments, ask a simple question: would a stranger reading only this description learn something specific about my judgment or my impact, or could this sentence describe almost anyone doing this job competently on any given week? A judgment call worth flagging survives that test easily, because the specific reasoning behind the decision is what makes it interesting. Routine, well executed work almost never survives it, because the whole point of routine work is that it looks the same regardless of who is doing it.

This test also protects against the opposite mistake, under-flagging genuinely significant moments because they did not feel dramatic in the moment. A quiet, calm decision that prevented a costly rebuild often does not feel like a big deal while it is happening, precisely because handling it well made it feel routine. Running it through the test above, rather than trusting how dramatic it felt at the time, catches moments that would otherwise slip past unflagged simply because they were handled too smoothly to register as noteworthy.

Go out and be successful.

Oluwatosin Ogunkoya | Flotog BA Insights  |  www.flotogbainsights.com

TOMORROW

Managing Up When the News Is Bad - How to stay visible and trusted even when what you have to report is a delay, a miss, or a mistake.