The communication most ICs treat as overhead is what gets read as leadership. Three conversations this week on why visibility is a craft, not a soft skill.
3 separate conversations this week kept landing on the same unglamorous truth, so I’ll say it plainly for y’all.
The communication work most individual contributors treat as overhead is the work that gets read as leadership.
This week, I coached one of my designers to post a short note in our design channel after crit: here’s what I took from the feedback, here’s what I’m not changing and why. Not because the team needs the recap (though it’s often useful for folks that couldn’t attend the crit), but I asked for it because that note is an important signal. The leaders deciding who’s operating at the next level are watching for exactly that kind of visible, deliberate closing of a loop. I pointed to a peer of hers as the benchmark, and what makes him the benchmark isn’t his design work. It’s his cadence. You always know what they’re working on, what they decided, and what they need from their teammates.
The same week, I got feedback on my own weekly updates that stung a little because it was right. My Monday “warm-up” updates to the entire design org are full of information and hard to connect. New items land without tying back to prior threads or to the priorities they served. You couldn’t tell what was still “live” and what had quietly gone to bed. More detail isn’t going to fix that, and what’s actually missing is a “so what” layer. How does this update roll up, who owns the next step, what should you carry over from last week? I’m not above the thing I was coaching her on, and I should be accountable for answering those questions too.
Here’s why this is a craft issue and not a soft skill. ICs are trained to believe the work speaks for itself, and at a certain level that stops being true. The work didn’t get worse, there’s just more of it happening than anyone can see. Visibility isn’t self-promotion, it’s the practice of making your thinking legible so other people can build on it, trust it, and stake their own decisions on it. And, to be honest, that’s a designable artifact: a crit recap, an update with a through-line, a Slack post that closes a loop. You can be good at it the same way you’re good at a flow.
The teachable part
If you’re an IC who wants to operate at the next level, audit how legible your work is to someone who wasn’t in the room. Not how good it is. How visible. Pick one recurring moment, the end of crit, the weekly update, and make a habit of closing the loop in writing where the right people can see it. Say what you decided, what you didn’t, and what you need next. It feels like overhead. It’s the part of leadership you can start practicing before anyone gives you the title.