"I should be in that magazine article."

"I should be on that panel."
"I should be on that advisory board."

If I had a quid for every time an engineer or architect said something like this to me over my 25 year career, I'd be a very rich woman.

I've heard it constantly. And honestly, it's the wrong question to be asking.

What you need to know about visibility

The real question is this: what did the people who ARE in there actually do to get there?

That's a harder one to sit with, because I promise you, nobody just landed there. Someone was having conversations one to two years out. Someone was doing the research that quietly built their credibility, publishing in industry journals as well as on LinkedIn. Someone sat through plenty of deathly dull meetings and working groups long before the big one came along.

This is the unglamorous, gritty work behind every visible thought leadership win. It's the bit nobody posts about.

Why everyone else's success looks like luck

It's easy to call it luck when you're only looking at someone else's end result. What you're not seeing is the years of small, unglamorous steps that got them there.

Here's an example from when I work in-house, I gave a talk to junior engineers about a senior director's win, watching him walk on stage at a big environmental conference. What they hadn't seen was the six months I'd spent chipping away at getting him there: spotting the opportunity, developing the pitch, arranging schedules, writing the deck and script, drafting his biog and publicity materials, then being in the room on the day to make sure it all ran smoothly.

I mapped out the whole timeline for them, step by step. Their jaws hit the floor as they had no idea how much work sat behind those few minutes on stage. And this unseen work is often where marketers end up coming unstuck. Our colleagues and even leaders don’t understant the sheer level of ‘grunt’ work we do and in challenging financial times - our lack of visible output is often given as a reason to let us go. But anyway, I digress, back to this piece!

Thought leadership is a long game, invest over time

Visibility in the built environment industry doesn't happen overnight because someone finally notices you deserve it. It happens because an architect or engineer, backed by a marketing and BD team, spent months, sometimes years, quietly building the case for them: the credibility, the relationships, the track record of turning up and doing the small stuff well.

If you want to be the person quoted in that magazine, sitting on that panel, or asked onto that advisory board, thought leadership is how you build towards it. It’s far more than a one off article or a single conference talk, but as a consistent, long term habit of sharing your expertise and turning up where it matters. Some of it is seen, some of it isn’t but I guess it’s that hard graft part.

Why marketers need to show thier process

This is exactly why marketing and BD teams need to start showing the journey of how we build our leaders in thought leaders. And until we map out that invisible work properly, people will keep grumbling about how it's not fair, and keep undervaluing everything that goes into building visibility for the firms and people they work with.

And honestly, if you haven't put the work in yet, you can't really complain about not being asked.

Building your own path to visibility

What's one thing you're doing right now that's building towards where you want to be in a year or two? Also this one’s for marketers you should be building your own visibility too! It’ll serve you in the long run.