If you’ve ever thought “I do so much disaster-prevention but no-one ever sees that” - then this week’s Extra Wrap is for you.
This isn’t a complaint about being underappreciated. It’s a visibility problem which has real consequences at review time, at promotion time, and at the moment someone is considering whether your role is “essential” or “nice to have.”
The asymmetry of visible and invisible work
Picture two EAs. The first spots a double-booking three weeks out, moves one meeting, and nobody ever knows there was a conflict. I imagine this is you 90% of the time. The second gets a call twenty minutes before a flight that’s been cancelled, rebooks the flight in real time, and the exec lands on time for a keynote. Both EAs prevented a potential disaster. Only one of them will get a thank-you email.
This is the evidence problem: the gap between the value you create and the value anyone can see you creating. It applies more to prevention than to recovery, because prevention removes the evidence of the problem along with the problem itself. Recovery leaves a visible before-and-after. Prevention leaves nothing - which, perversely, looks like nothing happened.
Over time, this reshapes how you appear to your company. The firefighter looks essential because the fire was witnessed. The person who made sure there was no fire in the first place looks, at best, “on top of things” - a much smaller compliment for exactly the same underlying skill.
Why this matters more than it seems to
This has three concrete costs.
First, it distorts how your role gets resourced. If leadership can’t see the volume of things you’re preventing, they’ll size your role based on the visible workload only - which is always an undercount, and likely a dramatic one.
Second, it distorts how your role gets evaluated. Review conversations run on memorable evidence. If the memorable evidence skews toward other people’s dramatic saves rather than your preventative ones, you lose ground in a conversation that was never actually about who did more.
Third - and this is the one most EAs don’t clock - it distorts your own sense of your value. When nobody reflects your prevention work back to you, it’s easy to start believing it doesn’t count either.
What doesn’t fix it
Before getting into what works, it’s worth ruling out the obvious bad options, because most EAs try one of these first and it backfires.
Narrating in real time - flagging every save as it happens - reads as anxious or attention-seeking, even when it’s accurate. Waiting for someone to ask assumes there’s a natural moment for this to surface, and there almost never is; nobody asks “what didn’t go wrong this week?” Inflating minor catches into major ones to make them memorable erodes trust the first time someone realises the stakes were smaller than you implied.
The fix isn’t about talking more. It’s about building a body of evidence - and yes, that means documenting things, which is one more small task on top of a job that is already admin-heavy. That’s a fair objection, not a reason to skip it. If I may be blunt, it costs you a minute a day, and it’s the only lever you have that turns “trust me, I do a lot” into something you can actually put in front of someone. Most of the value in this job never gets written down anywhere, so this is your list. It buys you leverage later, at exactly the moment you’ll want it - review, negotiation, or the conversation where someone questions whether your role needs to exist in its current form. Write down everything, and then you can choose what you surface.
The Near-Miss Log
Start with the format, because the format is what makes this sustainable. This is not a diary, it’s a simple list with key information. Nothing else.
