A big part of adulthood is the slow and repeated realization that many of the beliefs that have guided your coming of age are fallacies. Your expensive college degree might not in fact guarantee your dream job, your “good” middle-class salary might not be enough to buy a home, and perhaps the biggest wake-up call of them all: Hard work might not be enough to get ahead.  

Many of us (myself included) spent our school years working hard to get all As, participating in all the activities, doing all the things we were told were key to a successful life, only to enter the working world and find that the path to success and promotions is paved with a lot of things that have nothing to do with who works the hardest. The truth is, work, and the rest of the “real world,” isn’t a meritocracy. The most hard-working—and even the smartest or most-talented—people aren’t always the ones who end up in power.

So what are the unspoken rules of work? If hard work alone isn’t what matters, what does? And is there a way to shift what we value and make things more fair?

On the latest episode of The New Way We Work, I spoke to Jill Katz. She is the founder of Assemble HR Consulting, a talent strategy and communications firm. 

The difference between school and the working world

Katz explained why people who do well in school are not necessarily the ones who end up doing the best at work. “The fact is, what we do in school is really different from what we do in work. When we go to school, we learn how to be great test takers, great note takers, and we also learn to be really good individual contributors,” she says. “We’re in school for our own personal success, but school does not necessarily prepare all of us to be great leaders or team players.”

In fact, there have been studies showing that girls tend to get better grades than boys overall in part because teachers (often unintentionally) reward students for being quiet and neat, which is behavior society expects of girls more than boys. No wonder, then, that women often end up doing the invisible labor of note-taking in meetings—tasks that, while essential to the smooth running of a company, aren’t the type of visible work that often earns promotions.

Visible and invisible work

Visible work that gets rewarded often consists of the things that can be measured: the person who leads projects and starts initiatives or makes big sales. If it can be seen clearly, if it can be measured and if it is visible, it seems to be rewarded.

That kind of visible work can sometimes go along with the people who are more comfortable with self-promotion, which can then feed into a cycle of being put in charge of projects. Katz points out that there’s nothing wrong with people with these personalities. “There’s a real place in the workplace for these people, but people who tend to be more introverted, or people who tend to fall into more caretaking tasks or roles, tend to be recognized less.”

??Katz points out that we lose a lot when we only reward visible results because some of the most important work is the often invisible work of managing relationships.

“It really takes an effort, Katz says, “because you’re not looking at numbers, you’re not seeing things on a daily basis.” It’s important to keep an eye out for this sort of invisible labor, she says. “I’s about valuing teamwork and taking the time to really focus on teams around the organization that are excelling and recognizing that there is a leader of that team who is making an impact.”

For more on how to change the way we evaluate and view invisible work, and why it’s important, listen to the full episode. 

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