Latest / The Promotion Memo with Fexingo: Getting Visibility, Sponsors, and Executive Presence / How One Executives Assistant Built an Internal Brand
Transcript
- Lucas: So I want to start with a person I'll call Rachel — not her real name — who was an executive assistant at a Fortune 500 financial services firm. She'd been in the role for about six years, supporting the same senior vice president. And she was very, very good at her job. Luna: Define 'very good' — what did that look like on a day-to-day basis? Lucas: Her calendar management was flawless. She could anticipate her boss's needs before he articulated them. She prepped briefing documents for every meeting, flagged conflicts he hadn't considered, and basically ran the operating rhythm of his entire portfolio. But here's the thing — she was completely invisible outside of that dyad. Luna: Right, the classic 'indispensable assistant' trap. Everyone in the immediate team knows you're critical, but the rest of the organisation has no idea you exist. Lucas: Exactly. And Rachel wanted to grow. She didn't want a different job — she wanted the role she had to carry more weight. She wanted to be seen as a strategic partner, not just an operational one. So she started looking for what I'd call 'visible value gaps' — problems that were obviously everyone's problem but no one's responsibility. Luna: Can you give me a concrete example? What did she actually do? Lucas: She noticed that her boss's quarterly offsites — these big two-day strategy sessions with twenty directors — had no consistent follow-through. People would leave with action items scrawled on sticky notes, nothing would get tracked, and by the next quarter, the same unresolved issues would resurface. So Rachel quietly built a simple tracker in a shared spreadsheet — not a fancy tool, just a spreadsheet — that mapped each action item to a named owner and a deadline. Luna: And she got buy-in how? That could easily feel like a junior person stepping on toes. Lucas: She didn't announce it. She asked her boss if she could 'help him keep track' of the offsite outcomes. He said sure. Then she started sending a one-line summary email after each meeting — 'Here's what we agreed to, and here's the status as of today' — and copied the whole director group. She wasn't telling them what to do. She was providing a service that made everyone look more organised. Within two quarters, the CEO's chief of staff asked if she could extend that system to the company-wide leadership offsite. Luna: So the visibility came from doing something that was genuinely useful, not from self-promotion. That's a really important distinction. Lucas: Exactly. And it's the core of what we're talking about today — building an internal brand when you don't have a title that comes with a megaphone. Rachel's story is a case study in how to shift from being a 'doer' to being a 'connector' or 'enabler' without ever changing your job description. Luna: But let's push on that a bit. There's a risk that all this extra work just gets absorbed as 'above and beyond' without any formal recognition. How did Rachel actually convert that visibility into a sponsorship? Lucas: Great question. The critical moment came about eight months in. The company was rolling out a new cross-functional initiative — something about standardising client onboarding across three divisions — and it was a mess. No clear owner, lots of finger-pointing. Rachel's boss mentioned it in passing. She didn't volunteer to lead it — she said, 'I've been tracking something similar for your offsites; I could help map the dependencies.' Luna: That's clever — she framed it as an extension of existing work, not as a new bid for authority. Lucas: Right. And that led to her being asked to present her tracking system to the initiative's steering committee — a group of six VPs. She prepared a fifteen-minute walkthrough. She showed them where the bottlenecks were, who was dropping the ball, and what the timeline looked like. She didn't say 'I should be the project manager.' She just showed the work. Luna: And then someone with power said something that changed her trajectory. Lucas: Exactly. One of the VPs — a woman named Diane — pulled her aside afterward and said, 'You have better visibility into this than anyone on my team. I want you to co-lead the implementation workstream.' That's sponsorship. Diane didn't just praise Rachel — she gave her a real piece of work that came with a seat at a table she didn't previously have access to. Luna: So the key wasn't Rachel asking for a promotion. It was making her value undeniable to someone who could open doors. That's a totally different playbook from the typical 'update your LinkedIn and apply for jobs' advice. Lucas: Totally. And I think there's a lesson here that scales beyond executive assistants. Any role that's primarily support or operational — project coordinators, analysts, even some mid-level ICs — can fall into the trap of being excellent at execution but invisible in terms of influence. The fix isn't to talk more about your accomplishments. It's to find a problem that everyone feels but nobody owns, and solve it in a way that makes powerful people look at the solution and think, 'I need this person in the room.' Luna: And that's exactly the kind of thinking we try to get into on this show. If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, listener support is what keeps this podcast ad-free and independent. If that's something you value, you can help at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small way to keep the conversation going, and we appreciate every bit of it. Luna: So back to Rachel — after she co-led that workstream, what happened? Did her title change? Lucas: Not immediately. But her scope expanded. She started being copied on emails that didn't go to other assistants. She was invited to the pre-meeting before the pre-meeting. Within a year, her boss and Diane jointly proposed a new role for her — 'Director of Strategic Operations' — which was essentially what she was already doing, but with a title that matched the reality. It came with a twenty-five percent raise. Luna: So the promotion followed the influence, not the other way around. That's a really powerful sequence to keep in mind. Lucas: And I think the other takeaway is about patience. Rachel didn't try to force a change in six weeks. She spent months building something useful, letting it speak for itself, and waiting for the right sponsor to notice. That takes discipline. Luna: What about someone whose organisation isn't that meritocratic? What if the culture is more political and less performance-driven? Does this approach still work? Lucas: It works differently. In a highly political environment, solving a visible problem can actually make you a target — because you're exposing someone else's failure. So you have to be more strategic about who you share the solution with. Find a sponsor first, even before you solve the problem. Ask them, 'If I could fix X, would that be valuable to you?' Then solve it in their name, not yours. Luna: So you reverse the order — get sponsorship before you do the work that earns it. Lucas: Exactly. That's actually a more common pattern in traditional corporate hierarchies. But Rachel's story is the ideal case: solve a real problem, let the work create the pull, and then let the sponsor emerge naturally. Luna: I think the broader point — and this is what I'll take away — is that internal branding isn't about broadcasting. It's about being the person who makes a specific pain point disappear. That's how you go from indispensable assistant to indispensable partner. Lucas: And it's a path that's available to anyone who pays close enough attention to what's actually broken in their organisation. The question for listeners is: what's the one recurring headache in your team that no one's been willing to track, fix, or own? That's your starting point. Luna: Yeah. And if you've got a story like Rachel's — or a different approach that worked — we'd love to hear about it. But for now, I think that's a good place to leave it. Lucas: Agreed. Thanks for listening.