Every team I’ve ever led has had one of these people. The person who writes the doc that gives the project its shape, who closes context gaps in one-on-ones before they turn into conflicts, who somehow keeps six workstreams from drifting apart. They rarely get the credit they deserve because the work, when it’s done well, looks like it just happened on its own.

Hardik Pandya writes about this on his blog. He shares a quote from a founder friend describing his most valuable employee:

“She’s the reason things actually work around here. She just… makes sure everything happens. She writes the docs. She runs the meetings that matter. She talks to people. Somehow everything she touches stays on track. I don’t know how I’d even describe what she does to a person outside the company. But if she left, we’d fall apart in a month. Maybe less.”

I’ve known people like this at every company I’ve worked at. And I’ve watched them get passed over because the performance system couldn’t see them. Pandya nails why:

When a project succeeds, credit flows to the people whose contributions are easy to describe. The person who presented to the board. The person whose name is on the launch email. The person who shipped the final feature. These contributions are real, I’m not diminishing them. But they’re not more real than the work that made them possible. They’re just easier to point at.

Most organizations try to fix this by telling the invisible workers to “be more visible”—present more, build your personal brand internally. Pandya’s advice goes the other direction, and I think he’s right:

If you’re good at the invisible work, the first move isn’t to get better at visibility. It’s to find the leader who doesn’t need you to be visible.

As a leader, I take this as a challenge. If someone on my team is doing the work that holds everything together, it’s my job to make sure the organization sees it too—especially when it doesn’t announce itself.