The invisible org chart won't put itself on your resume
On doing a lot for other people and still having an answer when James McAvoy asks.
There’s a scene at the end of Wanted, the movie with Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy, where Wesley Gibson (James) turns directly to the camera and asks:
“What the f* have you done lately?”
I can’t shake it. Possibly because of a small, entirely reasonable crush on James McAvoy. Mostly because of the line.
I’m approaching two decades of working with engineering teams. For most of it, the answer to the question of what I’d accomplished felt natural: we solved this, we shipped that, we got through that rough quarter together. I was proud of that. I still am.
But the closer I got to where decisions actually get made, the more often I got a slightly different flavor of the question. Not "What did the team do?", because that part was obvious, and I couldn't take credit for it anyway, but more like "What did you do, specifically?" Gulp.
I never prioritized myself — not really. Company first, team second, me somewhere after that. More than once I set aside my own goals so someone on the team could grow into the opportunity instead. I judged it the right call for them and for the company. Still do.
There’s a difference between putting others first and not having an answer for yourself. Especially when you want to grow. When someone is deciding whether to give you more scope, more responsibility, more trust, “we did this together” stops being enough.
It’s possible to have a real answer to that question, even when most of your work shows up in other people’s outcomes. Not instead of helping others. Alongside.
Those two things can coexist. They should. But they don’t by default.
Looking back, I didn’t log the decisions, the things I prevented, the fires nobody saw coming. But I’m doing it now, and this is part of my system: written down so the next version of me, and future generations if they still have a need for this kind of thing, have a slightly shorter path. Dear future me, you’re welcome in advance.
How you earn it
Some people who are building informal influence don’t realize they’re doing it, because they’re too busy doing it.
So here’s what it looks like.
You’re getting CCed on decisions that technically aren’t yours. Usually not because someone was being inclusive, but because your opinion has proven useful enough that leaving you out started to feel like a risk.
People are running things by you before the meeting. “I wanted your read on this before we bring it to the team.” Not from politeness. They trust you. Someone decided the conversation would be better with your input already in it.
You’re getting pulled into rooms you weren’t invited to. The room needed something you have: context, a question nobody else thought to ask, the ability to slow things down in the right moment.
Newer people find their way to you with questions that aren’t technically yours to answer. It has nothing to do with the title, believe me. You don’t make them feel stupid for not knowing yet.
If two or three of these are happening, you’re already building something real.
So how do you build it? It starts with being genuinely useful. People come to you because you have answers, or because you’ll think alongside them until they find one. You give them a different angle on a business problem. You’re willing to brainstorm, to be a sparring partner, regardless of whether you’re their manager or not. You don’t mind sending the Slack message to someone on a different team, a different office, jumping on a Zoom call to loop them in or share something useful. You go to them. You don’t wait to be asked.
And when someone comes to you with something you can’t solve, you don’t turn them away. You think about who actually can help, and you give them the next step, the next person. It takes your time. It doesn’t always scale. But this is how social credits get built.
At a certain point (director level and beyond) the mode shifts from being helpful to being an accelerant. You run informal alignment sessions before the formal decision meeting, so when everyone sits down, rough consensus already exists. You take ownership of a cross-team dependency and just start coordinating it, without waiting to be assigned. You write the proposal, call the meeting, make it easy for people to say yes. You convene rather than direct.
You also learn to escalate strategically, not as a sign of failure, but as a tool. “I want to move forward on X. Here’s where I need a decision or alignment.” Clear, non-political, keeps things moving without making them a battle.
And momentum on anything significant almost always starts the same way: two or three peers who are bought in before it goes anywhere formal.
And at some point, you’ll see the return. A team that’s already swamped will find a way to help you, not because they have to, but because of the relationship. Someone who is usually guarded, entrenched, will sit down and actually think with you. You’ll be called the glue. You’ll be the one who points out the “us versus them” framing in the room and says, out loud, that you’re the same company working toward the same goals, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when looking away would be so much easier. People will listen. None of it required a title.
Building for one (a fair one)
Making other people successful is a genuinely good career strategy, not a consolation prize for people who didn’t want a title anyway.
When you help someone get promoted, you have an ally with more reach. Mentor a junior engineer who becomes senior and you’ve got someone you trust on every team they join. Unblock a stuck PM and the goodwill comes back in ways you can’t predict.
The investment in others isn’t separate from your own ambition. For people who lead without formal power, it’s often how it works.
But — and this is the note to self part — none of that exempts you from also building something for yourself. Something fair. Something you’d be proud of.
The higher you go, the less this is optional. At some point someone will ask, in a promotion conversation, in an interview, in a room where your name is on the table. Not what you enabled. What you did.
I’d been so oriented outward for so long that my own trajectory had gotten quiet. Not gone. Just... quiet.
I could describe in detail what everyone I was mentoring wanted to get better at over the next six months. When someone asked me the same question about myself, I had to think longer than I expected.
Crisis? No. Mere information.
What I figured out: treat your own development as a commitment, not a leftover. One goal, protected time, the same level of intention you’d give to someone you were mentoring. Enough to know whether you’re actually moving toward something, or just moving.
You’re not less generous for having a direction, the two don’t compete.
This is especially tricky when you lead engineering teams. You’re not directly responsible for adoption or new sign-ups. That lives in product. You can’t count lines of code, and it wouldn’t mean anything if you did. So you have to be more deliberate: what is your actual contribution to the business? Quality of what the team ships? Their ability to move fast without creating debt downstream? Fewer incidents? A team that didn’t exist six months ago and now can?
Those are the right questions. I stopped asking what I owned and started asking which ones I was in. Once I did, the contribution was more visible. What it still needed was a record: written down before the details dissolved into “we did a lot of good work that quarter.”
Keep a Captain’s Log
Leading without authority is hard to prove by design. You didn’t ship the feature; you unblocked the three teams that did. You didn’t make the decision; you were the reason the worse one didn’t get made. You didn’t build the culture; you kept it from eroding during the reorg. You got business and tech speaking the same language. You cleared the obstacle nobody else had the standing to clear. You put out a fire that would have cost six weeks. You kept a person from leaving quietly.
All real. None of it appears anywhere unless you write it down.
Start a log — a Captain’s Log, if you want to be nerdy about it. Build it inside your own personal operating system: a simple structure of folders and markdown files, easy to create and maintain, tool and OS agnostic, and readable by any AI you point at it. One file per day, one file per week, whatever works. One entry per thing that would otherwise disappear from your memory.
“Clarified technical constraints for PM, saved a week of misaligned work.”
“Pushed back on the architecture approach before the review. Team reconsidered.”
“Advocated for [person] in the reorg discussion. Their scope was preserved.”
This isn’t a brag sheet or a LinkedIn content calendar. Just notes, so that when someone eventually asks what you’ve been doing, the answer comes with actual examples and not a vague gesture at things you half-remember.
The invisible org chart reflects real influence. It just won’t speak for itself in the room where formal decisions get made. That part’s on you.
A habit beats a retrospective every time. Nobody reconstructs eighteen months of invisible work the night before it matters. You can’t remember what the team did, let alone what your part in it was. You either kept the log or you’re improvising. Improvising is how you end up saying “we did a lot of good things” when someone needs to hear what you did specifically.
With AI it’s easier now than it’s ever been. A quick daily check-in, a few minutes, and you get a different angle on what happened and where your contribution actually was, without the guilt of claiming credit, because you’re not claiming it. You’re just seeing it clearly.
I built a system to do exactly this: analyze the log, surface the patterns, build a record over time. The raw notes stay private: unfiltered, honest, not written for an audience. But out of that stream of words and thoughts, AI can extract what matters, summarize it, categorize it, shape it into something I can actually use for a yearly review, a promotion conversation, or just to stay oriented on where I’ve been and where I’m going.
It’s also how I stay disciplined: daily and weekly review built into the system. I’m not using it as evidence of being busy, but as a material to look at critically. What am I actually producing? What needs to change? The log isn’t only a record. It’s a feedback loop.
It’s same logic as investing: start early, stay consistent, let it compound. But it’s not too late to start today. With AI making this a five-minute daily habit, there are no excuses left.
At the end of a day, a week, or a role, I want to be able to look back and actually see what I built. Not just what survived in the memories of team members and myself. Some things stick, but a lot gets forgotten. Smart people write things down.
I need to be the first one who’s proud of what I’ve done. That matters, independent of whatever anyone else decides it’s worth.
What the f*** have you done lately?
When the time comes, imagine James looking straight at you.
A promotion conversation. A job search. Or eventually, someone who loves you asking what you spent all those years doing.
He’s not asking about your promotion. He’s asking what you actually did: with the time you had, with the people you worked with, in the third of your life you handed to a company.
Did you make the people around you better? Did you make the place worth spending that time in? Did you move anything, even slightly, in a direction that mattered?
The Captain’s Log isn’t only evidence for a performance review. It’s how you know your own answer. Not the polished one. The real one. The one you can look at and say: I was paying attention. I knew what I was doing and why.
So when the question comes — and it will — you don’t have to guess.