3 Ways You Talk About Your Work That Are Holding You Back From Bigger Opportunities
If you're great at your job but still getting passed over for promotions and raises, the issue probably isn't your performance. It's how you describe your work to decision-makers. Let's talk about it.
Welcome to Reframed by Ashley Rudolph. One idea, every week, that changes how you see your career.
Last week, Michelle Y. Hoover, David Daniels IV, and I wrote about the advice we’d give our younger selves. Some of my favorite takeaways from our newsletters were:
Think about the optics. Work isn’t just about what you do but also about others’ perceptions of you and your work
Being excellent isn’t enough. Excellent makes you valuable but it doesn’t make you advanceable - I’m going to be thinking about it for the rest of the week
Sometimes a detour isn’t failure, it’s just strategy. Also invest in relationships - they pay off.
The way you talk about your work just might be keeping you stuck, here’s how to change that.
Here’s a lesson I’ve seen play out with client after client: the way you talk about your work needs to reflect your impact if you want to continue to advance. When a friend sent me this tweet, I knew I had to write about it.
Low-level language is costing you: (1) the promotion you're qualified for, (2) the raise you've already earned, and even (3) invitations to the strategic conversations you should be invited to.
You can be the hardest working person on your team and still miss these opportunities not because you didn’t earn them, but because you’re using the wrong words to talk about your work.
CONTEXT
What’s “low-level language”?
I’ve found that “low-level language” falls into one of three categories:
Mistake #1: Centering Tasks and/or Activities
This is the most common trap for high-achievers. You lead with describing what you did, not the value your work produced. Describing tasks without impact sounds like:
“I managed the project, ran the weekly syncs, and coordinated the vendors.” - and what happened as a result?
“I delivered a presentation to 50 executives.” - and what happened as a result?
“I built a dashboard.” - yay numbers, but what am I supposed to do with them?
When you’re a really great executer, you develop a habit of talking about your work without outcomes attached, because quite frankly, you don’t have to. Your work is impressive and, up until a certain point in your career, your work really does speak for itself. But this stops working at the Director level.
Mistake #2: Providing Too Much In-the-Weeds Detail
When you try to show your work by listing every step in your process, you signal to executives that you’re an executor and not a leader.
Being too in-the-weeds sounds like:
“I pulled the data from three systems, then I cleaned it in Excel which took me 3 hours, then I built the pivot table and created all the charts we needed to visualize the data, and then I sent the deck to the executive team.” - great, but why should I care?
This example leaves out the outcome entirely and…it bores everyone with too many details. When you over-explain your work you leave people thinking “omg will he/she/they get to the point already!?”.
Mistake #3: Being Too Vague About Your Improvements
This happens when you’re trying your best to sound like an executive, but you don’t know how to “be strategic”. These statements feel like high-level language on the surface, but don’t say anything substantive at all. No specificity = no credibility.
Being too vague sounds like:
“I improved processes.” - okay, but how?
“I drove strategic alignment.” - also okay - but how?
“I helped move things forward.” - People who are informed see right through this.
Maybe you’re sitting there thinking “okay, but what does good look like?” Maybe you’re even a bit shook after realizing that you’ve made some of these mistakes. It’s okay, I sometimes make them myself and I wrote the playbook!
High-level language is not the ability to string together a bunch of impressive-sounding words.
Bad → Vague filler language/business slop: “I drove cross-functional synergies to accelerate organizational transformation.” This is bad. Very bad. Meme-worthy.
Good → High-level language: “I redesigned how the engineering and product teams collaborated on roadmap planning. My work reduced our average new feature development time from 8 weeks to 4.”
High-level language is backed by actual work. You’re drawing a connection between the steps you're taking and the impact your work ultimately has. It’s a skill that takes practice. You’re summarizing the truth, effectively. The detail exists. You’re just leading with what matters.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Reframing Your Work The Right Way Gets You Promoted
A client came to me wanting to prepare for her promotion conversation. The playbook that got her promoted previously wasn’t working anymore. She had spent weeks meticulously building a case — a detailed document comparing herself against every single competency at her current level and the next level. It was thorough. It was organized.
As soon as I read through it, the problem was clear to me: it proved she was doing the work but it didn’t make the case for a promotion. It wasn’t landing for me, so it wasn’t going to land for leadership.
She did what most high-achievers do, they document all their tasks. Every bullet point proved effort. The way that she framed her work actually made it look like she was doing everything without judgment and that gave her leader the impression that she wasn’t managing her time well.
Her impact (the 50% YoY revenue increase she had driven) was buried in the middle of the document, in a sub-bullet.
So we rewrote it and we revised her talking points. She led with the revenue increase. She described the meeting she’d built from scratch that the executive team found incredibly valuable. She named what the company now had because of her (structure, visibility, and the ability to make the right business decisions), not the inner workings of her task list.
She got the promotion.
Her work was never the problem. The language she used to frame her work was.
INSIGHT
High-achievers assume they have to take on more work in order to get promoted, but what they need to do is reframe the great work they’re already doing.
THE FRAMEWORK
2 Strategies for Reframing Your Work As High Impact
If you want a more detailed primer on how to identify your impact, start with my IMPACT Formula. Here's how to start communicating at the level you're actually operating at:
Strategy #1: Use Outcome-First Framing
This is the antidote to both task/activity framing and being too vague about your improvements. When you use outcome-first framing, you don’t center your actions, they’re implied by your results.
Most people can follow directives, so naming your tasks doesn’t impress execs. The ability to inform strategy, make decisions, and steer teams towards the right direction all signal leadership capability. Most often, you’re already doing this but you don’t talk about it like you are.
Outcome-first framing sounds like:
“I retained 3 at-risk accounts worth $1.2M by restructuring the QBR process.”
“I shifted the org’s vendor selection approach, which cut procurement costs by 22% this year.”
This framing works because you’re naming the outcome (revenue protected, costs cut), the scope (at-risk accounts, the whole org), and the mechanism (QBR restructure, vendor selection approach). You land your points without listing a single step you took to get there. That combination signals three things at once: you know what matters to the business, you operate at the right altitude, and you were the architect not *just* the executor.
Anyone can manage a vendor or participate in a QBR. Not everyone reshapes how an organization makes decisions or saves $1.2M in the process.
Strategy #2: Signal Complexity Without the Details
You can show the difficulty of what you navigated without listing every step. When you do this well, you convey that you have good judgment and rigor through context, not process. That sounds like:
“I aligned 4 executive team members and reallocated $2M in our budget, ahead of the Q3 deadline.”
Notice what’s not in that sentence: no meetings listed, no emails mentioned, no process described. But the difficulty is inferred. When you do good work, people don’t need to see how the sausage is made. If you reveal too much, you run the risk of coming across as someone who overcomplicates everything. Don’t undermine yourself by sharing too many details.
Anyway, in this example - you choose to highlight the things that matter: 4 execs, $2M on the line, a hard Q3 deadline. That’s the point. It tells the other person you understand you were in a complex situation and that your approach solved it. That’s leadership.
The in-the-weeds version of the same situation: “I scheduled and facilitated 8 meetings, built a budget model for each meeting, incorporated 5 rounds of feedback, and got everyone aligned before the deadline”. This describes the same work but makes you sound like a project coordinator instead of a leader.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
How you talk about your work shapes your own perception of the value you bring to your organization. It’s a variable you control — it’s leverage.
It shapes how others see you.
Try this this week → read through something you've written or said about your work recently. Then ask yourself my two questions: What happened as a result? Why should anyone care? If your description doesn’t answer those questions outright, then you need to rewrite your story.
If you’re reading Reframed, you’re doing the work. You just have to learn to lead with what matters.
If you feel stuck, let me know how I can help.
Good luck. See you next week!
Ashley
P.S.
Which of these do you catch yourself doing the most?
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