Last week we had our monthly Team Sync. That’s an opportunity for our CEO of our Australian team to share news and updates of our company. I look forward to this meeting because it’s a snapshot of what’s happening in the company and also learning about what other teams are up to as most of the time being in a remote and virtual workforce, and in a role where I work alone for most of the time, these stories aren’t surfaced outside their direct teams so we don’t get to hear about them.

(Although I’m desperately trying to change this as the Community Manager through a slow uptake of using Yammer as the enterprise networking tool for cross-team sharing and networking spaces. It’s a hard slog at times to enable people to see business value in sharing knowledge, experiences, learning across geographical boundaries so I’m starting with easier fun groups first before I even attempt at communities of practice).

I was looking forward to this meeting because you get “feelings in your waters” when something is up in the company. Discussions with various colleagues behind the scenes in chit chats were pointing to “something going down” but no clear idea of what this could be. Sure enough there was an announcement of a new organisational chart.

Overall though, this was nothing surprising as I’ve been through these restructures ad nauseum in the past. After 25 years in the working world, announcements of reorganisations and “deck chair shuffling” is part and parcel of working nowadays. It’s to be expected and at times, needed especially if it makes sense in a growing company.

In fact, I like to think I’m an “old hand” at restructures after experiencing many role changes, working full time, part time, contract, casual roles (even in my own business), going for hundreds of new job applications and countless job interviews as well as four redundancies in my life working in the corporate world. At one stage, working in corporate, I was called “The Black Cloud” by my peers because it seemed restructures and redundancies followed me around. But that’s a story for another day. ?

However it was different this time. It was the first time in my working life, my role was forgotten on the organisation chart!

As I looked on each of the boxes, I wondered where I was sitting.

Was it marketing?

Was it adoption and change?

Was it strategy?

Was it in the Innovation Lab?

Who knows? I wasn’t on it!

I remember thinking my first thought at the time as: “They don’t know where to put me.”

I didn’t think they’d have forgotten me. Nor did I think they left me off sending me a message that my role was redundant otherwise I would have known long before the announcement. Besides, I’m pretty active on Teams and Yammer and thanks to the latter predominately now, I’ve spoken and connected with colleagues all around the world in the company so it’s not exactly that I’m invisible to any of them. ?

My second action was to smile. Yep. They don’t know where I fit.

Now it was just made evident and visible to all because I wasn’t anywhere in the org chart.

And that was ok.

In some way, this is not strange to me but it was initially confronting to see this played out so publicly and visibly in front of others.

It was an expression that spoke volumes to me – in a good way.

In some way, it was what was needed to finally make it known that in a new and modern workforce, there will be people who don’t “fit boxes”. They are people who may have unique skills, capabilities and talents, who show and share their work openly and transparently, “who work out loud”, who look like they are free in their work and who seem to have their work apply across the org chart.

So it seems that I have achieved my aim to work within the white space between boxes of a company organisation chart – just as change makers and activists should.

When the CEO ended his presentation and asked for questions, I was first to raise my hand. I could visibly see on camera that he automatically knew what I was going to ask and he answered my question. (Later he called me personally to explain further).

However, what happened DURING the company announcement in the Chat box was something else that I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN MY WORKING LIFE.

Others, outside my direct team, my peers from across the business publicly offered me a position in their teams. They also later sent me private messages to meet to chat further about how I could work with them in their teams.

In that moment, of OTHERS sharing MY value openly and publicly, (not through invisible DMs), I was humbled, acknowledged and appreciated. This is what “working out loud” and being transparent, authentic in work means despite it feeling like I was knocking my head against a brick wall to show value in my role as Community Manager.

It’s not me explaining my position as to why I should have a role in the company. It’s others showing why I’m valuable.

In that moment, I realised who found my skills valuable and I appreciated it greatly.

Afterwards, when I had a chance to reflect on this, if no-one mentioned anything in the chat or stayed silent afterwards, I believe it would have been the death knell of my time in the company. I don’t want to be in a company that stays silent.

So my lesson here was the importance of having the courage to express the work of others who have helped you openly and publicly especially when the perception of their role is unclear or ambiguous. This is going to happen more and more in virtual and remote work when people are isolated or working within teams and silos. There’s going to be those individuals who don’t work this way due to their cross boundary networks or their skills, capacities and capabilities mean they can work across project teams.

In those cases, speak up for their work and show how they helped you or how they can help because these individuals are trying to work within the constraints of a traditional business model to explain their value – which at times will be difficult to articulate because it cannot be measured with simple KPIs – and they need your support to show their value to the company vision.