Championing Your People, Inside and Out

Susan wasn't lost to a better offer. She was lost to being invisible.

Structured Insight Panel

Topic

Championing your people, inside the organisation and beyond it

Core Idea

Organisations that develop, credit and make their people visible retain them more effectively than organisations that guard them – and are increasingly the only ones AI can find.

Why It Matters

LinkedIn® content and profiles are now among the most highly cited sources feeding AI answers to business questions. A visible team is how an organisation gets discovered, and how candidates judge whether it grows people or hides them.

Key Takeaway

Ask your team who genuinely wants visibility and what kind, write down what is actually confidential, and publicly credit one person's work this week.

Key Questions Explored

• Should you help your people become visible, or are you simply training them up for a competitor?
• What does it mean to see the whole person rather than the job title, and why does that change how teams perform?
• How has AI changed the way organisations and their people are discovered, and what does that mean for employee visibility? 
• What are the genuine risks of encouraging employees to build a public profile, and how can each one be managed?
• How should leaders handle the people who do not want to be visible?
• What can someone do if they want to be visible and their employer is not there yet?

Who This Conversation Is For

This discussion will be of direct value to anyone responsible for developing, retaining or representing the people in an organisation.

• Senior leaders and founders weighing whether to encourage their teams to build a public profile, and what that means for retention
• People and culture leaders looking for practical ways to see and support the whole person, not the role
• Marketing and communications professionals who recognise that brand credibility now comes through people rather than campaigns
• Team leaders and managers navigating different working preferences, communication styles and appetites for visibility
• Professionals who want to build their own visibility and are unsure how their employer will respond

Key Insights From This Session

The tank is empty, not the motivation

When someone is not performing at their best, the instinct is to treat it as a motivation problem. Often it is depletion. People carry a whole life with them – passions, worries, caring responsibilities, upbringing – and organisations that relate to them only as a job title are working with a fraction of the person.

The "useless" things are load-bearing

Autotelic activity – done for its own sake, where the doing is the reward – trains the flow state that shows up at work. The senior leader who has stripped out mountain biking, music and play in the name of efficiency has removed the fuel for their own high performance, and modelled that removal for everyone watching.

People are best known for what they are good at, not what they enjoy

The spreadsheet expert who never liked spreadsheets became the organisation's go-to and now does more of what depletes them. Preferences and strengths are not the same thing, and a shared language for preferences – such as the TMP work wheel – lets teams work with each other rather than around each other.

LinkedIn® has become an AI source, not just a social platform

LinkedIn content and profiles are now among the most highly cited sources feeding AI answers to business questions. That changes the calculation on employee visibility entirely: your team's visible expertise is the raw material AI draws on when someone asks who knows a field and who they should talk to.

Trust cannot be generated by AI – only supported by it

The most effective brands are using AI as a tool, not a replacement for voice. When content feels AI-generated – through predictable cadences, generic framing, or the absence of genuine perspective – it erodes the trust that the brand was trying to build. Authenticity remains the differentiator.

Guarding people does not keep them

Muzzling visibility does not prevent departures. It guarantees that while people are with you, they operate well below their potential – and that the most capable candidates, who can see from the outside whether you grow people or guard them, never apply.

Visible proof has replaced claimed expertise

Any organisation can buy a campaign that looks credible. A team member with a genuine network, real recommendations and consistent expertise in public is verifiable from the outside in a way no marketing budget can replicate.

Culture moves through the willing

There is no value in trying to convert the command-and-control managers first. Start with the curious ones and let them demonstrate what it looks like. The most resistant people frequently become the strongest advocates once they have experienced it.

Key Concepts From This Discussion

• Championing your people

Championing describes actively developing, crediting and backing team members rather than protecting the organisation by keeping them out of view. Internally it means seeing and supporting the whole person. Externally it means enabling and amplifying their professional visibility. The two are sequential: the internal work is the foundation that makes external visibility credible.

• Seeing the whole person

An approach to team leadership that relates to people as complete individuals rather than as their job title – accounting for their interests, preferences, life stage, caring responsibilities and outside expertise. It surfaces transferable skills the organisation can use, and it materially affects how seen and supported people feel at work. Participation is always voluntary; the right to decline is part of the practice.

• Autotelic activity and cross-domain flow transfer

An autotelic activity is one undertaken for its own sake, where the doing is the reward. Such activities generate flow states that transfer across domains, including into professional performance. The practical implication for leaders is that protecting play and leisure is not a concession to work-life balance – it maintains the cognitive conditions that high performance depends on.

• Employee visibility and employee advocacy

Employee advocacy conventionally describes team members sharing and amplifying company content. Employee visibility is broader: supporting people to build genuine professional profiles in their own names, posting about their own expertise, and being publicly credited for their work. The broader form carries more credibility with both human audiences and AI systems, because it reflects individual expertise rather than corporate messaging.

• AI discoverability through people

AI systems answering business questions draw heavily on LinkedIn profiles and content. An organisation whose people are visibly knowledgeable is surfaced as expert; an organisation whose people are absent is not interpreted neutrally, but simply does not appear. One visible leader creates a single route to discovery. A visible team creates many.

• Guidelines, not gags

An approach to managing the risk of off-message posts: rather than restricting employees from posting, organisations define clearly what is confidential and grant genuine freedom on everything else. In practice the confidential list is far shorter than the fear that precedes writing it down, and clarity is experienced as permission rather than restriction.

About the Speakers

Lynnaire Johnston  –  Executive Visibility Strategist, Link·Ability

Lynnaire Johnston helps senior leaders ensure their presence – online and offline – reflects their level of expertise, authority and influence. Her work focuses on AI discoverability, semantic visibility, and the gap between how leaders are interpreted and how they intend to be understood. Based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, New Zealand, she is the founder of Link•Ability, the author of Link•Ability: 4 Powerful Strategies to Maximise Your LinkedIn Success, co-author of Business Gold, the world's only book about LinkedIn company pages, and host of The Visibility Advantage podcast.

Laurel McLay – Team Dynamics Specialist

Laurel McLay has spent 20 years helping people and teams understand how they work differently, and then work with each other's preferences – primarily in the engineering and infrastructure sectors. She uses profiling tools, including the TMP work wheel, to give teams meaningful data about how they communicate and where they genuinely thrive. Based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, New Zealand, her work centres on helping people be seen and feel valued for who they are.

Knowledge Block – Core Concept

Why Guarding Your People Costs More Than Championing Them

For most of the past two decades, the cautious position on employee visibility was defensible. If a team member built a public profile, the organisation gained little that it could measure, and the risk of losing them to a competitor felt real. Keeping people out of view looked like prudent talent management.

Two things have changed that calculation. 

The first is how expertise is now found. 

When buyers, candidates and event organisers want to know who understands a field, they increasingly ask an AI system rather than running a search – and those systems draw heavily on LinkedIn profiles and content. An organisation whose people are invisible is not neutrally positioned in that environment. It is simply absent from the answer.

The second is what visibility does to retention.

The assumption underlying the guarding instinct is that visibility makes people portable. In practice, the reverse holds. Someone who builds authority with their employer's active backing is embedded in the conditions that made that authority possible, and leaving costs them those conditions. Someone who builds an audience despite their employer is accumulating an asset that travels, and every addition to it is another reason to go.

The organisations that manage this well do not treat it as a communications initiative. They begin inside – with the conditions that let people be seen and valued as whole individuals – and only then look outward, with genuine choice, clear guardrails, and time built into the role rather than expected on top of it. What results is not a content programme. It is a body of credible, verifiable expertise attached to named people, which is the one form of organisational reputation that cannot be bought.

Related Resources

• What Is Executive Visibility and Why Does It Matter Now
• How AI Is Changing LinkedIn Visibility for Senior Leaders
• The Link·Ability Blueprint
• Should You Encourage Your Employees to Be Visible on LinkedIn?

Quote Highlights from the Conversation

"Susan wasn't lost to a better offer. She was lost to being invisible." — Lynnaire Johnston

“It sounds like prudence. But in actual fact that really is a slow leak, because it doesn't stop people from leaving when you muzzle them." — Lynnaire Johnston

“A LinkedIn profile belongs to the person, not the company." — Lynnaire Johnston

“"Now it's not about brands claiming expertise. It's about visible proof." — Lynnaire Johnston

"Silence breeds fear, not safety." — Laurel McLay

"You can't champion in others what you've stripped out of yourself." — Laurel McLay

"Culture moves through the willing, not the resistant." — Laurel McLay

"Often the person putting the most pressure on us is us." — Laurel McLay

Key Takeaways for Leaders

• Ask, don't announce. Find out who genuinely wants visibility and what form appeals to them. Visibility that is mandated reads as exactly what it is, and it undermines the credibility of the people who wanted it.
  
• Write down what is actually confidential. The list is almost always shorter than the fear. Everything not on it becomes freedom rather than risk.
  
• Build the time into the role. Ten or fifteen minutes a day is enough. Expecting people to become visible in their own time guarantees inconsistency.
  
• Credit one team member publicly this week, somewhere a client will see it – on the company page, or by commenting on and sharing their post from it.
  
• Check your own profile first. If you are asking your team to be visible, a neglected leadership profile undermines the request before it is made.
  
• Test what AI says about your organisation. Ask an AI assistant the questions your clients would ask about your field, and see whether your organisation and your people appear at all.
  
• Treat the whole person as the foundation. External visibility built on an organisation where people do not feel seen internally will not hold, and audiences can tell the difference.
  

Full Transcript

Below is the full conversation from Championing Your People, Inside and Out, with Laurel McLay and Lynnaire Johnston, recorded 22 July 2026. The transcript has been lightly edited for readability while preserving the meaning of the discussion. The session replay is available alongside this page.

Welcome and introductions

Laurel McLay

Testing, testing. Can you hear me?

Lynnaire Johnston

Hi, Laurel. Great to be with everybody today.

Laurel McLay

Thank you, Lynnaire. Hi, everyone. Welcome, and thanks for being here. I'm Laurel McLay, and I'm here with the wonderful Lynnaire Johnston. We're both here in gorgeous Ōtepoti, Dunedin. For the next while, we're going to be talking about something we think matters more than ever: championing your people.

A quick bit of housekeeping. This is a conversation, not a lecture. So rather than holding a Q&A at the end, if a question pops up, just ask — don't sit on it. We're recording this, so you'll get that afterwards.

The question we're here for is this: should you help your people be seen, be visible, and grow out there? Or are you just training them up for the next competitor — putting them out there and saying, look how fantastic my people are? It's a genuine fear, and it deserves a proper answer.

Lynnaire is going to take the outside story: being visible and being found. I'll start with the inside one: seeing and championing the whole person. By the end, you'll have a simple way to do both.

For those who don't know me, I've spent 20 years helping people and teams understand how they work differently, and then work with each other's preferences — primarily in the engineering and infrastructure space, where I have a real soft spot. I also enjoy giving them profiling tools that provide meaningful data, so they can see the value of communicating powerfully on so many levels. Why I'm here today is helping people be seen and feel valued for who they are. That's the inside of championing people, which is where we're going to start.

But I'd love to introduce Lynnaire, who I met during the COVID days. This is our first session delivering together. Lynnaire, over to you.

Lynnaire Johnston

Thank you, Laurel. Hi, everybody. A special shout out to my friend Meryl Cass from New Jersey — hi, Meryl. Meryl always supports the events we do, and we're always very grateful. Thank you, and thank you to everyone else who has joined us today.

We've put everybody on mute and turned videos off just for now, but we'll open it up so you can chat with us or come back on video later, once we've finished talking.

I'm an Executive Visibility Strategist. I work with senior professionals all around the world who want to be seen online. Generally that's on LinkedIn, which is the world's best social media platform for business in my view. I help them be seen by people on LinkedIn, but also by AI — and I'll talk more about that shortly.

I'm the author of Link•Ability: 4 Powerful Strategies to Maximise Your LinkedIn Success, the co-author of Business Gold, the world's only book about LinkedIn company pages, and the host of the very new Visibility Advantage podcast, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm really pleased to have a chance to discuss this topic today, Laurel, because it's one I get asked about all the time. People find that their employers aren't terribly keen for them to be visible online — and as you can imagine, I think being visible is a very good thing indeed. But as you've already said, let's start from the inside and build that first.

The whole person

Laurel McLay

Thank you, Lynnaire. It's great that we have this wealth of knowledge you bring. Certainly, when I look at LinkedIn, or when I do an AI search on someone, I can see it's going to LinkedIn before anything else. So now more than ever, this matters.

Let's start with the inside bit. The whole you matters more than ever now, and I think we've just got to name it: so many people are dealing with exhaustion. I'm doing some work around signal in the noise, and around people being biology first — we're not just robots. When we run pre-questionnaires to find out how people are feeling, the typical response is simply, I am so tired.

We've got to stop expecting ourselves and our teams to run like machines. We're living people. We've got feelings and values, and if we feel we're not seen for that, our mental health can really suffer.

Every person carries a whole life with them: their passions, their worries, their beliefs, their experiences, their upbringing. When someone isn't performing at their best, it's often not a motivation problem. The tank is just empty. So championing people starts here — seeing the whole person, not just the professional mask.

I'm working with a wonderful flow specialist called Simon Mackenzie Nixon, and he put this in his recent peak performance blog. I loved it. Let's talk about someone called Olivia — two versions of Olivia.

Olivia A runs hard Monday to Friday. She's highly efficient. She quit the gym six months ago, she hasn't skied in two years, and she focuses on work, because she thinks that's what it's all about.

Olivia B has that same demanding week, but she fiercely protects her Saturday mornings. She mountain bikes. She's a mediocre but enthusiastic skier. She picks up the guitar from time to time, and she's not that good at it.

What we're coming to understand, now that we have this wonderful ability to look at the neuroscience, is that this "useless" stuff isn't useless. There's a great word — autotelic — which describes something done for its own sake, where the doing is the reward. That provides a source of flow. Olivia B's biking, her skiing, her not-great guitar all train the flow state that then shows up at work. We call this cross-domain flow transfer. Olivia A has stripped out everything "useless", and that's lost her the fuel of high performance.

So this is a key aspect of looking at the whole you, versus your job role.

I don't know how many of you come from my generation — seen and not heard, don't be a show-off, that sort of thing. That's a lot of the script we were raised on, and it's conditioning. We know conditioning can be unlearned. Sometimes the more senior we get, the more we treat play as optional, and that's when the high-flow leisure you've cut starts degrading the operating system we need you to run on to do your job. It's the same wiring: command and control, old conditioning showing up in how you treat your own life.

In my session today we're going to talk about seeing the whole person, championing them, and then future-proofing yourself and them.

What lights people up

Laurel McLay

So, what lights people up? When I'm hosting workshops, usually with engineers, we run an assessment on creativity versus practicality, and we look at that both inside and outside of work. Some of the most practical individuals turn out to be completely creative in their own lives. They share their poetry, their woodworking, their watercolour artistry. I know someone who ran an entire netball community. These are their hidden whole selves — and it's a nod to the autotelic activity I just mentioned.

But what about the transferable skills? What about the fundraiser who really knows how to create invitations? Or someone who's a real-life Ted Lasso and could bring some coaching? These are transferable skills the organisation can use. So it's good for people to name and share with their teammates what they do in their spare time.

Ask about their purpose, too. Are there causes or charities they care about? Some of the most amazing, helpful people I know keep themselves a bit hidden. Again, it's a hangover from command and control: we treat private lives as off limits. That doesn't apply any more, because silence breeds fear, not safety.

On team days, we'll go around the table and each share one thing that's going on in our life. It might be someone dealing with an elderly father needing care, or someone whose son has just gone overseas on a basketball scholarship, or someone renovating a yacht that's taking forever. When people share and understand a bit more about the whole person, it moves from fear to trust. And loneliness and mental health are so significant, particularly for people who are new to a city or a country.

How people are wired

Laurel McLay

We talk about preferences, not strengths. That's what I love about the TMP profiling system I use: you practise what you prefer, so you become more proficient. You want a job based on your preferences, not your strengths — which might not be the same thing.

For example, I know so many people who are spreadsheet ninjas. They understand spreadsheets so well, they can whip them up and make them control everything they need. They do it pretty well. But often they're the ones who don't actually like spreadsheets at all. They only got good at it to make their own lives easier. And guess what? They become the go-to person in the organisation for creating spreadsheets, and end up doing more of what they don't enjoy.

Preferences show how people best work, and how they communicate. This really helps reduce friction — with the highly principled version of yourself who won't budge on a stand, or the extrovert who can't stop talking, or the introvert who never speaks. When we look at how people are wired, we're giving a team a code for understanding how each other likes to work, and accepting it.

In a recent workshop, there were two people the manager had raised concerns with me about beforehand. They sat on opposite sides of the wheel, they were constantly niggling at each other, and the whole team knew about it. That completely flipped once they saw how differently they were wired, and understood to see their respective preferences as something to support rather than move away from. Do you know what? They now even have lunch together. The lightness just came up. It's something I've seen again and again.

Championing them: creating the conditions

Laurel McLay

The second thing we want to do is champion them, and the first step is to create the conditions. Happy people do better work and they're more productive. You can create your environment and your conditions, and none of it has to be expensive.

Some of the ways people I work with, and people I've observed, do this:

• A company band — a group of people in the company who all play an instrument and get together to play. Sometimes they perform, but mostly it's about having fun together.
• A show and tell, or a lunch and learn: sign language, martial arts, whatever you can share with your colleagues. Everyone has something they can teach.
• A cause or charity you'd like the company to get behind.

People want to feel supported, too. There's a company here in Dunedin, Cook Brothers, who have a full-time performance coach from a sports background, available for their team to talk about high performance and anything else. Another company, Potentia, started their recruitment company at the same time I started mine, many years ago. They include coaching someone into their new role, so if someone gets a placement through them, they coach them for the first few months. That gives real support through what can be bewildering early days.

You want to make sure your people are equipped. An EAP — somewhere people can go if they need it. Really solid mental health policies that cover the real things: bullying, domestic violence. So many organisations still don't have these, and it's important, not just from a legislative point of view but for creating the conditions.

Some other things you can do:

• Let people choose their own development. Even a small annual budget each person can spend on what they want helps them feel valued for who they are.
• Think about life-stage support. Some people are going through fertility challenges, some menopause, some caring for elderly parents. In engineering and construction, a lot of people haven't talked about this, so it's a real differentiator.

One thing I want to raise, because I'm hoping it has changed and I'm fascinated to hear your thoughts: work drinks and offsites. They're often held up as a drawcard, and a party culture can be seen as attractive. But more and more, people are sober curious — I don't love that term — and some companies now host events without alcohol. That's a big change from the old everyone-gets-slammed default. It does take a while. I know plenty of people who avoid social occasions altogether because they're not interested in watching everyone get blotto, and quite frankly it's boring. That's definitely a differentiator in creating the right environment and conditions.

I grew up in the eighties, and my first job was in the nineties, and it was very much you can't socialise with your boss. My brother had a job at McDonald's where there was a total policy: you could not fraternise with the people you worked with. I think we still carry some of that old command and control — don't share anything about your own life, keep a very reverent mood. I worked in a department store where the manager was on the mezzanine floor, and they would look down and wander around the store very importantly, and we never did go and talk to them.

In my first job, my employer was completely disinterested in who I was. I was constantly being told off for my exuberance. There were a couple of times I took sick leave, and he rang me back in the old landline days about twice during each day. I could think that was a welfare call, but it wasn't. He was checking up on me. I couldn't have an outside life. Management was driven by fear, and I'm sure some of you have your own examples.

That's not how organisations thrive today. Take the risk, be vulnerable, share something real. I've been in meetings and workshops where a leader has shared something genuinely hard and personal, and I've seen the room shift. In one instance, not only did the room shift, but other people had been through something very similar, and it created real relatedness.

We also have to smash the age stereotypes at both ends. My son is 19 and doing really well for himself as an entrepreneur, and people respect and rate him — as opposed to when I was his age, when it was very much you are the bottom of the barrel. And at the older end, experience and relevance don't expire. It's about making sure ageism isn't tolerated.

This shows up in the results. The Deloitte 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Study found that most people aged 18 to 24 want to be authentic at work, versus only 38% of people in their late fifties and early sixties. Over half of millennials can discuss personal matters with their manager; only 24% of boomers feel they can. It's a leadership and culture issue. We want to make sure we don't tolerate the stuff that has been so entrenched — and that includes sharing blogs and write-ups publicly, which Lynnaire is going to talk more about.

And people look to you. So be the first. Culture change is modelled. Why not consider being the Olivia B version: protecting your own play and leisure, living a life out loud, telling people about it. You can't champion in others what you've stripped out of yourself. So it's a great reason to go and unlearn any of that, if it applies to you.

Future-proofing

Laurel McLay

Finally, future-proofing. Anticipating external change is really important right now for seeing the whole person. Look at the civil servants in Wellington: the restructures and cuts have shown how fast a single-identity working life can come apart.

This is why a broad identity matters. If your work is your whole self and that work goes, what are you left with? That's what championing your people is about — making sure they're more than the job title they feel they need to be.

Reinvention isn't expensive any more, either. You should see how quickly you can create a website now. I found that amazing. You don't have to pay a lot of money if you're looking at transitioning out. That's something I'm doing, and we'll share information about it when we send material out afterwards — it's about AI play, tempting people to bring AI in in a way that fits for them.

People's needs shift across a working life. I'm dealing with people who have team members wanting to travel less because they've just had a baby, and others whose kids have just left home and want to travel more. So think about all that change, and think about supporting them through it.

Something we don't talk about a lot is people heading towards retirement. We treat them as though nothing's going to change, or we start writing them out of our future. I turn 60 next year, and I've been reading a great book called The 60-Something Crisis. For the first time in my life I'm planning — I'm not going to call it my retirement, I'm going to call it my years up to 70 — because I want to make sure I'm doing more travel now, rather than suddenly ten years go past and I haven't travelled at all.

You can actually manage some of those off-ramps. I've got a number of clients who have gone from four days a week down to three, down to two, then turned into a consultant and contracted back to the organisation. And on-ramps matter too: someone coming back after illness, and making sure that managed return looks at the whole person.

This is brave, because you're saying you've got people you're not necessarily encouraging to leave, but potentially helping. It's also important to be commercial about it. If you genuinely invest in someone's development, it's okay to have a bond — the last thing you want is to say yes, I'll help you with this, and then they don't stick to their end of the bargain. So be fair, and be commercial.

And the privacy point has to be said: some people, particularly older people, may not want to share their plans or share themselves, and that has to be respected. But I also think that if other people start to share, they might feel less resistant — because before, they may simply not have felt safe enough to.

So we're looking at a championing-your-people plan. Implement these changes, and understand that this is not the normal narrative — which is exactly why it's a massive advantage. Do it well, and your employer brand elevates.

We're just about to move into Lynnaire's work, and the key point is this: the internal championing is the foundation for the external visibility. Externally, that means encouraging your people to be visible on LinkedIn, rather than worrying that you're training them up to be a competitor.

We'll send you out a championing-your-people checklist — it's a bit hard to say — with some ideas you can use. Make sure you do something that makes a difference to championing a person inside and out. Seriously, I've seen this in teams where people simply ask what's going on in each other's lives, and it becomes something far more accepted in the common narrative. When you see the whole person, they feel seen.

What I'd like to do now is hand over to Lynnaire, who's going to take the external championing side.

The external story: Susan

Lynnaire Johnston

Thank you, Laurel. I'm with you — I grew up in the day and age where you were seen and not heard, so there was very little opportunity for people to be the whole person inside the company. To a degree, that's still the case in a lot of traditional organisations.

But in this day and age it's really important that companies understand the world has changed. Look at the massive change that has come on the back of AI going mainstream in the last 18 months. Think back to 2022 or 2023 — there was very little AI around. Now it's everywhere. Building visibility, trust and reputation has changed in the modern era.

I'd like to start with a story about Susan. We heard about Olivia from Laurel; I'm going to talk about Susan. Susan is, of course, a client who doesn't exist under that particular name.

Susan was a very clever person in the accounting field, and she recognised that AI was changing the world dramatically. She wanted to be at the forefront of that. She still wanted to have a job in five years' time, and she recognised that a good, solid understanding of AI was the way to do that. She also recognised that the best way to learn about it was to write about it and share what she was finding out.

She had a nice little network of people on LinkedIn that she'd built up over time. So she started writing consistently — not frequently, not every day — about what she was learning about AI and its effect on accountancy.

What happened as a result was that a conference organiser in her city found her using AI. They'd put in an AI query for somebody with her experience, understanding and knowledge, and she was the person who came up. She was consequently invited to speak at the conference this person was organising. It was a national conference, so it was a really big deal.

At the same time, Susan's boss had been watching this go on, seeing Susan post more frequently on LinkedIn about her area of expertise and what she was learning. But he had a very poor LinkedIn profile with nothing current on it. He'd ignored it and couldn't see the value. When he saw that Susan was building a network, that she was becoming visible, that people were seeing her, and that she was getting opportunities like this conference invitation — which incidentally he did not receive — he ordered Susan to stop posting. Dead in the water. That was it. No discussion. Just stop.

Susan wasn't terribly keen on this, which is an understatement. Within a month, she left the organisation, and she was immediately snapped up by a competitor.

It's worth remembering that Susan had put time into this. She'd built a network, and she was well known as somebody with good experience in her area of expertise. But that was seen as a problem by her company.

The fear-based logic

Lynnaire Johnston

This is not unusual. Fear-based logic holds a lot of companies back when it comes to LinkedIn and being visible online generally.

There's a general feeling that if you develop your team members too much, too quickly, they'll have a better profile than you on LinkedIn. That's often the case, because senior leaders don't often put a lot of time and attention into how they come across on LinkedIn. Their profiles are frequently incomplete, they're not using LinkedIn's current features, and their profiles don't reflect who they currently are or the work they're currently doing.

Company pages often fall into the same category. They're not used well, or they're used only to promote the company rather than to talk about staff members and their achievements, or to give a much wider view of what's going on in the industry. They see their company page as having a very narrow focus indeed.

So the first fear is that when you develop your team members, they'll overshadow you.

The second fear is that the person who is visible online will be poached. I'll talk more about this in a minute, but it's a very real fear for a lot of people, and they can sometimes conflate somebody leaving with the whole visibility issue.

The third is that if you develop your people and they become an authority in their field, they might go out on their own and compete with you. You certainly don't want that if they're doing good work for you.

When you add all three of these together, it sounds like prudence, doesn't it — not allowing your team members to be visible online. But in actual fact it's a slow leak, because it doesn't stop people leaving when you muzzle them. What it does do is guarantee that while they're with you, they'll operate at only a fraction of their potential. Your best people are the ones who'll be great at their jobs, and also great at what they do online, if that's something they want to do.

I should point out at this stage that this is not mandatory. Some people will want to do this; some people won't, for some of the reasons Laurel has already talked about.

What happens when someone is visible

Lynnaire Johnston

So instead of a slow leak, let's talk about what happens when somebody is visible online.

It wasn't very long ago that LinkedIn was seen as a platform where people went to look for jobs. Then it became a platform where people could post content, build their brands and bring in new clients. Then AI got involved — and now LinkedIn content and LinkedIn profiles are among the most highly cited sources of information for the questions people ask their AI.

If you're anything like me, you'll have moved away from Google search. When you want to know about something, you ask your AI: how to do something, how to find out about something, what you need to know, how something works. That's happening all over the place, and it has changed what gets answered and what shows up.

If you want your company to show up in those AI answers — because let's face it, SEO doesn't do the job any more — then you'll want your company to have good visibility on LinkedIn, and you'll want to see your team members as an asset, because their visible expertise is what AI picks up.

This is something that has only happened in the past few months. Very few people are really aware that this is going on, but LinkedIn has now become the most cited source for many AI answers to business questions. If we keep that firmly in mind, it rather changes the whole idea about people being visible.

Another reason to think about this is how people themselves feel. Laurel has talked about the whole person and how people feel within an organisation when they're able to be themselves, and I think that has a direct correlation with how they're championed visibly online.

People who have their company's support will feel loyal to the company. They'll bring their best selves to work. They'll feel supported, credited, and like the company is on their side. If they walk away from that, they're walking away from a company that makes the authority they're building possible — and they simply won't want to do that, all other things being equal. If the culture is great, if they feel rewarded financially, if they feel visible and supported, they're going to want to stay.

Conversely, when people feel guarded — when they're not able to be visible online — and let's face it, younger people particularly are keen on this, because they've grown up in the social media era and to them it's second nature. For those of us who are a little older, it's harder to get our heads around, and some people are extroverts and very keen while others are introverts and not so much. But when a company guards its employees and doesn't allow them to spend time online in a positive way that boosts the company and shows it in a good light, that sends a bad message. People are more than inclined to think, I wonder where else I could go where I'd be seen. Because as we've already seen, Susan wasn't lost to a better offer. She was lost to being invisible.

Visible proof

Lynnaire Johnston

Any company worth its salt can buy a marketing campaign, and it can look very credible from the outside. But this kind of marketing isn't nearly as successful as it once was, and that's largely due to AI — to how people and companies are now being found, discovered and surfaced using AI. The game has changed dramatically in the last 18 months.

So now it's not about brands claiming expertise. It's about visible proof. This is where trust comes in, and it's the complete opposite of the command and control structure we've seen in companies for so long, which as Laurel has pointed out is now changing.

What we're seeing is a necessity for organisations to build trust online. You can't do that just by saying how great you are. You need expert proof, and that's built through the reputation of your people.

Say you've employed Susan. She has 5,000 people in her network, ten good recommendations on her LinkedIn profile, and she's on the platform regularly. She's commenting on other people's posts. She's putting up a post a week in her area of expertise. That's building a reputation, that's building visibility, and all of it is verifiable from the outside — verifiable to your clients, your potential clients, and those you may want to work with. No marketing budget can get anywhere near that.

The other thing to remember is the perspective of people who might want to come and work for your organisation. What if they're the kind of people who like to be visible? They're looking at your organisation and deciding whether they want to work for you. They're talented, they want to be visible, they want to develop their career, they want to become an authority in their own right for their longer-term goals.

What happens if your company is shielding its employees and nobody can see anything about either the leaders or the employees in their areas of expertise? They may well decide you aren't the right fit, because you're not supporting your employee experts publicly. So do remember that companies are also being looked at by candidates as potential employers, and think about how that might come across.

The risks

Lynnaire Johnston

Now, this is all very well — but what could possibly go wrong? Well, let me count the ways.

There are very real risks in this strategy, and it's worth looking at them and talking about them, because brushing them aside won't give you the ideas and suggestions you need to deal with them if this is the way you want to proceed.

Poaching. This is the biggest fear most companies have: that the team members you make visible will be poached by the competition. A lot of the people I work with feel this is a very real risk, and if anybody pretends otherwise, nobody's convinced. So that's the highest risk people feel about this.

Off-message posts. What if a team member posts something you don't agree with, or don't like, or that shouldn't have been said, or was confidential, or was off-brand? How do you deal with that? Fortunately this is the simplest one to fix — but it's a very real risk that people are concerned about, and wisely so, in my opinion.

Time. Being visible and developing that visibility takes time away from the actual work that has to be done. If a company is going to go down this road, it needs to think about how it's going to build that in. You can't expect people to become visible in their own time if you want to make maximum advantage of it. So think about how that might fit into the structure of a person's day if you're going to promote it to them.

Uneven participation. Some people will take this on board and some won't, and how people participate depends on their own whole person. It depends on whether they like to write, whether they like video, whether they like talking about themselves, whether they want to talk about what's going on in their lives, the charities they support, or the work they do outside their main job. There's a lot to think about, and it's an internal issue to deal with, because you don't want the company to look like it's promoting some people publicly and not others simply because some are online and visible. There are other ways to promote and champion people internally, and Laurel has already talked about some of those.

Reluctance. Not everybody wants to be visible online. A lot of people see LinkedIn as social media. I see it as social media for business — a business tool, which is completely different. Some people will be happy to do this, younger people generally, and some older people less so. It's important that we understand and respect that they value their privacy and don't want to be visible online.

Resolving the risks

Lynnaire Johnston

So how can we resolve these risks? Let's go back and deal with them one at a time.

Poaching was at the top of the list. You might back somebody publicly and then they leave. But people who leave on the back of being visible online generally don't leave for the visibility reason alone. They leave because they're unhappy with other aspects of the culture, or the work they're doing. They might want to be promoted and not feel they're being given the opportunities. So it's important to recognise that if a person is thinking of leaving, it's not necessarily just because you're restricting their visibility. It also means that when they do leave, another company may well promote and support them in becoming more visible online. The poaching risk isn't something to be seen on its own — it's part of your culture.

Off-message posts. I said this one is easy to fix, and I believe it. Upskill your team members. Give them guidelines and checklists. Tell them what they can post about, and be very clear about what they cannot post about. You don't want them talking about anything confidential — perhaps a major project the company is working on. As long as they're aware of what they can talk about and you put some guardrails around it, it won't be seen as gagging them. It'll be seen as giving them an area in which they can operate. Make that very clear, and upskill them so they can do it well and in a way that fits with your social media policies.

Time cost. Again, this is an internal issue, but you can't expect somebody to put time into it out of hours. You need to make it part of their role. You can make it part of a KPI, although as I said, perhaps not mandatory, because some people simply won't want to do this. But you do need to allow time for it. Even 10 or 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn — it's all about consistency over time. Making time available and encouraging people to use it is a very sensible move, in my opinion.

Uneven participation. Celebrating contribution in its different forms needs to be seen holistically within the organisation, and Laurel has covered this pretty well. People need to feel supported in the different ways they contribute, and public visibility is only one of those. It shouldn't outweigh the people who'd rather not be seen and heard.

Reluctance. You can't force anybody to be visible online if they don't want to be. A LinkedIn profile belongs to the person, not the company. If somebody doesn't want to do it, there's no point trying to force them. Keep it a genuine choice, because they won't do it as well as you'd like — they'll pay lip service to it, and they won't do themselves or the organisation any favours if you push it on them. Giving them a genuine choice is a really important thing to do.

Three things to do next week

Lynnaire Johnston

So what are three things you can do in the next week that push this along for the team members who want to become visible?

One: publicly credit one team member's work, somewhere a client could potentially see it. That could be on your company page. Company pages aren't used very well, in my opinion, and one way they could be used better is to promote what team members are doing — either on the page, or by supporting a team member's post by commenting on it and sharing it from the page. If you do that, the person is going to feel very supported, and I believe they'll feel more loyalty towards the organisation.

Two: ask your team members who actually wants this. As I said, I don't think it should be mandatory. It needs to be something people are keen to do, because they want their visibility to grow and can see the value in it both now and in the future. And ask them what kind of visibility they want, because there are plenty of ways to be visible online, and LinkedIn isn't even the only place it can happen.

Three: give them the guardrails. Write down and give them guidelines about what they can talk about and what they can't. This list will be a lot shorter than you might first think, or fear, because you'll want them to talk about their areas of expertise — perhaps not necessarily about the company, because you might have policies that don't allow that. Just make sure they're very clear on what they can write and talk about.

And that's it. So I'm going to leave you with this question: is your organisation championing its people, or quietly holding them back? I think that's a very real question in this day and age, with visibility the way it is and AI the way it is. Laurel, you and I have both seen how AI has changed everything we do, haven't we.

I'm really happy for us to take any questions, or for Laurel to pick this up and move the conversation forward

Discussion

Laurel McLay

Thank you, Lynnaire. What I loved about what you shared is that you called the elephant in the room. I hate that such a cliché, but that is it. The fact is there are risks — and I think there are risks in some of the other things I talked about too. It's about making sure you've got buy-in from the people who count, and if you haven't, that you quietly start showing it yourself. And for me, it's the whole thing about how incredible AI is at finding people who are out there prolifically profiling themselves and doing things like that. So thank you.

Lynnaire Johnston

I think it's important too, Laurel, from my part — the external part — to turn it on its head for a moment and talk about what it's like to be the person in the company who wants to be visible but isn't being allowed to be. It's useful for those people to have a few ideas as well.

I'm sure you'll have suggestions for the internal side. My suggestion as a starting point, for people who want to improve their visibility online and may not get buy-in from their company, is to start with their LinkedIn profile.

Nobody these days thinks that updating your LinkedIn profile means you're going to leave. That's a very old-fashioned way to look at LinkedIn. It's important that people keep their profile up to date over time — adding new milestones, new things they're learning, new certifications. There are a lot of features people don't generally use on LinkedIn now, and it's important for people to grow their networks. To do that, they need a profile that reflects who they currently are and what they're currently doing. So that's my major tip for anybody who wants to become more visible online and isn't sure what their company will think.

Laurel, have you got any suggestions for people from the inside?

Laurel McLay

The main one is: don't buy into the stereotypes. People often think that those out there blogging — about their life, or about their work — are the people who want to be presenters or speakers.

One of my favourite books, which I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, Lynnaire, is Quiet by Susan Cain. It's a guide to introverts in a world that can't stop talking. It talks about the leadership of quiet people, and how introverts make very great leaders. Often it's the dominant voices that get the attention, so sometimes introverts — even though they might be very good writers — think, oh, that's not for me, I'm not very showy. But it's about coaching yourself and understanding that this is a really great way to quietly and powerfully influence.

Lynnaire Johnston

I agree with that. Part of the issue for a lot of organisations is the speed at which things are changing, Laurel. Younger people see things very differently these days, but the leaders of companies are generally older. So there's a very big divide in how people see visibility.

A lot of leaders grew up in an era when you got a new job by word of mouth — the old boys' network, there's another cliché for you — and that's how business got done. These days it gets done in a completely different way, and having a large network of people you can call on, get to know and learn from over time is becoming increasingly important.

Our networks have always been important, but post-COVID those networks have gone online, largely. Building them up with people who aren't necessarily in your city or even your country — people who are overseas — is a very good thing to be doing. LinkedIn's a great place to learn from others. Reaching out to people who might be heavyweights in your industry and suggesting you'd like to learn from them, being active in their networks, is a good way to quietly become visible online without people getting concerned that you might be overstepping. It's a really interesting topic, and I could talk about it all day.

Laurel McLay

One thing I wanted to touch on, which someone sent me as a private question: we've got to face the fact that there are still plenty of command and control managers out there, and some of them will never accept, for example, that their young people shouldn't be treated pretty badly.

The whole point is that you don't start with them. You start with the managers who are already curious, the ones open to learning differently, and you let them show what it looks like. I've often found, especially in the engineering market I work in, that sometimes the most grumpy, set-in-their-ways people end up being your greatest advocates. So many times with the profiling systems, someone will say, I really wasn't looking forward to this, but actually it's been really useful.

There's no point trying to dominate and insist this gets done. Culture moves through the willing, not the resistant. But if you do get the resistant ones on board, that can be a really great influence, right?

Lynnaire Johnston

Absolutely. I love the way things are moving now, because with technology and the availability of AI to anybody who wants to try it out, the playing field has become a lot more level, and people can do more things publicly, and also in their own lives.

If companies were awake to the opportunities and saw people as an asset in this way, we'd see a lot more people being visible online and promoting their organisations. People build up a reputation through their LinkedIn profile and their network, and those are the things that make a person a really good asset for an organisation.

I'm really enthused about this topic. I've now allowed people to unmute and put their videos on if they wish, and to ask any questions. I haven't spotted anything in the chat, but we'll give you a moment if you'd like to.

We'll be providing some material on the back of this. Laurel, I'll put together a bullet-point summary of the things we've been talking about, and I know you had something you wanted to give to people who registered today as well.

Laurel McLay

Yes. It's really good to have a checklist. We'll send out the recording and the summarised version, but also a checklist — that's always useful for people who couldn't make it today.

Honestly, the way I've seen this change cultures in the people and companies I've worked with, where it's okay to talk about this — that's the whole thing. Some of these initiatives, like the R U OK movement out of Australia, address the idea that it's not my job to ask what's going on. When people realise it actually is all right to ask, things change.

Hannah, I see you and I worked at the same company that used green, orange, red. It became a narrative where you could just wander up and say, hey, how are you, Lynnaire? And you could say, actually, I'm feeling pretty red today. Or even orange, and it's fine. It's incredible how some of these initiatives can really help shift things, and help us see people not just as machines any more. There are a couple of us here on this call who remember when we were machines and were expected to be machines.

The one thing I'd like to finish on is that sometimes it's ourselves. Think about that Olivia example. No one's asking us to be a machine — we put that pressure on ourselves. We wouldn't dare ask someone whether we could blog, or whether they're interested in supporting our own work online. So often the person putting the most pressure on us is us.

Lynnaire Johnston

That's a very good note to leave this on, Laurel.

I'd like to thank everyone who has joined us live today. If you're watching the replay, Laurel and I are both open to discussions about the content of today's presentation. We trust you'll be connected to both of us on LinkedIn — if not, let's rectify that. Both Laurel and I are keen to talk with anybody who'd like to follow up, because we think this is an important issue that needs to be discussed more widely.

Thank you to everybody in the audience today, thank you very much to Meryl Cass for bringing people along, and thank you to Laurel. It's been a pleasure working with you on this, and I hope we're going to do it again soon.

Laurel McLay

Back at you, Lynnaire. It's great that we finally got the opportunity, and thank you for being so professional and prepared. It makes such a difference.

Lynnaire Johnston

Thanks, everybody. It was great to see you. Bye for now.