How to get noticed by key stakeholders and build your career brand

Executive overview

Most professionals focus on performance but neglect the relationships that determine whether opportunities reach them at all. Daphne E. Jones argues that treating yourself as a product — with a market, a price, competition, and an expiry risk — removes emotion from career strategy and makes improvement concrete.

The framework is performance, image, and exposure: performance is table stakes; image is how people experience you when you show up; exposure is who knows you well enough to advocate for you when you're not in the room.

The biggest career risk isn't poor performance — it's being invisible to the people who decide your future.

You are a product

• Your compensation is your price; if price exceeds value, you get discontinued or moved to a lower shelf.
• Competitors exist for every seat — treat them as Pepsi treats Coca-Cola.
• Relevance requires continuous improvement; products without it expire.
• Thinking of yourself as a product makes feedback data, not personal attack.

The performance–image–exposure model

• Performance is the foundation: know what winning looks like for your boss, department, and company.
• As you rise, performance alone stops differentiating you — everyone at the top performs.
• Image is the intangible: emotional intelligence, how people feel when you walk into a meeting, what they predict about you before you arrive.
• Exposure is the who: the number and seniority of people who know your image well enough to recommend you unprompted.
• Underexposure means opportunities pass silently — no one mentions them, no one calls.
• Overexposure is also real: being the face of a campaign can invite scrutiny of whether you're doing your job.
• Balance all three; a strong image means nothing if only two people have seen it.

Stakeholder mapping

• Start with your destination: what do you want to achieve, and who has been there?
• Plot stakeholders on a 2×2 matrix: high/low influence on one axis, high/low interest on the other.
• High influence + high interest: invest the most time — feed them information, stay visible.
• Low influence + high interest: maintain contact; their influence may rise with a promotion.
• Low influence + low interest: monitor, don't ignore — categories shift.
• Apply the same logic as a sales territory map: spend time proportional to the return on that investment.
• The goal is intentional engagement, not whoever lands on your calendar.

Circle vs. corner

• Not every stakeholder in your circle is in your corner — distinguish who can help from who will.
• Think of the boxing corner: sponsors there to relieve the cut, give water, provide strategy, push you back out to win.
• Identify who needs to be in your corner, what influence they hold over your outcomes, and what they need from you in return.
• Keep relationships warm proactively — don't wait until you need them to re-engage after four years of silence.
• Apply the net promoter lens: count your detractors vs. supporters; if detractors dominate, take action rather than ignore the signal.

Building and sustaining sponsor relationships

• A sponsor talks about you; a mentor talks with you — both matter, but sponsors move your career.
• Pre-invest in relationships before you need them; the woman who lost her president role had strong performance but no sponsor willing to argue for a second chance.
• Mentors want to feel their investment is working — not listening is a form of rejection.
• Take the meat and spit out the bones: adapt advice to your situation rather than accepting or rejecting it wholesale.
• Report back on what you used; mentors respond to evidence that they contributed to your win.

Diagnosing under- and overexposure

• Underexposed: you learn about opportunities only after someone else is chosen, and silence is the norm around you.
• Overexposed: attention shifts from your work to your presence — people question whether you are focused.
• When you identify underexposure, map who makes decisions about you and build deliberate access to them.
• Declining high-visibility opportunities is sometimes the right move to protect credibility.

Mindset shift: from self-focus to purpose

• Daphne completed the book while undergoing breast cancer treatment by reframing: the book was not about her, it was for overlooked and undervalued people who don't know they don't need permission to prosper.
• Shifting from self-centered to purpose-driven unlocked energy that personal resilience alone couldn't.
• Leaders who build this outward orientation sustain momentum through setbacks that would otherwise stall them.