There is a peculiar thing that happens inside companies when an opportunity appears. A department needs someone to lead it, an important client has become difficult, a new project suddenly needs an owner, someone resigns, or management decides that a particular problem requires a different kind of person. Long before the formal machinery of job descriptions, interviews, performance reviews and HR processes has finished doing its work, people begin mentioning names. Someone says, “What about Sarah?” Another person agrees. Someone else remembers working with her on something two years ago and says she was excellent. Before long, Sarah has entered the consideration set.
There may be several other people in the organisation who are equally capable of doing the job, and some may be objectively better qualified. They may have stronger performance records, deeper technical knowledge or more years of experience, yet none of those things guarantees that their names will appear at the moment when someone asks, “Who could do this?” We tend to explain what happens next through merit, qualifications, relationships, politics, seniority or sometimes plain luck, all of which obviously play a role. But I have become increasingly interested in something that happens before much of that analysis begins: somebody has to come to mind.
Oddly enough, the science of selling toothpaste, Coca-Cola, washing detergent and chocolate may offer a useful way of thinking about why.
Marketing has spent decades trying to understand why people buy the brands they buy, and research associated with Andrew Ehrenberg, Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has challenged some of the more romantic explanations.
Consumers do not necessarily develop deep relationships with brands, carefully evaluate every alternative or consistently select products because they perceive some unique point of differentiation. Much of consumer behaviour is considerably more mundane. People buy from a repertoire of familiar brands, under conditions of limited attention, and brands benefit enormously from being easy to notice, easy to remember and easy to buy.
This is where mental availability enters the picture. A brand has greater mental availability when it is more likely to come to mind, or be recognised, in a buying situation. Knowing that Coca-Cola exists is therefore quite different from Coca-Cola appearing in your mind when you are standing in a shop deciding what to drink. The latter requires the brand to be connected in memory to the circumstances surrounding consumption.
Those circumstances are described as Category Entry Points, or CEPs. They are the needs, motivations, situations and contextual cues that bring someone towards a category. You might think about a soft drink because you are having lunch, because it is hot outside, because friends have come over, because you are watching football, because you are driving somewhere, or because you simply want something cold. The product category remains broadly the same while the route through which you arrive at it changes. Brands connected to many frequently occurring entry points have more opportunities to become mentally available.
The interesting leap is to take this mechanism out of consumer markets and place it inside a company, because organisations are full of situations that generate very similar retrieval problems. A major client becomes unhappy and somebody asks who can fix the relationship. A project starts falling apart and someone needs to take control. The company wants to enter another market and begins thinking about who understands unfamiliar environments. A manager resigns unexpectedly and somebody has to run the team. Senior management needs someone who can stand in front of an important customer tomorrow morning and handle the room. A new business idea appears and somebody asks who could build it.
Every one of these situations causes people to search their memories for names.
Viewed this way, professional reputation starts to look less like a single measure of how highly regarded someone is and more like a network of associations connecting that person to different organisational situations. Someone can be extraordinarily well known while being strongly associated with only one or two things. Another person can be less famous overall while appearing in people’s minds across a much wider range of circumstances.
Consider someone who has become known throughout a company as extraordinary with numbers. Whenever a complicated financial model appears, everyone thinks of him. It is an enviable reputation and a powerful professional Category Entry Point, but perhaps it is almost his only one. Another colleague might be slightly less technically accomplished, yet over several years people have encountered her in many different circumstances. They have watched her calm down an angry client, contribute intelligently to a strategy discussion, help another department solve a problem, present confidently to management, manage a junior colleague well and take responsibility when something unexpectedly went wrong. When a broader management position becomes available, she is connected to more of the cues activated by the role. People can retrieve evidence about her from several different situations because they have actually encountered her in those situations.
This does not imply that she gets the job simply because people remember her. Qualifications, politics, seniority, performance, compensation and the particular requirements of the position continue to exert their influence. Mental availability operates earlier and more quietly. Before someone can be evaluated for an opportunity, they generally have to enter consideration for it, and human beings do not carry perfectly indexed databases containing every colleague’s capabilities, achievements and latent potential. We retrieve people from memory using associations.
This brings me to an apparently trivial part of professional life that I increasingly suspect is not trivial at all: showing up.
I do not mean showing up in the conventional sense of networking aggressively, shaking every hand in the room or manufacturing visibility for its own sake. There is a more ordinary version of presence that happens constantly inside functioning organisations. You attend the meeting that you could technically have skipped. You participate rather than remaining permanently silent. You make an appearance at the company gathering. You answer when somebody asks a useful question in a WhatsApp group. You pick up the call. You contribute to the discussion when you genuinely have something useful to add. Someone outside your department asks for ten minutes of help and you give it to them. You remain responsive when something requires your attention rather than disappearing until somebody follows up three times.
Individually, these interactions can seem almost meaningless. Across several years, however, they create hundreds or thousands of small opportunities for other people to observe how you think, how you behave, what you know, whether you respond, whether you help and what kinds of problems you seem capable of solving. Some encounters disappear immediately from memory while others leave small associations behind. Sarah understands clients. Daniel is remarkably calm when things go wrong. Maya knows this market. James responds when something is urgent. Helen always seems to improve a discussion when she joins it. None of these impressions necessarily emerged from a formal assessment. They accumulated through repeated exposure.
There is a reason the old phrase “out of sight, out of mind” has survived for so long. Human memory does not preserve a perfectly weighted record of everybody we have ever worked with. Retrieval is affected by recency, frequency, context and the strength of existing associations. Someone who repeatedly appears in relevant situations gives other people more opportunities to form and refresh those associations, while someone who performs exceptional work almost entirely within a narrow organisational perimeter may have far fewer opportunities to build them.
Modern organisations have made this even more interesting because showing up no longer requires physically appearing anywhere. WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, email and group chats have created something resembling digital proximity. A person can work thousands of kilometres away and remain remarkably present in the organisation’s collective consciousness, while somebody sitting twenty metres from senior management can become almost invisible.
Take something as mundane as a company WhatsApp group. Twenty people might occupy the same group for three years. One almost never contributes unless directly asked. Another replies occasionally, usually after the discussion has moved on. A third contributes selectively, answers questions when they know something useful, acknowledges important information, occasionally shares something relevant and responds when another person needs help. None of this feels like career strategy while it is happening. Yet after three years, the third person has been encountered by colleagues in hundreds of small contexts from which impressions have gradually accumulated.
Responsiveness itself may become an association. At first, somebody simply notices that you answer messages. After enough repetitions, “she answers” can quietly become “she is reliable.” Reliability then begins to travel beyond the original behaviour from which the judgment emerged. Someone facing an unfamiliar problem months later may think of the responsive person because availability and dependability have become connected in memory.
Of course, anyone who has survived enough corporate meetings knows that visibility has its own failure mode. There is always somebody who speaks constantly without improving the conversation, replies to every message without adding information and treats presence as a substitute for contribution. Frequency creates associations, but there is no guarantee they will be favourable. The more useful form of presence combines repeated exposure with contribution, allowing people to encounter your capabilities without making them wish they encountered you less.
Research on what Kimberly Elsbach, Daniel Cable and Jeffrey Sherman called passive face time offers an interesting parallel. Their work found that simply being observed at work could affect colleagues’ perceptions of characteristics such as dependability and commitment, even when the observer did not have direct evidence of the employee’s actual performance. It is a slightly unsettling finding because it suggests that presence can influence professional judgment independently of output.
I would resist turning this into another argument about everybody returning to the office. Physical proximity is only one way in which people become mentally available, and newer evidence complicates any simple claim that being seen at a desk determines career progression. A large randomised trial involving more than 1,600 Trip.com employees, published in Nature in 2024, found that hybrid working improved retention without damaging performance or promotion outcomes. A remote employee who remains engaged in the informational and decision-making life of a company can therefore be far more present than an office employee who occupies the same building every day while rarely participating beyond a narrow job description.
Perhaps the more useful concept is associative surface area: the number and variety of meaningful contexts in which other people encounter your judgment, behaviour and capabilities.
Physical proximity can increase that surface area, but so can responsiveness, cross-functional work, useful participation in digital spaces, presentations, client interactions, informal conversations, helping colleagues and being involved when unusual problems arise. What matters is not merely the number of times people see you, but the range of situations in which they have credible reasons to associate you with something useful.
This also makes me reconsider one of the most common pieces of career advice: make yourself indispensable. Becoming indispensable sounds like the ultimate professional achievement, and within a particular role it may be. Yet it can also concentrate your reputation around an increasingly narrow collection of associations. If everyone thinks of you whenever one particular problem appears, you have achieved extremely high mental availability within that Category Entry Point. The difficulty arrives when the position you want next activates a completely different set of cues.
Someone can become the best financial controller the company has ever had while remaining largely absent from people’s minds when they think about commercial leadership. Someone can become synonymous with operating an existing business without ever becoming associated with creating a new one. Someone can establish an extraordinary reputation for execution while rarely being encountered in situations where the organisation can observe their strategic judgment. More excellence within the existing association can simply reinforce what everybody already believes the person is for.
FMCG brands encounter a comparable problem. A brand that is overwhelmingly associated with one consumption occasion may become exceptionally strong within it, but there are limits to how much growth can come from becoming even more strongly associated with the same occasion. Connecting the brand to additional relevant buying situations creates more opportunities for it to enter consideration. Careers may contain a related dynamic, in which the breadth of situations connected to someone’s name becomes increasingly important as that person seeks responsibilities different from those they already hold.
There is another reason proximity can become powerful here. People who interact regularly with decision-makers are naturally exposed to a wider variety of situations. They are present when a formal meeting drifts into a discussion about an unrelated business problem, when a senior person casually asks what everybody thinks, when an unexpected issue emerges, or when a conversation continues after the agenda has technically ended. These are small events, but each provides an opportunity for someone to demonstrate a dimension of themselves that would never appear in a performance report.
Over time, proximity creates more sampling opportunities. More sampling produces more information. More information can produce a richer set of associations.
This can happen without favouritism, conspiracy or deliberate office politics. If I have worked closely with one person across twelve different situations and encountered another only through quarterly reports, I simply possess a richer mental model of the first person. When a thirteenth situation appears, I have more memories available from which to imagine what that person might do.
The consequences become particularly interesting around promotion because opportunities are intermittent rather than continuous. You may spend three years doing your job before the particular position you want becomes available. When it finally does, the formal process may last six weeks, but the associations influencing who appears plausible for the position have been accumulating for years. By the time HR begins comparing candidates, some people may already exist in the organisation’s mental consideration set while others have to overcome the fact that very few decision-makers have ever imagined them in that context.
The same logic may extend, more uncomfortably, towards demotion, restructuring and redundancy. When organisations contract, leaders start asking a different collection of questions. Who can take on these responsibilities? Who could move somewhere else? Who understands enough of the business to operate across functions? Who possesses capabilities that remain useful if their existing role disappears? An employee whose professional identity has become almost completely attached to one function may find that their perceived usefulness moves with the fate of that function, even when they possess capabilities that could travel elsewhere.
Someone with broader organisational associations may be easier to imagine in alternative roles because colleagues have already encountered that person solving different kinds of problems. This certainly does not mean that visibility protects people from layoffs. Economics, employment law, compensation, organisational design, politics and actual capability can dominate such decisions. But when human beings have to decide where somebody might create value next, they inevitably reason from the capabilities they know or believe that person possesses. Unobserved versatility is difficult to value.
There is also an obvious organisational problem buried inside all of this. A company that confuses mental availability with capability can make terrible decisions. Quiet employees can be exceptional leaders. Remote employees can outperform highly visible colleagues. Some people are extremely skilled at generating visibility while producing surprisingly little value, while others produce enormous value with very little self-promotion. Good management systems should deliberately counteract these biases by searching beyond the first names that come to mind and examining evidence rather than treating familiarity as competence.
Yet recognising a bias does not make the underlying cognitive mechanism disappear. Organisations remain collections of human beings operating with finite attention and imperfect memories, and formal processes sit on top of those cognitive limitations rather than replacing them.
For the individual, this suggests a more useful question than the usual instruction to “network more.” If twenty people who matter inside your organisation were independently asked what kinds of problems you are good at solving, what would they say? More importantly, how many different answers would appear? If somebody asked who could handle a difficult client, would your name surface? If the question changed to launching something new, would it appear again? What about managing a team, entering another market, making sense of an ambiguous problem, representing the company externally or stepping into something that has gone badly wrong?
The number of people who know you certainly has value, but so does the range of relevant circumstances attached to what they know about you. A person can have enormous organisational awareness and surprisingly narrow mental availability, while somebody else can be known by fewer people but associated with a rich portfolio of capabilities. Career progression probably depends on some interaction between the two.
This is why the apparently peripheral behaviours of professional life deserve more attention. Making an appearance at the gathering, joining the occasional optional call, responding to the WhatsApp message, contributing when you actually have something worth contributing, helping somebody outside your immediate reporting line, remaining in contact with people after a project ends and allowing colleagues to encounter your thinking outside the narrow confines of your formal responsibilities can all look secondary to doing your “real work.” Yet organisations are social systems, and reputations are constructed from repeated observations distributed through those systems. Your work creates the underlying value, while your interactions influence how widely knowledge of that value travels and how many situations become connected to it.
There is no reason to turn this into an exhausting performance of perpetual visibility. Nobody needs to respond to every WhatsApp message, attend every dinner or manufacture an opinion in every meeting. That would probably destroy the very associations one is trying to build. The point is more subtle. Absence has a cumulative effect just as presence does. Repeatedly declining, disappearing, remaining silent, failing to respond or staying entirely within the formal perimeter of one’s job reduces the number of occasions on which other people can update their understanding of what one might be capable of.
Marketing science learned long ago that having the best product does not automatically produce the biggest brand. Distribution matters, availability matters, memory matters, and the circumstances under which consumers encounter and retrieve a brand matter. There is something uncomfortable but useful in considering whether professional careers contain some of the same properties.
Excellent work remains fundamental because mental availability without capability eventually creates exposure of the wrong kind. Yet excellence that exists almost entirely outside the attention of the people making decisions has a different problem. People cannot easily associate you with situations in which they have never encountered you, and organisations cannot reliably retrieve evidence they barely possess.
So perhaps the advice is not simply to work hard, become indispensable and assume the work will eventually speak for itself. Work does not literally speak. People observe it, interpret it, remember fragments of it, connect those fragments to other experiences and retrieve them later when circumstances provide the appropriate cue.
Show up sometimes. Make the appearance. Answer the message. Take the call. Contribute when you genuinely have something useful to contribute. Allow people outside your immediate circle to encounter how you think. Remain present enough in the social and informational life of the organisation that your capabilities have somewhere to live in other people’s memories.
Because when the next opportunity appears, the first competition may take place before the interviews, before the applications and sometimes before the position officially exists. It begins in the few seconds after somebody sitting in a room asks a remarkably ordinary question:
“Who do we know who could do this?”
References & Further Reading
Elsbach, K. D., Cable, D. M., & Sherman, J. W. (2010). How Passive ‘Face Time’ Affects Perceptions of Employees: Evidence of Spontaneous Trait Inference. Human Relations, 63(6), 735–760. Demonstrates how workplace visibility can influence perceptions of dependability and commitment independently of direct performance observations. Research paper
Bloom, N., Han, R., & Liang, J. (2024). Hybrid Working from Home Improves Retention Without Damaging Performance. Nature, 630, 920–925. A randomised trial involving 1,612 employees showing that hybrid working improved retention without significantly affecting performance or promotion outcomes. Research paper