How Do You Know If You Are Still Relevant?

One of the greatest difficulties in assessing diminishing relevance is that it is often couched in language that is very positive. Diminishing relevance rarely announces itself. Instead, the signals often arrive wrapped in language that sounds reassuring.

“You’re indispensable here.” “Nobody knows this process like you do.” “We can always depend on you.” “You’re the safe pair of hands.” “We need you to keep things running.” “You’re too valuable where you are.”

And what makes this particularly difficult is that every one of those statements can be genuinely positive. There is no attempt at subterfuge. The praise is not trivial or insincere. In most cases, it has been genuinely earned through years of consistent hard work, reliability and effort.

This is exactly why assessing relevance through the usual signals — performance appraisals, recognition, praise from a manager, perhaps even the security of one's position — does not necessarily tell us the real situation. A professional may continue to perform extremely well and be highly valued for what they do, while something else is changing underneath.

What the professional begins to feel are the consequences of diminishing influence.

It may begin with something quite small. A meeting that you would once have been part of takes place without you. A decision concerning an area you know intimately is made elsewhere and you are informed about it later. You are still trusted to make things happen, but increasingly the important decisions seem to have been made before they reach you.

None of this necessarily feels dramatic. There may be no confrontation, no poor appraisal and no conversation in which somebody tells you that your role has become less important. In fact, your workload may suggest precisely the opposite. You may be busier than ever. People may continue to seek you out because they know that when something has to get done, you will get it done.

And that is where the confusion begins.

Because being needed is not quite the same thing as having influence.

I have seen professionals become extraordinarily important to the functioning of an organisation while becoming progressively less important to the decisions that shape it. Their knowledge is valued. Their experience is valued. Their reliability is certainly valued. But the nature of that value has changed.

This change is difficult to see from inside the role, particularly when the organisation continues to reward the very behaviours that have made the person successful. The professional therefore has little reason to believe that anything is wrong. The appraisal remains good. The manager remains appreciative. The work keeps coming.

What has changed is not necessarily how well the professional performs. What has changed is where that performance sits in relation to the organisation’s future.

The final hammer often comes when someone is recruited into a role that you might once have expected to grow into.

Until then, it was possible to explain away many of the signals. Perhaps the organisation was changing. Perhaps the timing was not right. Perhaps there simply wasn’t an opportunity yet. After all, you were still doing well, still being appreciated and still being given important work.

And then somebody arrives from outside.

They may have less experience in the organisation than you do. They may know less about its history, its people and the way things actually get done. You may even find yourself helping them understand all of those things.

But they have been brought in to occupy the space that, somewhere in your own mind, represented the natural next stage of your career.

This is often when the question changes. It is no longer simply, “Why didn’t I get that role?” There is a more uncomfortable question underneath it:

What did the organisation see that made it look outside rather than towards me?

The temptation, of course, is to answer that question through the individual appointment — politics, favouritism, a particular manager, perhaps even an unfair decision. Any of those explanations may sometimes be true. But they can also prevent us from examining the more important question: whether the professional’s relevance had been changing for some time, while almost all the visible signals continued to tell them that they were doing well.

Waiting for that moment, however, is a particularly poor way of discovering that your Professional Relevance has been changing.

By the time somebody else has been recruited into the role you thought you were growing towards, the change has already happened. The appointment did not cause the loss of relevance. It merely made visible something that may have been developing quietly for months, perhaps years.

This is one of the reasons Professional Relevance is so difficult to assess. We tend to look for outcomes. Did I get promoted? Did I receive a good appraisal? Did I get the salary increase? Am I still being given important responsibilities? Does my manager value me?

These are understandable questions, but they are largely questions about what has already happened.

Relevance is more difficult because much of it concerns what is happening before the outcome becomes visible.

Are you increasingly being asked for your judgement, or primarily for your ability to execute? Are the problems coming to you becoming more consequential, or are you simply becoming better at solving the same class of problems? Is your experience creating greater leverage, or has the organisation become dependent on you doing things that nobody else wants to do? Are people beyond your immediate manager becoming aware of what you can contribute? And perhaps most uncomfortably, if you stepped outside your organisation tomorrow, would the professional value that is so obvious inside it be equally obvious elsewhere?

None of these questions, taken individually, tells us whether somebody is becoming more or less relevant. That would be far too simplistic. A professional can be deeply involved in operations and still have enormous influence. Someone can spend twenty years in the same organisation and continue to grow. Another can have plenty of visibility and very little real consequence.

It is the pattern that matters.

And that was the problem I kept returning to when I began thinking seriously about how Professional Relevance could actually be assessed.

If diminishing relevance can coexist with good performance, genuine praise, job security and even increasing responsibility, then asking a professional whether things are going well is simply not enough. Nor is looking at their designation, compensation, appraisal rating or years of experience.

We needed a way of looking underneath those outcomes — at the forces that were shaping them.

That is where the idea of a Professional Relevance Diagnostic began.

There is no doubt that politics, favouritism, a bad boss and unfair decisions exist in working life. They can alter careers, sometimes profoundly. That is why the organisational environment forms an important contextual layer in assessing Professional Relevance.

But within that environment, The Relevance Trap identifies 31 different criteria through which we can examine what may actually be happening to a professional’s relevance. They cover the nature of the work we are repeatedly trusted to do, whether our judgement carries weight, how early we enter important conversations, whether our experience is being used to shape the future or preserve the past, how widely our professional reputation travels, whether our capabilities continue to evolve, and whether our value has any proof of life outside the organisation.

The external environment matters enormously. But it cannot automatically become the explanation for everything that happens inside it.

Nor can the opposite be true. Every stalled career cannot be explained as a failure of the individual to learn more, work harder, network better or become more ambitious.

The difficulty is that very different situations can produce remarkably similar outcomes.

A professional may have stopped moving because the organisation has very few larger roles available. Another may have opportunities around them but has become so strongly identified with their present role that nobody seriously imagines them doing anything else. Someone else may still have considerable influence internally but discover that much of what makes them valuable is specific to that organisation. And another may have perfectly good external prospects but simply have no desire to move at this stage of life.

From a conventional career perspective, all four might appear to have the same problem: they have been in the same role or at the same level for too long.

But they do not have the same problem.

This distinction became fundamental to the way I thought about the Diagnostic. Its purpose could not be to decide whether somebody was “relevant” or “irrelevant”. Professional Relevance is not a label that can meaningfully be attached to a person.

Nor could it simply add up a series of answers and produce a number. A low score on one aspect may be explained by strength somewhere else, by the nature of the person’s role, by a conscious choice they have made, or by the environment in which they are working.

What mattered was whether different pieces of evidence began pointing in the same direction.

Consider someone who is repeatedly praised for reliability. On its own, that is positive. If the same person is also spending increasing amounts of time solving operational problems, that still does not establish that their relevance is diminishing. If they are being consulted early on important decisions and their judgement carries weight, their operational involvement may simply be one part of a highly influential role.

But suppose the pattern is different. They are praised primarily for keeping things running. More difficult operational work keeps finding its way to them. Important decisions increasingly reach them after they have been made. Their manager depends heavily upon them, but their reputation does not travel much beyond that relationship. Conversations about their future remain vague.

Now the same praise means something different.

Not because being reliable has somehow become a weakness. Not because any one of those observations proves that the person is losing relevance. But because several independent pieces of evidence have begun to form a pattern.

That became one of the governing ideas behind the Professional Relevance Diagnostic: do not diagnose from an isolated answer. Look for convergence.

But convergence creates another problem.

Human beings are not particularly tidy.

We can be highly influential in one setting and almost invisible in another. We can genuinely enjoy the work we do and still know that it is no longer taking us anywhere. We can say that we want a larger role while repeatedly avoiding the unfamiliar situations that would prepare us for one. We can complain that our manager does not give us enough exposure while also depending almost entirely on that same manager to represent our work to the rest of the organisation.

None of these are necessarily contradictions in the ordinary sense. They are often simply the reality of working life.

This meant that a Diagnostic could not merely ask a long list of questions and assume that every answer meant the same thing for every person.

The first set of questions could establish the landscape. It could look across the different conditions that shape Professional Relevance and identify where the evidence appeared strong, where several answers seemed to reinforce one another, and where something did not quite fit.

But sometimes the most interesting part of an answer is precisely what it does not explain.

A fixed questionnaire can identify an apparent inconsistency. It cannot necessarily tell us what lies behind it.

This was why the Diagnostic eventually developed in two stages.

The first stage asks a common set of questions so that every assessment begins from the same broad evidence base. The second does something different. It follows the areas where the first stage has left something important unresolved and asks further questions to understand what may actually be happening.

The purpose is not to keep asking questions until the Diagnostic gets the answer it expects. Quite the opposite. A follow-up question must be capable of weakening an initial interpretation just as much as strengthening it.

If someone believes that politics has prevented their progression, for example, the Diagnostic should not begin from the assumption that they are wrong. There may be substantial evidence that the environment really is constraining them. Equally, it should not simply accept politics as the explanation because that is how the situation feels from inside it. It should look at the other evidence and ask what explanation best survives it.

In that sense, the Diagnostic is not trying to tell a professional what is wrong with them.

It is trying to understand what is happening around them, what is happening because of them, and what may be happening to them — and to distinguish between the three.

And this brings us back to the person who discovers that somebody else has been recruited into the role they once thought they were growing towards.

The real value of understanding Professional Relevance is not in explaining that moment after it has happened. By then, explanation may provide clarity, but it cannot give back the years during which the underlying pattern was developing.

The value lies in seeing the pattern earlier.

Earlier does not necessarily mean leaving the organisation. In fact, that would be a rather crude interpretation of Professional Relevance. Sometimes the evidence may suggest precisely the opposite. The professional may still have considerable room to grow where they are, but need to change the nature of the value they create. They may need to move away from being the person who repeatedly rescues difficult work and towards being the person who changes why that work keeps becoming difficult. They may need to make their judgement visible beyond one manager, develop capabilities that their next stage will require, or deliberately test whether the value they have built inside the organisation has currency outside it.

In other cases, the problem may genuinely lie more in the environment than in the professional. There may be very few opportunities available. A manager may be constraining movement. The organisation may be shrinking, changing direction or placing less importance on the function in which the professional has built their career.

Knowing that matters too.

Because the response to an environment that cannot offer you room to grow is very different from the response to a situation in which the opportunity exists but your own Professional Relevance has not evolved sufficiently to reach it.

And there is another possibility that career conversations often overlook altogether.

Perhaps the professional does not want the next role.

Perhaps they have reached a stage of life where greater designation, responsibility or compensation is no longer what they are trying to optimise. They may value autonomy, craftsmanship, family, health, location or simply the freedom to do work they enjoy. Remaining where they are may be an entirely conscious decision.

That is not stagnation.

There is an important difference between being unable to move and choosing not to move. Any meaningful assessment of Professional Relevance has to preserve that distinction.

This is why I do not think the purpose of a Professional Relevance Diagnostic is to tell somebody whether their career is going well or badly. Nor is it to prescribe the next career move.

Its purpose is much simpler, and perhaps more useful: to make visible a pattern that is otherwise remarkably difficult to see from inside your own career.

Because once the pattern becomes visible, the professional has something they did not have before.

Choice.

They may choose to rebuild their influence where they are. They may decide to broaden their capabilities. They may test themselves in the external market. They may have a different conversation with their manager. They may decide that the environment itself has become the constraint and begin preparing to leave.

Or they may look at the evidence and decide, quite consciously, that they are exactly where they want to be.

The Diagnostic should not make that decision for them.

It should help them make it before somebody else makes it for them.