Meritocracy is a simple idea. Do good work, make a meaningful contribution, develop your capability and opportunity should follow. Most organisations would probably claim to operate this way, but of course the reality is more complicated.

Merit still matters, but it isn't the only currency. Visibility, relationships, sponsorship, confidence, timing and organisational politics all influence who gets noticed, who gets opportunities and ultimately who progresses.

There are times when this creates an uncomfortable contradiction. The person delivering the most visible result isn't necessarily creating the most value, and may not be inspiring their team as well as another colleague.

Organisations naturally notice immediate brilliance. The successful turnaround, the resolved crisis, the conference presentation or the high profile project. Often it’s the individual who confidently communicates what they've achieved. Those contributions of course deserve recognition, but they're also the easiest to see.

Much harder to measure is the leader who proactively prevents the crisis happening in the first place. The person who develops others by openly sharing their experience. Or the one who connects different teams with their collaborative nature, freely sharing information, builds relationships and creating the conditions for collective success. Their fingerprints may be everywhere, they be universally respected by their peers while their name appears almost nowhere with the critical career decision makers.

This becomes particularly problematic when selecting leaders of people. Some of the qualities that make people exceptional collaborators can also make them less visible individually. They talk about what “we” achieved rather than what “I” delivered. They share credit readily. They create space for others to contribute. They spend more time listening than speaking.

Meanwhile, confidence can easily be mistaken for competence and self-promotion for impact. Meritocracy can therefore become distorted by the same short-term thinking that affects operational decisions. Immediate, highly visible results are easier to reward than capability built over years. What someone has delivered personally is easier to attribute than the performance they've enabled through others.

That doesn't mean organisations should stop rewarding results. Nor does it mean everyone overlooked for an opportunity was somehow the better candidate. It means merit is more complicated than a league table of individual achievements.

There is another complexity, meritocracy only works when people have genuinely fair access to opportunity in the first place. Removing historic barriers, challenging bias and breaking glass ceilings can therefore strengthen meritocracy, not weaken it. Talent that was previously overlooked gets the opportunity to compete and progress on merit.

But this can be a tightrope, if the pursuit of greater representation creates a perception that identity or targets have become more important than capability, contribution and potential, it risks undermining the very principle it was intended to strengthen. Worse still, it can unfairly cast doubt over the credibility of people who have absolutely earned their opportunity. The goal shouldn't be to manufacture equal outcomes. It should be to remove unfair barriers, create genuine equality of opportunity and make the best possible decisions from the widest possible pool of talent.

How results were achieved matters. What was left behind in the aftermath matters. Whether other people became more capable matters. Whether success could continue in the absence of that individual matters. Whether they made the organisation stronger matters.

Yet recognising the imperfections of meritocracy creates another responsibility. Your career cannot depend entirely on somebody else noticing how hard you work. Hard work matters, it always has and always will. But hard work alone isn't a career strategy.

There is a difference between self-promotion and self-advocacy. You don't need to become the loudest person in the room, or a LinkedIn Warrior or claim credit that belongs to others. But you do need to make your contribution understood. Build relationships beyond your immediate team. Develop a broader network of colleagues. Find people prepared to advocate for you when you're not in the room. Put yourself forward for opportunities or discretionary work. Keep developing your capability and take calculated risks that stretch your experience and thinking.

Many career opportunities are shaped before the vacancy is advertised or the interview takes place. Having people who know your capability and are prepared to put your name into those conversations matters.

Take accountability for your own career rather than assuming meritocracy alone will take care of it for you. That's a responsibility that's too important to entirely outsource.

The organisation has a responsibility too. Every promotion, appointment and recognition decision communicates something far beyond the individual receiving it. It tells everybody else what the organisation really values. If collaboration is talked about but individual heroics are consistently rewarded, people notice. If developing others is celebrated but self-promotion determines progression, people notice. If values supposedly matter but results repeatedly trump poor behaviour, people notice. Eventually the greatest damage isn't that one deserving person missed out on an opportunity. It's that everyone else learns what actually gets rewarded.

Merit still matters, but meritocracy only works while people believe that contribution, behaviour and capability have a meaningful relationship with reward and opportunity. Once they stop believing that, something else starts determining how they behave.

For organisations, the challenge is to ensure that what gets recognised genuinely reflects what they claim to value. For individuals, it's recognising that doing great work and hoping somebody notices isn't enough. Neither side can simply assume meritocracy will take care of itself.

Merit should always create opportunity. But meritocracy only works when good work is both recognised and visible.