Author Chat: Visible by May Busch

Many professionals work hard, deliver strong results, and uphold high standards—yet still feel their career progression slipping further out of reach. Traditional advice like “let your work speak for itself” or “play the game” often traps people between burnout and becoming someone they don’t want to be. But this cycle can be broken, allowing you to advance with clarity, integrity, and confidence.

In this edition of Author Chat, Disrupt Your Career speaks with May Busch, Founder of Career Mastery™, speaker, executive coach, and former COO of Morgan Stanley Europe, about her book ‘Visible: How to Advance Your Career Without Playing Politics, Selling Your Soul, or Working Yourself into the Ground’ (Summit Press Publishers, October 2025). In her book, May explores the hidden capabilities senior leaders look for when deciding who progresses and who plateaus, offering practical guidance on navigating office politics without compromising your values, building strategic relationships authentically, and developing the presence to command attention—all while taking ownership of your career at every stage. An edited version of our conversation with May follows.

May, why did you write Visible?  

I have written the book because I’ve seen so many dedicated, hardworking achievers who struggle to get ahead in their careers while they watch their less capable colleagues pass them by. One of my values is fairness, and I want to even the playing field. That’s the main reason I wrote the book. You know that saying, “Good guys finish last?”, well, I want to live in a world where good people who are sincere, hardworking, they try to do the right thing always, and they care about other people, I want them to be the ones who finish first, not last. That’s the world I want to live in. When we look at the environment today, it’s just harder than ever. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world, huge amount of change. We’re all in a tense and fearful mode, and we even have this term called “job hugging”, where people are holding on to even jobs they don’t really care for, just to have a job. So it’s a very glass half empty world and I think that’s why this book is especially timely. 

The book takes all the lessons I’ve learned, mostly the hard way in my own career and now working with senior leaders as a coach and with mid-career professionals in my Career Mastery membership. It’s about helping those good, hard-working achievers advance in a way that’s authentic without having to burn out or sell out. In a way, I wrote this book as something that I wish I had had back in the day when I was coming up the ranks. Because my 24-year career from entry level to COO of Morgan Stanley Europe, it was a struggle. I was the first in my family to go into a business world: they’re all doctors or academics or government public servants. So I had to learn everything from the ground up. But the good news is I took good notes. Also I’ve seen it from all sides, from the person who’s feeling unseen and invisible to the higher ups, to then finally becoming one of those senior people behind closed doors where decisions are made, and I just wanted to share what I’ve learned to support other people in their journey.

What was your process for writing the book, and what mindset helped you get through it?

That is such an interesting question, and no one’s ever asked me that, so I want to applaud you for this. In the very beginning, I thought this was going to be simple because I’d written a book about a decade ago, and it was a very thin book with just some of my ideas. I thought, well, I’ll just expand that book and bring it up to date. But the book that we now have, Visible, has morphed itself. It became something new and different. So while I had the benefit of a few concepts to leverage, I also had a lot of frameworks from the original book that I had to let go of. That was really challenging to do. It’s harder to unlearn than to learn, they say and sometimes it’s harder to let go of parts of what you regard as your baby in favor of the new stuff. 

What was really important for me to be able to write this book, the book that we now have, was, number one to carve out time to write, because I was at the time, and I still growing my business and running my business. That is all thanks to this marvelous team that I have who I could trust to do a lot of that so that I could carve out enough time on a consistent basis. But it was an hour here, maybe two hours there. It was not these big blocks of time. 

Then the second thing that was important for me on the how was to have people around me who both knew me and understood the art of what a book that would actually get read by people and help people, what that intersect looked like. These were people I could bounce ideas off of, I could pressure test. That’s frankly how I realized that a big chunk of what I thought I was going to put into the book had to be jettisoned, and then what needed to be added in. 

The third and final thing I want to add is I had to do a lot of work on the how in terms of managing my own mindset. I’m a recovering perfectionist, a recovering micromanager – I think those two go together. It was very hard for me not to edit as I wrote, to not judge and say, “Oh, this is terrible, crinkle it up and throw it into the waste basket” as the analogy goes, because I was actually typing into my laptop. But just that getting rid of that doubt along the way, that was no easy feat. And again, having people around me and working on my inner game, which is one of the things I also teach in the book. I guess we teach what we need to learn. Those were the parts of the how that really came to the fore when I saw your question. 

If you had to summarize the key concepts and messages of the book, what would you tell us? 

I’ll just share three quick concepts or key messages. Number one is there is a third way to advance your career authentically, where you don’t have to work harder and you don’t have to play politics, because we’re all taught to put your head down, work hard, do a great job, and you’ll be recognized and rewarded. But that’s really something that only works for the first couple of years of your career, and then it becomes a recipe for being invisible and pigeonholed in your current role. Then we’re told, “Oh, well, you have to play the game”. But that feels really slimy, exhausting, and just completely wrong. My book shows you how to find that third way, to advance on your own terms by developing the skills that will most move the needle for you in your career. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all. 

The second message is doing a great job at your job is not enough. You also have to demonstrate your potential to succeed at the next higher level. This is what decision-makers are looking for, not just your performance, but your future potential. That leads to the third big message, which is when senior leaders are looking at someone’s potential, there are three main areas where they are looking. One is how you work with people. So that’s how your relationships with stakeholders are, how you lead when you’re working with others, how you communicate in a way that’s influencing. Then the second piece is how you work on the business. That’s about thinking strategically, making good decisions, even when things are uncertain and changing, and creating new kinds of value. Then the third piece is how you work on yourself. That’s about self-awareness and being able to self-manage. It’s about building your presence and your profile, so a bit of personal branding, and also having a network that you can leverage and draw on for the good not only of your own career, but also of the organization and the team that you’re in. 

And then the rest of the book shows what those skills are in those three areas that you need to potentially consider developing for yourself so that you can choose which ones of those skills are worth working on for you. Then there are actionable steps for developing all those skills. And by the end of the book, I want people to have clarity on what they need to do next to advance their career. I want them to have confidence to carve their own path by developing themselves. And then I want them to have courage to take action.

Let’s dig into a couple of case studies or stories that you think would really illustrate aptly what you’ve been talking about.

I’m going to share two quick stories. One is how I came to understand this whole concept that doing great work is not enough. I was up for promotion. I had just moved into a new role about six months prior, I was doing really well. My boss and her boss, they thought I was doing such a great job. They were surprised, but really happy. So they decide to put me up for promotion. But then I didn’t get that promotion. They had to come to me and say, “May, we really went to bat for you. But when we got in front of the senior executives, the committee that makes all the decisions, their response was, most of them didn’t even know who you were. It was May who?” And that was the mic drop moment. That was the wake-up call moment for me, where I realized that doing a great job isn’t enough. In fact, having my boss and my boss’s boss back me, that still wasn’t enough. I needed to be visible to all the others as well who are decision makers, which then leads to the second story, which is about stakeholders.

At this point, I had managed to get that promotion. They transferred me to London, where I knew no one. My mission that was given to me was to go and win over the investment banking teams. That’s what I did. I spent all my time focusing on that. But then about six months in, my boss says, “May, the sales and trading people are wondering what you are doing and whether we should ship you back to New York because they haven’t seen anything of value that you have done.” So that was another wake-up call that you really need to look broadly at your stakeholder set and not just focus on what you’ve been asked to do, which I was doing to a high standard. And it was just the problem with ignoring the 13^th ferry, That Sleeping Beauty Story, Grims’ Fairytale, where the 13^th fairy does not get invited to the christening, and she barges into the party and puts a spell on Sleeping Beauty. So I had ignored the equivalent of the 13^th fairy, and fortunately, I was able to overcome that. But the bottom line is you really want to be thinking broadly about who those relationships are, who are those stakeholders, and start building those relationships in an intentional way.

To listen to this Author Chat podcast episode

Order May’s book ‘Visible: How to Advance Your Career Without Playing Politics, Selling Your Soul, or Working Yourself into the Ground’

May’s personal website

May’s LinkedIn profile