Kofi will tell you he is not the kind of person who complains. He has spent eleven years as a procurement analyst in Tema, and in that time he has never missed a deadline, never made a costly error, and never once been described by a manager as anything less than “reliable.”
So when a regional manager role opened up and the job went to someone who had joined the company three years after him, Kofi did what many of us do. He went home, sat in the quiet of his living room, and asked himself a question he was almost embarrassed to say out loud: what am I missing?
The answer, as it turned out, was not a skill. It was two-thirds of a formula nobody had ever handed him.
The Formula Nobody Writes on the Whiteboard
Ask most Ghanaian professionals what it takes to move up, and you will hear some version of the same advice: work hard, be punctual, know your stuff, and be respectful to your seniors. All of it is true. None of it is the full picture.
Career advancement, in nearly every field, rests on three things working together. Think of them as three legs of a stool. Take one away and the whole thing wobbles, no matter how strong the other two are.
Competence. Your actual skill, judgement and track record of delivering good work.
Relationships. The people who have watched you work closely enough to vouch for you by name.
Reputation. What people who have never worked with you still believe about you, because your name keeps turning up in the right places.
Kofi had built one leg beautifully. The other two were barely there.
Leg One: Competence, the Part We All Get Right
Let us give competence its due, because nothing below works without it. You cannot network your way out of poor work for very long. In a country where professional circles are tight and word travels fast, from Accra offices to Kumasi boardrooms to Takoradi project sites, a reputation for sloppy delivery follows you faster than any CV.
Competence is the foundation. Most of us spend years, and a great deal of money on certifications and training, getting it right.
The trouble is that competence has a quiet flaw: it is invisible to anyone who has not watched you use it. Your excellent work lands on your manager’s desk, your manager nods, and that is often where the story ends. The people who decide on appointments, board seats and recommendations are frequently several steps removed from your desk.
Leg Two: Relationships, the Part We Mistake for Networking
When people hear “relationships,” they often picture someone working a room with a stack of business cards, or collecting WhatsApp contacts like trading cards. That is not what this is.
A relationship, in the sense that moves careers, is a person who has seen how you think, how you handle pressure, and how you treat people when things go wrong. It is the colleague who says “You should talk to Ama, she handled something just like this at Cocobod” when someone asks for a recommendation.
You do not need five hundred of these people. You need a handful, ideally spread across more than one organisation, who could describe specifically what you are good at. Kofi, when he counted honestly, could name two, both within his own department, both of whom reported to the same manager.
Leg Three: Reputation, the Part That Works While You Sleep
Reputation is the one most professionals neglect longest, and it is the one that compounds most quietly.
It is what people believe about you when you are not in the room. Someone you have never met sees your name on a conference programme, hears you speak on a panel discussion later covered by Joy Business, or reads a short piece you wrote for a members’ bulletin. They form an impression. Months later, when your name comes up, that impression is already working for you.
Reputation is what turns “I think she’s good” into “Oh yes, I know of her.” That small shift is often the difference between being considered and being overlooked.
Where All Three Legs Get Built Together
Here is where the Chartered Institute of Leadership and Governance, and professional bodies like it, quietly earn their place in a career.
Most people think of a professional institute as a place to get a credential. It is that, certainly. But a well-run body is also one of the few settings where all three legs can be strengthened at the same time.
Serve on a CILG committee, and you demonstrate competence to peers who work in different organisations from you. Those same peers become relationships, people who have now watched you contribute under real conditions. And the visible work you do, a governance framework you helped shape, a session you chaired, a younger member you mentored, becomes reputation that travels well beyond that committee room.
One activity, three legs strengthened. It is hard to find that kind of return on time anywhere else in a career.
The members who benefit most are rarely the most senior or the most brilliant. They are simply the ones who treated membership as something to do, not something to hold.
A Story From Takoradi
A trainer who works with early-career professionals in Takoradi often tells the story of two accountants who qualified in the same year.
The first, Yaw, poured everything into technical excellence. He became the person colleagues quietly went to when a tricky reconciliation needed fixing. The second, Efua, was good but not exceptional. What she did differently was join her professional body’s technical working group in her second year, and she kept showing up, month after month, even when the meetings were dull.
Ten years on, when a firm in the oil and gas sector needed a finance lead for a sensitive review, Yaw’s name never came up. Efua’s did. Three different people on the selection panel knew her from that working group, and each of them had independently come to trust her judgement.
Yaw was, by most technical measures, the stronger accountant. But strength that nobody beyond your own team can see is a bit like a generator running in a locked room. It is real, and it is working, and it is lighting nothing outside.
The Mistake of Strengthening Only What Feels Comfortable
Here is the pattern worth watching in yourself. We tend to invest in the leg we find easiest.
If you are analytical, you will keep sharpening competence. If you are sociable, you may invest in relationships but neglect depth of skill. If you are visible and confident, you might build reputation faster than substance, which brings its own risks, because a reputation that outruns competence eventually gets tested, and not kindly.
The formula only works when all three are growing. Not equally, and not at the same speed, but all of them, together.
A Simple Check You Can Do This Week
Take ten minutes and answer three questions honestly, preferably on paper.
First, competence: could you point to specific recent evidence that your skills are current and respected, not just your own sense that they are?
Second, relationships: how many people outside your direct reporting line could describe, in specific terms, what you are good at?
Third, reputation: in the last twelve months, where has your name appeared in your professional community in a way that was not simply required by your job?
Most people find one of these answers comfortable, one uncomfortable, and one embarrassing. That is useful information. It tells you exactly where your next move should be.
Back to Kofi
Kofi did eventually do something about it. It was not dramatic. He applied to join a working group at his professional body, mostly because a former colleague suggested it. He went to the first meeting feeling slightly out of place, certain he had nothing to add.
Eighteen months later, someone from that working group called him about a role at another organisation entirely. It was not an advertised position. It was a conversation that began with the words, “I think you’d be good at this.”
Kofi had not become a better analyst in those eighteen months. He had simply started building the other two legs.
So here is the question worth taking into your week: of the three, which leg are you neglecting, and what is one small, unglamorous thing you could do about it before the end of this month?