The referee is asked to be invisible until invisibility becomes evidence of failure.

The referee’s job is to be unnoticed, which means the only visible evidence of their existence is failure. Every good call disappears and every bad one is replayed, and the reward for doing it well is that nobody can remember you were there. It is a job with no positive feedback built into it.

A lot of work has this shape: infrastructure, safety, administration, the person who prevents problems rather than solving visible ones. If you depend on someone like that, tell them specifically what did not go wrong. And if you do that work, you will need to source your sense of having done it well internally, because the structure will not supply it.