I have never heard of such a thing as "laddering". That just sounds really strange to me.
I totally understand about being visiable or not. I do often feel that I am not that visible to management. Most everyone at the company knows me as "The Phone Lady" but that doesn't mean that anyone knows what I do to ensure that their phones work. People are used to network or servers being down sometimes but just let the telephones be down for a few minutes and the entire company is in an uproar! It's something that sits on the desk and is taken for granted until it doesn't work.