Employers have repriced what gets you promoted. Here is what they now look for, and how to show it.
Something repriced while you were busy being good at your job. In the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, published in January 2025, the skill employers named as core far more often than two years earlier was leadership and social influence, up twenty-two percentage points. The skills that slipped were dependability, attention to detail and quality control.
Those are the qualities most accomplished people were trained to perfect. Mary Gardner has spent more than twenty years with the people who built their careers around qualities that used to be enough, and who now find the marketplace rewarding something additional. Her description of them is blunter than the survey’s. They have been “overlooked, underpaid or undervalued,” she says, and they are often the smartest or hardest-working person in the room.
Organizations are hunting for exactly the people who can close that distance. Development Dimensions International, the leadership consultancy companies hire to assess and develop their executives, found in its 2025 research that only twenty percent of HR leaders have anyone ready to step into their most critical roles, while seventy-five percent of organizations would rather promote from inside than hire from outside. The seats are open. The candidates do not look ready.
What follows is her diagnosis of why credentialed people stall, the questions she asks before she offers a single piece of advice, and what she tells clients to do about it this week.
From the Diary of Mary Gardner
Mary Gardner is an Orlando-based executive communication strategist and the Founder and CEO of Mary Gardner Communications, LLC. The firm helps organizations strengthen leadership, culture and growth through strategic communication, work she has done for more than twenty years. She has worked on Capitol Hill, as a lecture agent at Keppler Speakers, as founder of The Coaches Certification Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, and as an anchor and reporter at FOX in Charlotte, North Carolina, and her LinkedIn profile carries 82 recommendations. The line under her name is “Every Conversation Matters™.”
The Smartest Person in the Room Is Not Getting Promoted
Gardner’s clients have usually done everything they thought they were supposed to do. They earned the degrees. They developed the expertise. They produced results. Then someone else gets promoted, someone else gets invited onto the stage, or someone else becomes the person everyone listens to, and, as she puts it, they don’t understand why.
The cause is rarely large.
“Often the issue isn’t enormous,” she says. “It can be something surprisingly small.” Someone walks into a room and waits to be approached instead of starting the conversation. Someone is brilliant on paper and does not carry the presence people unconsciously associate with leadership. Someone is so humble that nobody understands the magnitude of what they have accomplished. Someone gets onstage with extraordinary expertise and has never learned how to make an audience feel anything.
None of that is a character flaw. It is an untaught subject, and she is precise about who failed to teach it.
We teach people how to get good grades. We teach them the technical competencies of their profession. We rarely teach them how to earn trust in a room, develop executive presence, tell a compelling story, communicate an idea so people remember it, understand organizational dynamics, or inspire people to follow them.
So accomplished people do the thing that worked before. They rely on the résumé, earn another degree, take another certification, work longer hours. “I see brilliant people continue polishing their technical credentials when the real gap is their ability to communicate, influence and lead,” she says. As she puts it on her profile, expertise may get you into the room, and communication determines what happens once you’re there.
She Starts With Questions, Not Answers
Ask Gardner what she tells every client and she corrects the premise. The important part is not what she tells them. It is what she asks.
Who are you. What are you about. Where do you want to go. What has happened in your career so far. What are you extraordinarily good at. What do you want that you haven’t been able to achieve yet. And what is missing between where you are and where you want to be.
That last question is the whole practice. She calls the answer the gap.
Then she diagnoses the situation.
Sometimes the missing ingredient is mindset, she says. Sometimes it is mentoring, communication or visibility. Sometimes the person needs a bigger opportunity, and sometimes they need to stop waiting for the opportunity and create it. The habit of starting with the person rather than the formula traces back to seven years as an agent at Keppler Speakers, where her job was watching which ideas, personalities and stories actually connected with an audience.
I don’t believe in taking the same formula and laying it over every human being. A CEO, an engineer, an athlete, an entrepreneur and an emerging speaker can all have an influence problem for completely different reasons. So we identify the gap and then build the strategy.
What She Did With a Phone Book
When her former husband was transferred to Charlotte, Gardner arrived in a city where she knew nobody, holding a set of skills she could not look up in the classifieds. So she opened the phone book, found a public relations professional and called him cold.
He asked her, “What are you buying and what are you selling?”
“I’m not buying or selling anything,” she told him. “I’m new in town, I’ve been an agent, I don’t know anybody, and I thought I’d start with you.” He invited her to an event. She sat next to the editor of the Charlotte Observer. The article that followed traveled far enough that authors and experts around the country began mailing her their books, and she had people asking her to create the business before she completely understood what the business was.
The instruction she now gives clients is the one she gave herself, and it has three parts.
Know what you are selling, which is not your job title or a list of responsibilities but your edge, provable with stories and results. Do not just apply, get noticed: think like a publicist, and make your profile, your résumé, your reputation and the way you walk into a room reinforce the same message. And research the human being, not just the company, because what that person is trying to accomplish is the problem you are actually being hired to solve. Walk into the conversation curious, prepared and interested, she has written, not desperate to be chosen.
The Expert Who Does Not Know Which Story to Tell
More of her clients now arrive wanting a platform rather than a promotion. They are physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and executives with decades of material and no idea which of it matters to anyone else. The questions change: what should you be known for, where do you bring the greatest value, what do you know or believe that is worth sharing.
Then the harder part starts.
Someone can have 25 or 30 years of extraordinary experience and still have no idea which stories from those years will be meaningful to an audience. Part of my work is helping them excavate those experiences, identify the moments that contain something important, and then shape those stories so an audience doesn’t simply hear information. They feel and remember it.
Her advice to anyone waiting for the platform to arrive is to stop waiting. Volunteer to give the keynote at an important company or community event. Do it well, and hundreds of people who knew you for a job title or a technical competency now experience you differently. That, she says, is influence.
The Evidence: Fees, Salaries and a Standing Ovation
Gardner has trained over 20,000 professionals through her courses and workshops and has personally coached dozens of people into seven-figure speaking careers. The individual numbers are more useful than the totals.
Derek Kayongo, founder of the Global Soap Project, came to her as a college speaker earning approximately $2,500 a speech. After work on positioning, storytelling and the move into the corporate market, his fee passed $25,000 an engagement within roughly six months. A Florida-based CEO who had been unemployed for about ten months landed a role in Arizona paying approximately $200,000 more than his previous one, weeks after they reworked his mindset, positioning and the story he was telling about himself. A young man whose stutter was reading as nervousness in interviews stopped hiding it, talked instead about his work with children with disabilities and where his compassion came from, and got the dream job.
Then there is the Orlando company. The president of Sentry Technology Solutions was preparing to present at a national technology industry event against two large, well-known firms, with 3,000 audience members voting after all three presentations. Gardner worked on the story rather than the technical content. The small Orlando firm went in with a message that amounted to “if we can do it, so can you,” and won the AI innovation award and a $20,000 prize.
Behind that sit Capitol Hill and the Subcommittee on Criminal Law, seven years at Keppler Speakers, an early coach-training school she founded in Princeton, New Jersey, Goldman Sachs, a national television career that included The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Dateline, ABC’s 20/20 and CNN, and rooms at Siemens, EisnerAmper, AXA Financial and dozens of universities. She has also worked with Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, NBA All-Star Bernard King and Olympic gold medalist ice skater Peggy Fleming as they moved into the professional lecture market, and with Senator Mark Kelly, years before his election.
Kelly’s assessment sits on her website: “Mary’s coaching and techniques took me from being an industry speaker where I spoke about mostly technology, to being a speaker who can command an audience and receive a standing ovation.”
The lesson she draws from all of it is about herself as much as her clients. “Your work doesn’t always speak for itself,” she says. “At some point, you have to learn how to speak for your work, your ideas and the people you hope to lead.”
Where Mary Is Now
Gardner works out of Orlando.
She coaches executives through courses, a mastermind and a new weekly masterclass for people who want to grow their influence, and she runs corporate workshops and the StoryCraft Summit for leaders who need to be understood before they can be followed. Her framing for the people who find her mid-career is on the front of her site: you’re not starting over, you’re rising higher.
On Saturdays and Sunday mornings she hosts The Mary Gardner Show on Salem Media Orlando, which is her own method pointed at strangers. She created it, she says, to go beyond the résumé and have conversations about the experiences that actually shape people’s lives, and a recent guest was Stephanie Bowman, who lost her career, her home and her children to addiction and now runs One Heart for Women and Children. Long before any of it, Gardner swam for Winter Park High School, where she was an All-American and a state champion in the relay.
One belief has stayed with her throughout, she says: far more is achievable than most people realize when you combine talent with the right mindset, mentoring, strategy and opportunity.
“And after all these years, I still find it fascinating that sometimes a very small change can alter the trajectory of someone’s life.”
The Mary Gardner Playbook: Five Moves for the Person Who Keeps Getting Overlooked
- Find the gap before the fix. Before buying another course, coach or certification, identify the specific thing standing between where you are and where you want to be.
- Know exactly what you are selling. Not your title and not your responsibilities, but the one thing you do exceptionally well and can prove with a story and a result.
- Stop applying and get noticed. Your profile, your résumé, your reputation and the way you enter a room should all reinforce the same message about who you are.
- Research the human, not just the company. Understand the organization, then understand the person across the table and what they are trying to accomplish.
- Volunteer for the keynote nobody wants. One talk delivered well in front of hundreds of colleagues changes what you are known for faster than another year of quiet excellence.
Sources
World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025, Chapter 3, Skills Outlook. 2025. weforum.org
Development Dimensions International (DDI). Global Leadership Forecast 2025 and HR Insights Report 2025. 2025. ddi.com
Mary Gardner coaches executives, speakers, and technical and brilliant experts at marygardner.com. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
