Six business leaders reveal the real secret to standing out at work

What separates the person who gets promoted from the one who stays in place? Six business leaders—founders and executives running companies from beauty to banking—were asked that question, and their answers had little to do with the credentials on a résumé.

Charlotte Tilbury, who built a global beauty empire, traces her own rise to a simple refusal: she stopped letting other people draw the boundaries of what she could attempt. She heard plenty of voices telling her ideas were mad, that they wouldn't work. She ignored them. What matters more, she argues, is how you frame difficulty. When something goes wrong, most people call it a mistake. Tilbury calls it an opportunity to rethink and improve. Challenge, she says, is what pushes you toward greater places.

Charlie Bowes-Lyon, who co-founded the deodorant brand Wild, has a blunt formula: ninety percent attitude, ten percent skills. Skills, he notes, can be taught in a classroom or on the job. Attitude cannot. He also carries a piece of advice he wishes someone had given him earlier—that even the people who look most confident are often uncertain. Everyone is improvising until the moment they aren't. In a job interview, he recommends asking questions at the end. Candidates who say they have nothing to ask rarely get the job. One strong question: what does success in this role actually look like?

Marcia Kilgore, a serial entrepreneur behind Beauty Pie and Soap and Glory, looks for curiosity above all. She wants people willing to roll up their sleeves, ask many questions, and think about how they can be useful. She also learned early that communication breakdowns are often the real culprit when things fall apart. Her advice is to listen carefully to what's being asked, take a breath or five, and respond thoughtfully rather than immediately. Your answer doesn't need to be instant, but it does need to be considered.

Anabel Kindersley, CEO of Neal's Yard Remedies, built a varied career—child actress, author, businessperson—by saying yes to opportunities that made her uncomfortable. She recommends the same approach to others: do everything, say yes to everything, even when it feels risky. When she hires, she looks for people with emotional intelligence matched to their technical ability. Honesty matters too. Be truthful about what you know and confident about what you can offer.

Charlie Nunn, group chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, values curiosity, resilience, and the ability to think about how AI tools might be used in the future. But he emphasizes something else: the capacity to work well in a team, in service of something larger than yourself. His own career included a retail role that terrified him at the time. It turned out to be invaluable. His advice: if something feels risky, do it anyway. You'll learn more from it and build breadth on your CV that you didn't have before.

James Reed, chairman and chief executive of the recruitment company Reed, identifies a common mistake: thinking about what an employer can do for you instead of what you can offer in return. The question to ask yourself is not what the world owes you, but how you become the solution to an employer's problem. As AI increasingly filters applications, Reed says candidates should make sure their skills and experience clearly match the job description—let the technology pick up what you're offering. But AI is a tool, not a replacement for judgment. The goal is to strengthen your application, not to let the algorithm do your thinking.