The Story Builder: Why What's Missing Matters More Than What You're Saying

The fastest way to get overlooked? Tell only half your story.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, Lori sits down with Niki McKinnell, a marketing executive who has spent two decades walking into companies that were operating reactively and building something proactive out of it. She calls herself a story builder, and the definition is not what you would expect. It has very little to do with content or messaging and everything to do with finding what is missing — including, for years, in how she told her own career story. Twenty years across state agencies, B2B SaaS, supply chain, and health tech, and when she walked into private sector rooms she talked about the parts she thought people wanted to hear. It took a mentor pointing out what she was doing for her to see what she had been cutting out. Not just a chapter of her resume. The reason companies kept hiring her in the first place.