Introduction
Mary Adeyemi was, by every external measure, thriving. Internships turned into a career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Promotions came. She rose to vice president, managing ten billion pounds in assets and lending. And for the first five years, almost none of it felt real. "I was doing the work," she says, "but I wasn't reaping the rewards of the work that I was doing. I think I was largely invisible in my mind." On this episode of Everyday Leadership, Mary sits down with Sope Agbelusi to trace that gap, between what her CV said and what she actually felt, and the manager who forced her to close it.
A Childhood Built on Focus and Elimination
Mary describes herself as an independent, focused child, the kind who cried when told school was closed for the weekend. That independence shaped how she chose her career. Rather than deciding what she wanted to become, she eliminated what she did not want. No medicine, she disliked blood and injections. No law, because in the Indian films she watched growing up in Nigeria, the lawyers always seemed to end up dead. What survived the elimination process was accounting and finance, subjects she found she was naturally good at, reinforced by watching a glamorous aunt who worked as an accountant.
"My decisions around what I wanted to become was almost by elimination rather than by intention," she says. It is a candid admission from someone who now teaches career intentionality for a living. The irony is not lost on her.
From Memorising to Understanding: Two Education Systems
Mary moved from Nigeria to the UK at sixteen, first to a college in Oxford, then to Lancaster University to study accounting and finance. She describes Nigerian schooling at the time as rigorous but outcome-focused. "We were taught the end result, but rarely the process," she explains. Students learned which formula went where without necessarily learning why.
That approach worked for exams. It did not work for UK-style academic assessment, which asked her to explain her thinking rather than reproduce it. The transition was made easier by her father, who constantly pushed her at home to explain her reasoning. Still, it was university tutors who taught her to reason from first principles rather than recall, a skill she says shaped everything that followed.
Five Years of Success That Felt Like Failure
Mary began her career as a risk manager in the middle of the 2007 financial crisis. Peers were losing jobs within months of qualifying. As an immigrant, the stakes felt higher: losing her role meant losing her ability to stay in the country. She kept her head down.
What followed were five difficult years. She had supportive managers and good colleagues, and on paper she was succeeding, earning her first promotion, doing the work well. But internally, something did not sit right. "I was largely invisible in my mind," she says. "I wasn't a star student, and coming from a world where I was always a star student, that was never... I was like, what is happening right now." Competing for the first time against elite, internationally educated peers, she found herself commercially underprepared and quietly convinced she did not measure up.
The Manager Who Wouldn't Let Her Coast
Five or six years into her career, a new manager arrived, Nigerian, blunt, and unwilling to let anything slide. Their start was rocky. He gave direct, unfiltered feedback behind closed doors. He read due diligence materials over the weekend when previous managers never had. He marked her work like a teacher rather than simply signing it off.
Mary's first reaction was resistance. "I rejected it very strongly," she admits. She wondered whether she only accepted the criticism because he was Nigerian, because he was Black, because there was no easy label like discrimination to hide behind. That observation became one of the episode's sharpest lines: "Often times what people call discrimination today is really just disciplined difficulty... but if that person looked different, will you receive it?"
The turning point came when she reframed what was happening. "This guy is teaching you exactly what you need to learn," she remembers thinking. "Don't fight against your own growth."
Sponsorship Is Not the Same As Being Cuddled
Mary draws a sharp distinction between the managers who protected her earlier in her career and the one who finally pushed her. The earlier ones were kind. They shielded her from difficulty. What she needed, she now says, was not kindness but sponsorship: someone willing to back her publicly and challenge her privately.
"It's not about somebody cuddling you and using relationship metrics," she says. "It's about somebody backing you, but also grooming you whilst they're backing you, to ensure that when those opportunities do open up, you are not going to embarrass yourself, and you're not going to embarrass them." She argues this labour, the grooming that has to happen before the door opens, is consistently underestimated in conversations about sponsorship and representation.
Competing With Receipts, Not With Her Mouth
As the mentorship deepened, Mary describes becoming strategic rather than simply busier. She stopped equating being overwhelmed with being effective. She started speaking up in meetings, asking for promotions directly, and being specific about what she wanted and why.
Crucially, she did not become louder to compensate. "I became smarter, but I didn't become more aggressive," she says. "I was competing, but I wasn't competing with my mouth. I was competing with my receipts." The shift was not about performing confidence. It was about building a body of work substantial enough that she no longer needed to perform it.
When Grief Became a Mandate
Alongside her corporate career, Mary began running mentorship circles and career development work for women, work that eventually grew into a platform and talk show she calls Visability [CHECK: exact name/spelling]. Then her father died.
Her father had spent his later career as an executive trainer, mentoring leaders and governors after retiring from the civil service. When he passed away, people came forward with stories, not about his job title, but about the tangible difference he had made in their lives: paying for a masters degree, saving a marriage, offering five days of mentorship that changed a life's direction.
"No one was talking about my dad being an amazing administrator," Mary says. "They're talking about the impact he had on them specifically... it was about the everyday moments of leadership." His death accelerated everything already stirring in her. She started writing her book [CHECK: exact title, referenced in the episode as either "Visible Strengths" or "Invisible Strengths"] and moved further into the work that is now her full-time focus.
Redefining Legacy Through Everyday Leadership
Asked what legacy she wants to build, Mary starts small: she does not want her own daughter to come home from work confused and defeated the way she once did. She widens it from there, describing too many women as underutilised, either by their own design or by the design of others, and work as something that should be an enabling environment rather than a box to tick.
On leadership itself, she offers a definition worth sitting with: "Positive influence. Being able to direct yourself and others towards positive outcomes that improve, rather than deplete, the world that we live in." Her closing advice to anyone wanting to be more visible is not to promote harder. It is to get self-aware first, so that when the right conversation or opportunity arrives, it lands on solid ground rather than guesswork.
