One of the sharpest communications leaders I’ve coached wanted to be a trusted advisor. She just couldn’t understand why she wasn’t treated like one.

Her team executed every request flawlessly. Leadership praised her for it. Reporters trusted her, executives relied on her, and the work went out clean every time.

She was, by every visible measure, a valued expert. And that, she realized, was the problem.

She’d become the person you call once you’ve already decided what you want. Draft the statement. Fix the deck. Handle the reporter. Indispensable, always in the room, and never the one who made the call.

If you’ve ever felt the distance between how much you know and how rarely you’re asked, you know the feeling. You’re valued for what you produce, not for what you think.

I’ve written before about the perception gap that separates communications leaders from the C-suite. This is the flip side. It isn’t about how the C-suite sees you. It’s about whether they seek you out before they act.

Here’s the trap. The more indispensable you make yourself to the work, the more people rely on you to do, not to decide. Expertise gets you the assignment. It doesn’t get you the conversation that happens before the assignment exists.

Being needed feels like influence. It isn’t. A valued expert is someone the organization can’t function without. A trusted advisor is someone it won’t decide without. Those aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them is where most talented communications people get stuck.

David Maister and his co-authors mapped why. In The Trusted Advisor, they describe trust as a function of four things: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

Read that list closely. Expertise lives in the first two. Credibility is what you know. Reliability is that you deliver. You can max both and still fall short, because trust also depends on intimacy, the safety people feel bringing you the messy, half-formed problem, and on low self-orientation, the sense that you’re focused on their outcome and not your own standing.

That’s the shift. Not more expertise. More of what expertise alone can’t buy.

So ask yourself honestly. Are you the person they call to execute a decision, or the one they call to make it?

Four moves close the gap.

Get in before you’re asked. The order for a press release is the end of a decision, not the start of one. Get into the conversation earlier, when the question is still what should we do, not how should we say it. Advisors shape the question. Experts answer it.

Trade certainty for counsel. Experts are rewarded for having the answer. Advisors are trusted for helping leaders think. Offer the risk you see, the second option, the consequence no one raised, even when nobody requested it.

Make it safe to bring you the mess. This is Maister’s intimacy in practice. If people only bring you the polished ask, you’re a vendor. If they bring you the half-formed worry at 7 a.m., you’re an advisor.

Get your own agenda out of the way. Low self-orientation is the hardest variable and the most visible. The moment your counsel starts protecting your turf or your budget, trust drops. Advise for their outcome, and the standing takes care of itself.

This isn’t a soft skill. It’s where the whole profession is heading. The Arthur W. Page Society, in Beyond Communication: CCO Leadership in Navigating New Complexity, found that the communications leaders moving to the center of the enterprise are the ones acting as strategic advisors to the CEO and the board, not the ones who simply execute best.

In my executive coaching work, the leaders who make this shift don’t do it by knowing more. They do it by changing what they’re known for.

The valued expert is asked to execute. The trusted advisor is asked what to do. Decide which one you want to be, then start acting the part before anyone grants you permission.

I help communications leaders make exactly this shift. I offer a complimentary consultation. You can schedule it here.