Executive Presence Explained: Confidence, Decisiveness & Communication

What is it that makes one person stand out as a leader and another person seem like they just don't have that leadership trait or whatever that is, right? What is that? Well, we're going to talk about that today. It's called executive presence and there are some ways that you can actually build your executive presence pretty quickly and executive presence really moves the needle in your career if you want to move to the executive level. Welcome into the channel. My name is Tom. I'm the founder of Vertical Motion where we help good people become great leaders. That means we like to work with authentic, empathetic, and audacious people who care to build great things not just for themselves but their community as well. If you're interested in learning more about how we do that, there's a link down below in the description where you can find out all about our coaching programs. I have a book. There's a whole bunch out there. So, go check that link out. But today what we're talking about is I think [music] the most important thing that you can develop if you want to move forward in your executive career journey and that is executive presence. So, we're going to talk about what executive presence is, why it's important, and how you can grow executive presence yourself. So, first of all, let's start off with what is executive presence exactly. What is this thing that people talk about that doesn't quite seem like something you can pin down. It doesn't feel very tangible, right? Executive presence. Well, what is presence in general? Presence is the weight that you fill in a space. Someone with a lot of presence is someone that a lot of people will notice. So, imagine a large room with lots and lots of people, maybe hundreds or even thousands of people and someone like Barack Obama shows up in that room. Well, he's going to carry a lot of presence with him. People are going to be aware of who he is and they are going to wonder, "Wow, am I going to get a chance to talk to him? What is he thinking? What is he up to these days?" Somebody like that has a lot of presence. Executive presence is a specific version of presence where you show up looking, sounding, and acting like a leader. And specifically, I like to say that you look, sound, and act like a CEO. Somebody who is in charge and is responsible and is up to the challenge. And there's a lot of elements to executive presence that we'll go through, but in general, this is the weight you carry in a room. And executive presence specifically is the weight you carry in the boardroom or the conference room or in the presentation or in the meeting or wherever you are. And [music] if you have executive presence, people treat you very differently than if you don't. So, an example of this is you picture yourself in a conference room [music] with maybe 10 other people. And there's this one person who's kind of got his feet kicked up on another chair. He's looking at his phone. He's kind of sagging. He doesn't look like he's really well dressed. He's kind of sloppy. Didn't shave for the last 2 days. Something like that, right? You see someone like that and it's like this person's not really engaged. It's not somebody that I necessarily want to follow. Then there's someone else and she's completely put together. She's poised. She speaks with a ton of confidence in what she's saying. She's very well put together. She's clear with her points. She stands up for herself and for her thoughts and her ideas. She's also willing to admit when she's wrong. That person has an entirely different demeanor to them and you treat their words differently. They carry more weight than the person who's not really showing up for the conversation or the meeting. And so, executive presence is what you see in the latter person. She's showing up with this presence as being an executive. And while executive presence is made up by like 50 things, there's really three elements of executive presence that are the most important and somewhat usually the easiest to improve the quickest. And so, let's talk about those three things right now. Number three on this list is communication skills. And specifically what I'm talking about is the idea that communication is what the listener does. When you say something in a way that makes sense to you, it doesn't always land with someone else who thinks and communicates differently than you do. So, for example, if you are somebody who is direct, straight to the point, you don't have time for fluff, you just want the facts and the data, you can say, "We're laying off three people today." And for you, that's like, "Okay, well, we're laying off three people. I got it." And that's all the information you need. Someone else who is more emotionally attached and connected and needs to feel a sense of safety and comfort in their environment, and they need to understand the why and the backstory, and if there was any thoughts about how this could be avoided, that person needs a whole lot more information delivered in a softer context than how you would deliver that. And so, learning how to communicate to people in the way that they can hear you, communication is what the listener does, it means that whatever the person is hearing, what they understand, that's that what's being communicated. And you may communicate something that you didn't intend to communicate by saying it in a way that makes the most sense to you, but not to them. And so, learning how to communicate to other people with different forms of communication style, this is critically important for executive leaders because at the end of the day, leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And if you can't influence somebody because they don't understand what you're saying, then you're going to have a problem here. You're not going to be able to get across your points. You're not going to be able to influence these people the way that you want to. Also, with communication, we need to learn how to speak to teach and listen to learn. This is really important here. When we speak, we just want you to hear what we have to say and really understand that. We'll say it three, four, five times, but you want to speak in a way that teaches somebody, not just what you want them to know, but why? Why you realize that or why you understand that. And so, we need to be speaking to teach, but more importantly, we also need to be listening to learn. One of the greatest pieces of advice I was ever given was realizing that you have two ears and one mouth, and that means you should probably listening twice as much as you're speaking. That was actually really valuable for me, especially as an extrovert. It's easy for me to just lawnmower over a conversation, and I've learned to take a moment, sit back, listen to what people are actually saying. Because a lot of us listen to respond, not listen to learn. And what that looks like is when you're in a conversation, somebody says something, and you're like, "Oh, oh, oh, yeah, I know I'm going to reply to that. I'm going to talk about this thing." And then you don't hear the next 30 seconds of whatever they say, cuz you are locked in and thinking about what you're going to say to this person. Well, cool, but you missed 30 seconds of what they had to say. And so, what I have learned is that if you listen to learn, you actually hear everything that they're saying, and you may change what you say next. And so, what I like to do is give myself 2 seconds before I reply, whenever I can. This is kind of difficult, especially for extroverts, because we have so much to say. But, if you take a moment after somebody finishes speaking, take 2 seconds, reflect on what they said, and then share your thought, whether it was the one you came up with a minute ago or the one that you just come up with right now. Either way, it's giving space for what they're saying. Now, some people will continue to fill that space as extroverts naturally do, but try to give a little bit of space, at least enough of a pause that you make it clear that you heard everything that they had to say. So, that's communication. That's number three on my list of the top three things you need to know in order to build your executive presence. Number two on this list is decisiveness. Now, ask yourself if you have ever worked for an indecisive leader. How miserable it is. I had an indecisive leader that I worked for long long time ago. He was the vice president of engineering at a large company and he had one job which was to choose one of these three products to put into our system. It was going to be like a hundred million dollar contract for one of the three vendors. It couldn't go to all three because if you went to one of them, you got a massive price discount and all three companies were capable of producing exactly the same product. The specs were just minimally different. The pricing was minimally different. But if we bought from all three companies, it meant that the price would come up 20% per unit. So it was a huge cost. All we had to do was pick one. And in retrospect from my perspective, I remember sitting there back there thinking, "Any one of these is fine. Just [music] pick one." Well, this vice president spent the next six months going through ABC testing of these three products. He got three products from each company into a lab and had engineers work on them for months to do tests and all the data came out. These are the same things. They basically do exactly the same thing as each other. And instead of just choosing one, he chose to buy from all three, which supply chain went insane because it increased our cost by 20%, which led to a challenge with the program and all the things, right? And it was like, "Just pick. Just decide because sometimes it's better off to just pick one path even if it's not the most optimal path. Sometimes just choosing any path is better than just sitting there and staring at the paper for six months." Like I just remember how infuriated I was. And so think about this. If you are somebody who is indecisive, you're not able to make decisions quickly. Do people want to follow you? Because would you want to follow somebody like that yourself? So, take a step back and think about the decisions that you make from day to day. Should I do this? Should I do that, right? Well, if you are taking way too long to decide, you're causing problems not just for yourself, but other people as well. What I have seen and learned is that people who are decisive, they make decisions quickly, fare way better in their lives and in business than people who are indecisive. And someone else recently told me this idea that high-potential people decide quickly and change their minds slowly. Whereas low-potential people decide slowly and change their mind quickly. So, if you find yourself in that latter category, this is part of why you are not moving forward in your executive career journey. Learn to be decisive. And one of the ways that I found that's the best way to learn decisiveness or to practice decisiveness is to go to a restaurant, look at the menu for 5 seconds, and then just choose something to eat, and that's your choice, and you stick to that choice. Worst-case scenario, eat something you don't like, but it's forcing you to make decisions more quickly. And the better you get at making decisions quickly, and the better you get at trusting your gut and your instinct, the more decisive you'll be and the more executive presence you'll have. And the number one most important trait that you can have in order to have executive presence is confidence. And I'm talking about a very specific kind of confidence. So, a lot of us get our confidence from external validation. And a lot of us are, I guess what you would call, validation junkies. What I mean by this? I mean that our confidence comes from outside of us, right? So, we look at our checking account, or we hear our friends say that they think we're pretty, or we look at our social media and see our hearts and likes and follows and shares, right? And those things are external validation of who we are. And when those things are going great, then your confidence is at a high. But, here's what happens when those things aren't going great and your mood dips. Like, imagine this. You have the confidence in yourself to do your job, and then you get laid off. Do you have the same confidence in yourself anymore? There it's obvious that you will go through an introspection period, but you should very quickly snap back to like, "Well, this wasn't my fault. I did my job as best I could. The company let me go because of other reasons, not because I'm a bad person." And when you recognize that, your confidence should snap all the way back up. But, does it? Because the reality is that for most of us, and I include myself in this, external validation has at least some weight on our mood and our energy and our belief in our self. If you are externally validated to be bad too many times in a row, you can start to lose your confidence. If you think about it, someone who is intrinsically confident, somebody whose confidence is coming from inside of them, is going to be someone who's going to lead a whole lot better than somebody who doesn't have that confidence. When you lead based on your morals, values, beliefs, your mission, your purpose in life, what you're trying to do, your goals, what you're trying to accomplish, when you lead from that place and you believe in those things, that is a solid foundation to lead from. But, when you lead based on what people think about you or what people say about you or how much money is in your checking account or how many hearts and likes this thing will get or how many follows and views. Like, if you're leading from that place, that means you're outsourcing your confidence to other people, which means other people can either give you confidence or take it away. When you have intrinsic confidence, it doesn't matter too much what other people say. You want to be aware of what other people saying. External validation keeps us in guardrails, cuz we might go too far off in one direction. But, generally speaking, it shouldn't be changing our decision-making process for difficult decisions. Difficult decisions should be made based on our internal morals, values, and beliefs. And this is why it's easier to respect a leader than to like one. Sometimes we don't like what a leader is doing, but we respect that they made the decision based on what they think is the best thing to do. And confidence, intrinsic confidence, if you do not have this, you will not have executive presence even if you have everything else. Because nobody will follow a leader who is not confident in themselves, in the mission, in other people around them. That lack of confidence will destroy any executive presence you try to build. So you can be a highly effective communicator, you can be highly decisive, but if you don't have confidence in yourself, you're not going to go very far. And so this is, I have learned, the most important element of everything when it comes to executive presence is having confidence and believing in yourself. That's the most important thing that you can build. So we've talked through what executive presence is. Let's talk about why it's important to have executive presence. The reality is that humans are tribal. We form bands, and this is based on getting through the last ice age together 70,000 years ago when there were only 50,000 breeding pairs on the entire planet of humans. We learned that we have to survive in tribes, we have to survive in bands. And each of those tribes and bands has a strong leader in charge of it, right? And that can look like a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, we need our leaders to show up as versions of themselves that are confident, that communicate clearly, that make decisions boldly and correctly as often as possible. Those traits really matter in our leaders. This tribalism has brought itself into the corporate world, too. And if you look around, there's an org chart, but then there's this unofficial org chart. And what is this unofficial org chart? It's the locus of real power in an organization. Somebody might be off to the side role that's like, you know, not even really on the org chart, but just kind of like off to the side doing logistics or facilities management or something unimportant to the business, but they're the most important person to get a yes from in the building. And that person may not have positional authority, but they have community authority. And that's what executive presence is about. You need to marry the positional authority with the authority of the community. This unofficial org chart is more of an influencer chart. And so somebody with a high level of influence doesn't need to have positional authority. Doesn't need to have the title in order to influence the community around them. But you have to realize that influence is way more important than your professional skills or your professional experience. Like you can be an amazing accountant, but if you can't influence people to close the books correctly, you'll never be CFO. So you have to understand that the higher you go, the more influence matters. And influence is made up by your executive presence. And so if you don't have executive presence, you're not going to influence people at the executive level. They're not going to see you as an executive leader. And so this is why it's so important that you have executive presence. And I will say that executive presence moves the needle more than any professional experience or any skill or anything that you can point to on your resume. It's how you show up, that presence that you have, that really drives success. There was an interesting study done by a researcher who said that he could predict with confidence the grade that the class would give a professor after just eight minutes of the first lecture, what the grade would be of that professor at the end of the semester. And the correlations were incredibly high. So, he would show an 8-minute clip to a group of 60 people, and they would guess what the class graded that professor. And in the first 8 minutes, that correlation stayed true. So, that means that in 8 minutes, everybody in that class already decided what they're going to grade that professor. Over the next, you know, 15 classes, 2-hour-long classes together, it never changed. Those first 8 minutes really matter. And in reality, the first few seconds matter the most. And so, people will start to decide where you fit on the hierarchy very quickly. Where you fit in terms of how much influence do you have? How much should I pay attention to this person? Should I follow him? Should I ignore him? All of that stuff comes from this tribal stuff, and that's why executive presence at the end of the day, if you don't have it, they're not going to follow you. And it doesn't matter how good you are at your job. If they don't follow you, they're never going to promote you to be put in this position to be followed. So, finally, how do you develop executive presence? And we could spend a whole day going through this. In fact, in my coaching program, I have hours upon hours upon hours of content around executive presence, not just the what and the why, but really we focus on the how, because this takes time, right? [music] Each person shows up a little bit differently. Some people have strengths in this area, but not in that. Some people are highly decisive, but they have no idea how to communicate their decisions. Some people can communicate uh amazingly, but have no idea how to decide their way out of a one-hole paper bag. So, you have to think about what your strengths and weaknesses are in your executive presence. Do you have intrinsic self-confidence? Start there, because if you don't, none of this works. And so, you have to start liking yourself and believing in yourself. And I will tell you as somebody who spent 45 years of my life and career not really having intrinsic confidence, everything was external validation for me. It took a lot for me to understand how to build that intrinsic confidence that I have now. >> [music] >> I did not have it until quite candidly, I went through leukemia and almost died. I They gave me 6 weeks to live and said, "Sorry." And somehow, I miraculously survived, and that's why I'm here on YouTube. But, it took a near-death experience for me to learn how to build intrinsic self-confidence. I don't wish that on anybody, but building intrinsic confidence is harder than it sounds if you don't know, like, and trust yourself. And so, focus right there first of all. Start believing in yourself. I know this might sound a little woo, but this stuff really matters. And then with decisiveness, as I talked about, you can practice decisiveness in what I call throwaway situations. Go to a movie theater and just pick the first name of the movie that shows up and watch that movie. Or, go to a clothing store and just walk up, pick a shirt, and buy it, right? Like, decisiveness can be practiced, and it can be honed. And the idea is that you start to learn how to trust your instinct, trust your gut, because what I've also learned is that your first decision tends to be the right one. We then let fear, uncertainty, and doubt talk us out of that decision for what is ultimately maybe a safer route, but itself has unintended consequences that actually wind up making that decision worse than what your first bold decision was. And then finally, with communication, go to Toastmasters. Toastmasters is this great organization where you can go and speak publicly in front of a whole bunch of other people who really don't want to be there either, but they themselves also get up on stage and speak publicly in front of you. And this is kind of like immersion theory for introverts, right? Just putting yourself in an environment where you have to communicate is a great way to start learning those communication skills and realizing that at the end of the day, all of these skills, right? Confidence, decisiveness, communication and everything else, these are all learnable skills. We're not necessarily born with them. It may seem that some people are just more naturally predisposed to those things and maybe they are, but I can tell you as somebody who has learned all of these things, these can be learned. You can learn how to show up with confidence, how to be decisive, and how to communicate in in a way that's empathetic to what other people need to hear. Of all the topics that any executive coach could teach you, executive presence is the number one most important trait that you have to learn in order to move your career forward. I can teach you all of the tactics, how to use LinkedIn, how your resume should be this, how to nail the interview, all of that stuff, right? And we talk about that on this channel, but at the end of the day, it always comes back to this. How much executive presence do you have? How quickly can you grow it? Because executive presence, I have seen time and time and time again being the one thing that moves the needle more than anything else for all coaching clients and everyone I've worked with, the thousands of people that I've spoken to now over the years. So, build your executive presence. Put some time in it. If you want to learn more about how to build executive presence the right way, join me for a master class that I do on Tuesdays that teaches you that and several other things you need to know in order to move your executive career forward. The link for that master class is down below as well. I'd love to see you there and we can have a direct one-to-one conversation. At the end of that call, I do Q&A. So, that masterclass happens on Tuesdays, and then we have a Q&A right afterwards, and I'm glad to have this conversation with you about your challenges with executive presence. So, join me for that masterclass. I'll see you there, and hopefully I'll see you in another one of these videos, too.