Genuine Executive Presence: 3 Surprising Steps To Actually Develop It

But authentic executive presence is not simply about appearances. To achieve executive presence, we must cultivate inner habits that transform the way we interact with the people we lead from the inside out. The following three steps to improving executive presence are not going to teach you how to learn to love the limelight or how to appear confident when you are nervous. Rather, they will help you improve your relationships and understanding of others and yourself in powerful ways. These inner habits will, in turn, allow you to develop authentic executive presence.

Executive Presence Step 1: Be a good listener

A good listener does more than lean forward in their seat and nod their head. Though habits like this can help a person know you are paying attention, a truly good listener draws out the speaker by demonstrating curiosity and interest through the use of open-ended questions. When your team feels seen, heard and understood, trust and goodwill will flourish. A leader can’t be truly effective if her teams don’t trust her.

To be able to inspire and lead your team with confidence you have to understand them. And to develop an authentic understanding of the people you are leading, you must listen.

“How you think is how you lead,” CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, a manufacturing technology, Bob Chapman explained when he adopted the Truly Human Leadership style. “If you view each of [your employees] as the human beings that they are—as someone’s precious child whom you are helping to become all they were meant to be, empowering them becomes easy because they feel cared for and valued and they want to contribute their gifts to the shared purpose.”

At the center of this approach is listening. For this reason, Barry-Wehmiller requires its executive leaders to take courses in empathetic listening. Chapman continued: “The conventional wisdom is that leaders tell people what to do and how to act. We believe that the most powerful thing a leader can do is to truly and deeply listen.”

Executive Presence Step 2. Trust your story

People with executive presence are often caught telling the right story at the right moment. A brief, brilliant story can turn a run-of-the-mill interaction into a meaningful and memorable one. But having the right story ready to tell when the moment arises requires that you understand your own stories.  Therefore you must mine your life for stories. When you understand the experiences you’ve been through and how they demonstrate your character, it not only helps you understand who you are, it also helps you trust that you are in the right place at the right time – and that the stories you have to tell are the right stories.

Harilous Xenos, Manager for Continuous Improvement & Sustainability at Kiswire Europe, recalled that learning how to make sense of his life experiences was transformational for him. He said, “I learned to make a sculpture out of the rocks at a crucial transitional point in my career. I thought of the separate experiences of my life and work as rocks—separate moments that were not connected.”  Through storytelling coaching, “I was able to look back on these rocks and see how they fit together. Our sessions forced me to think and reflect on the moments of my life. As a result, I was able to create a sculpture out of the rocks: a cohesive story that now welds these experiences together.”

Xenos’s experience captures the power of being able to trust your story. It helps you to uncover and comfortably articulate your character — the reasons you do what you do. Trusting your story builds trust with others.

Executive Presence Step 3. Use word play.

People with executive presence are memorable. When you have to give a presentation or when you meet someone new, have fun and make it memorable by using word play. Word play is both fun for you as the leader and for your audience. Word play is memorable because it’s unexpected and snappy. Here are some examples:

• Flip Flop Words: When you change the position of words, it changes the meaning. Example: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
• Contradiction: When you contradict commonly held beliefs, you make people stop and think, because it’s not what they expected you to say. Example: “Be brave enough to suck at something new.”
• Lean On The Little Ones: Use the power of “to be” verbs and prepositions in commonly heard phrases, such as “Progress makes perfect” vs. “Progress over perfection” vs. “Progress is perfection.”

A sales leader at Moore, a constituent experience management company for leading nonprofits, Leigh Janis uses word play to make an impression while networking. Instead of simply stating her name and title, she calls herself a “Rejection Therapist” to call attention to the complex and human side of sales. Like mining your life stories, using word play takes some thoughtfulness and prep work beforehand. You must ask what you want your audience to remember and why. The answers to those questions will inform what phrase you want to highlight in your on-stage moment with word play.

The Executive Presence Takeaway

Taking these three steps toward executive presence requires some bravery. Most of us are not used to intentionally employing the power of being a good listener, trusting our own stories, or using word play at work. But if we build up these new habits, we will transform our relationships with ourselves and the people we lead. So why not be brave enough to try something new!

Related Articles

What Happened When These Leaders Tested The Power of Leadership Storytelling? 

Leaders on Leadership: 10 Valuable Lessons That Will Make You Think