Executive Presence is a Skill: Be professional and yourself at the same time

Then, partway through dinner that first night, her face broke out in hives, she started itching all over, her eyes swelled shut. No! She couldn’t believe she was having an allergic reaction in front of her boss! She was ill, but even worse, she was horribly embarrassed and didn’t feel competent at all..

Damien ended dinner early, raced to the pharmacy for some benadryl, and deposited a very meek Stephanie to her hotel room. Before leaving, Damien looked at her and said, “This is gonna be ok. We’re all just humans."



The next day at work, Stephanie was ready to follow Damien into fire. That one moment of warmth, where he acknowledged her discomfort and made it ok, made all the difference. 

What Damien Got Right

Damien didn't become less of a director at that dinner. The two-Palm-Pilot guy was still sitting across the table. He added a moment of warmth to a whole lot of competence, and that moment is the one Stephanie still remembers all these years later.

That combination is what executive presence is: both the competence and warmth others perceive you to have. Competence tells people they can trust your judgment.

Warmth tells them they can trust your intentions. Both are about what people perceive, which is separate from how confident you feel on the inside. You can be the most capable person in the room and still not read that way, or you can feel like a complete impostor, but project confidence nonetheless.

The Tension Everyone Feels

Authenticity matters. In Why Authenticity Matters, we argued that authenticity is part of being liked and trusted. But then, mash that up against the advice that many professionals get: you need more executive presence. How does one square being “authentic” with the need to have “more executive presence?” Some view presence as a performance and refuse to play along. Others perform and feel like frauds. Underneath all of them is the same worry, one that comes up in almost every Wolf & Heron workshop: If I change how I show up, am I being fake?

Presence Is a Skill

The key is to think of executive presence as a skill rather than a personality trait. Think about a kid learning to ride a bike. They wobble, overcorrect, and fall, and nobody watching thinks they're being fake. They're learning something they want to be able to do.



Presence works the same way. It's a skill, and you learn it the way you learn anything else: clumsily at first, then better. The growing pains are part of the process, and they don't make the result any less yours.

Executive Presence is warmth and competence

The warmth and competence framing comes from decades of research on how people size each other up. The people we find most charismatic are the ones who signal high warmth and high competence at the same time. Lean too hard on warmth and people like you but hesitate to trust your judgment (the Pushover). Lean too hard on competence and they respect your skill but keep their distance (the Expert Nobody Calls). When both land together, you're in the Charisma Zone.

Behavioral researcher Vanessa Van Edwards, author of Cues, has taken that research in a practical direction. She posits that people decide how warm and competent you are through cues: the small signals you send with your body, your voice, and your words. Most of them happen in a split second, and most of us have no idea we're sending them. A few examples:

• Showing your palms, or gesturing with them facing up, signals openness and reads as warm.
• Letting your voice drop at the end of a sentence signals conviction and reads as competent. Letting it rise turns a statement into a question.
• Smiling all the way up to your eyes reads as sincere, where a mouth-only smile can read as polite at best.
• Steepling your fingertips together is one of the strongest competence cues there is. (It's also one Stephanie will never use. It just isn't her, and that's fine.)

There are hundreds of these cues, and nobody needs all of them. What matters more is knowing which ones you're already sending, especially the ones working against you.

Swap the Cues That Sabotage You

Most people don't need to practice a plethora of presence cues. They need to drop the few habits working against them: like the apology before every point or the ramble when they don't have the answer.

The problem is that it's really hard to NOT do something. The habit fills the space the second you stop paying attention. The easier fix is to do something else instead.

Identify a warmth or competence signal that you can use to replace a behavior that’s undermining your presence. A few swaps we coach all the time:

• "Sorry I'm late" becomes "Thank you for waiting." Gratitude gives the other person credit and keeps you from shrinking.
• Rambling when you don't know becomes "I don't know yet. Here's how I'll find out." The honesty reads as warm, and the plan reads as competent, and the combo reads as confidence in your own capacity to figure it out.
• Glossing over a mistake becomes telling the story of it, including what you learned. Owning it makes you relatable, and the lesson shows you can grow from it.
  

Where to Start

• Pick one or two habits that undercut you. If you're not sure which ones, ask someone who sees you in meetings.
• Choose a warmth, competence, or charisma cue to replace each one.
• Try the swap in a meeting, then ask one person whether they noticed a difference.
  

Back to Ithaca

Damien ran two calls at once in the office and told a nervous new hire "we're all human" over dinner. He was the same man in both places, and that's why Stephanie began to view him as a charismatic leader. You don't have to choose between being professional and being yourself. You get to practice being both.



If you want to go deeper, join us on October 21 for our free webinar, Executive Presence: Be Influential and Authentic at the Same Time, a 30-minute session on choosing the cues that fit who you are and who you're becoming.