8: Does executive presence have an age requirement?
Today: Do you have to be a certain age before you can wield executive presence? Let's consider. Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you. Thanks to Carlos Santiago from GSK for his insights, which contributed to this episode.
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Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License
Transcript
Let's talk a little bit about age and executive presence. It's pretty easy to slip into the thinking that you need a certain amount of experience or a title, or need to reach a certain amount of, I don't know, grayness or white haired-ness to really warrant executive presence.
And I'm here to tell you that's totally bogus, right? That's not what executive is about, and I'm actually reminded of a really funny remark and insightful remark by Carlos Santiago, who's an executive for Glaxo Smith Kline; was interviewing him for a show, "Si-suite: A Seat at the Table With Executive Leaders" for a podcast that I host for ALPFA New Jersey. ALPFA's the Association of Latino professionals For America and I'm on the board of the New Jersey chapter.
And Carlos was talking about leadership development and he said a lot of times what you hear from people when you ask them for input on how you can develop as a leader, you hear a lot of things like, well, you need to be three to five years in every role, right?
And he thought about that and he was like, wait a second. What is the average age of most CEOs? They're roughly 40'ish and if every CEO actually had to take three to five years in each role before they became a CEO, as Carlos said, most CEOs will be closer to a hundred years old. So what's going on? What's what's different. Why is that advice actually not 100% valid?
And what's interesting to me is people can only see what they experienced and what they realize, and they kind of have a certain perspective and that understandably is what they're going to share with you. And I believe in most cases, that's a well-intentioned sharing. I don't think anyone was talking to Carlos trying to sabotage his career.
However, that doesn't mean that you always have to take as 100% truth, advice that people give to you. You have to consider why they're saying it and what's important and truthful about it, but it doesn't mean you have to limit yourself or assume that that is necessarily true, where the path for you as well.
And this also applies to executive presence. If we look back on our North Star, which is the definition of executive presence, which I've developed, which is, "executive presence is the ability to inspire confidence that you can lead well in a given situation."
Think about that for a second. There's no experience requirement there. There's no age requirement. There's no looks or title requirement. There's not even a talent or skills requirement. If, with all the tools you have at your disposal, you can inspire confidence in that particular person that you are the best one to lead in a given situation, you will be the one who's perceived as having executive precedence.
So it doesn't matter if you're 5, 15, 20, 25 or 55. If you are able to do that, you will be perceived as having executive presence. So the question is not really, when will I have executive presence? It's how do I generate executive presence now?
So whether you're a student, whether you have just entered the workforce or whether you're a seasoned professional that maybe has been critiqued that they don't have executive presence, if you start thinking about executive presence in these terms, you'll start to understand and be able to develop the right things - the things that actually generate executive presence and put to the side parts of advice that don't really get to the root, which is how to generate executive presence. Not when.
I'd love to hear from you about how you're enjoying executive presence morsels. Feel free to record a message on the anchor.fm app or website with your thoughts or questions on executive presence. I'd love to hear from you.
This is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor, and thank you for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. Remember, it's not what you say, do or wear, it's how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.