Today: When you can't define something, it is difficult to get more of it. We discuss what executive presence really is and the 2 questions you can ask to generate more of it in any situation. Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you.

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

Transcript

Have you ever noticed that a lot of the most desirable leadership or personal qualities are really difficult to define or distill into what they really are? Charisma is one, for example, that I think everyone would welcome having more charisma. And the other is the one that we talk about every day, on Executive Presence Morsels, which is executive presence.

Imagine if you asked 10 different people for their definition of executive presence. How many answers do you think you would get back? And among the answers you get back, how many of those answers do you think would be particularly useful to you personally in terms of developing your own executive presence? So improving how much you have beyond what you already do.

So when you start to think about these things or even try them in reality, it becomes very readily apparent how elusive this concept can be. In writing my book, Unlock your Executive Presence. Feel Like a Boss, and in thinking about these things, I came up with a formulation, a definition that is really simple and really explains the mechanism.

So once you understand the mechanism, then you can develop the techniques and strategies to develop more of your own executive presence. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to work on a bunch of techniques and strategies, if you don't understand why you're employing those particular tactics.

So here it is. The definition is, “Executive Presence is the ability to inspire confidence that you can lead well in a given situation.” I'll say it one more time. “Executive presence is the ability to inspire confidence that you can lead well in a given situation.”

That's all it is. It's not any more complicated than that. It doesn't have to do necessarily with how you look, your communication skills, gravitas, whatever the heck that means. So let's break it down.

If you think about it in terms of two questions, this will really help you work on the things you need to develop executive presence in general and also specifically for certain scenarios, if you're in this situation.

So question number one. “How do you inspire confidence?” Right? So executive presence is between you and the other people. So they're feeling something. So do they feel confidence in you or do they not feel confidence in you?

So everything that you do that helps inspire confidence. And by “do,” I don't necessarily mean actions. I also mean your demeanor, your state of being your timing. It's not necessarily the material or physical things that you do in terms of talking or moving. Some of that could even be stillness, right? Not moving, when it's not a good idea to move.

So that's the first question. So in any situation where you need more executive presence, it really helps to ask how do I inspire confidence with the people who I want to feel my executive presence? Right? What would make them feel confident in me, specifically? And you want more of that.

The second question is what is the situation? Right? So remember from the definition executive presence, isn't just about inspiring confidence, period. It's that you can lead well in a given situation. So what's the situation? So each situation will require different things to inspire confidence, right? If you're on a boat, there may be certain things…if there's a disaster happening, that would inspire confidence…if you're on a plane or in a car or in a board room. Right?

What are those things in that particular situation that will resonate with people in terms of, “Wow, this person is going to take care of things. They're a leader. They know what to do, whether they've been here before or not, I'm going to put my trust with them rather than the other person.” The other person is the person who has less executive presence, because they really haven't been able to inspire confidence in that person as well.

So hopefully this is helpful. If you break it down to these two questions, how do you inspire confidence? And two, what is the situation? It will really help you determine what things you should be doing, not doing, your state of being your presence, that will help you have outsized executive presence in any situation. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. This is Joe Kwon, the connection counselor. Remember, it's not what you say, do or wear. It's how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.

I'd love to hear from you. So please record a message on Anchor.fm, the website or the apps with your thoughts or questions on executive presence. Thanks!

Today: What does being proactive have to do with executive presence? We learn some lessons from the man in black. Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you.

DEI article on being proactive.

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

Transcript

You ever notice when you anticipate or start preparing ahead of time, things tend to go better? Like imagine if you live somewhere where a flood or storm is threatening. Would you prepare your sandbags or get ready to evacuate before the storm hits or after it's already arrived?

This state of being, and one of the Six Degrees of Executive Presence is called being proactive. People want and trust proactive leaders who are thinking ahead and prepared for what is to come. Whether what's coming is good or bad.

There's a great scene in the Netflix show glow about the female wrestlers and one of the characters, Sandy Devereaux St. Claire, played by Gina Davis is talking to one of the wrestlers Liberty Bell, and Liberty bell is recently divorced. She's a single mom with a young child so her season in Las Vegas, she imagined it would just be a single season doing the wrestling show and then she would just go back to doing whatever and go back to where she was living before.

But what happens is the show is so successful it gets picked up for another year. And so Sandy Deveraux St. Claire, the Gina Davis character is talking to her about it and thinks that she'll be all excited. But, Liberty bell is like, oh no, I can't. I only wanted to do this for one season. I have to go back and take care of my child. Because it's been hard for her to wrestle full-time and be a single mom.

And Gina Davis said something so interesting. She said, “you mean to tell me you didn't prepare to succeed?” Right? It was like, she assumed that it wouldn't be a success and that she would be done, so now she was in a very tough spot in terms of her options, because she hadn't even considered that a good thing could happen.

Now being proactive, people generally think of it as things going bad. Right? And it also helps to be proactive in anticipation of bad things happening. So to really drive this point home, let's listen to a clip from one of my all-time favorite books and the movie adaptation, “The Princess Bride.” Look out for where the Dread Pirate Roberts has used being proactive to his advantage.

Here's the clip (clip plays)

For those of you who haven't seen the movie, this period right now, Vizzini, he drops dead after laughing.

(more of clip plays)

I love that clip. I originally identified this example for a series of diversity and executive presence articles I wrote for Medium. I'll include a link to the article and a clip of the movie in the show notes. So, what happened here?

He prepared so far ahead of time, he couldn't lose. No matter which cup he drank from, he was going to be okay because he had built up an immunity to Iocane poison.

It's a bit of a fantasy and dramatic example, but you can think of that in terms of executive presence and leadership, too. Are you, or are your leaders doing things to prepare for when bad things happen? Because inevitably there's going to be problems, things aren't going to go right 100 percent. There's going to be unexpected things that happen. A vendor will fall through. A person who's an important resource will no longer be available or we'll move to a new position or a new job.

Have you done the things to anticipate and as much as you can prepare to deal with those things ahead of time so like with the storm coming, the results can be smoother or as smooth as it can be, all things considered. And consider how, when you have that proactive state of mind, that proactive state of being, people feel that, and that is part of what they perceive as your executive presence.

There's this great feature on Anchor.fm where you can record a message with your thoughts or questions on executive presence. I'd love to hear from you. Just go to the anchor FM app or the website and hit the message record button, and you can leave us a message.

Thanks for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. This is Joe Kwon, the connection counselor. Remember, it's not what you say do or wear. It's how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.

Today: Can you improve your executive presence by studying those who have it? We take a look at Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Investment to learn more. Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you.

You can watch her 2019 talk from the SingularityU ExFin South Africa Summit here.

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

Transcript

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but can you get executive presence just by copying another person? I actually have a bone to pick with a lot of approaches to executive presence, where they just take a look at a bunch of people and have some qualities that they have and say, you should just copy them.

Well, as you know, if you study a boxer or an athlete or even a great singer or musician, and you just try to copy them, that's not actually going to make you the same as them or give you the same qualities. So, as you can see, imitation will not get you executive presence. However, it is useful to have role models and learn from people who do things really well.

So what does that mean? If it's not imitation, what is it? It’s distillation. So today we're going to distill someone with outsized executive presence. Her name is Cathy wood. You may know her. She's the CEO of Ark Investment. It's one of the hottest investment companies around right now. And this is something I saw her in a video when she was at singularity UX Fin in South Africa. It's a financial, economic type summit.

And I'll include the link to the video so you can watch it after, and I'm going to go over two qualities or principles. I call them the Six Degrees of Executive Presence. I'll go over two of them that she exhibits during this talk.

Now the first one happens right at the beginning, where, you may not notice this if you're not paying careful attention, but her slides are not ready at the beginning of her presentation. So you imagine she's in a room with a huge bunch of people — Luminaries, competitors, colleagues, she's getting ready for her 20, 30 minute talk. Slides are not ready.

What does she do? She is cool as a cucumber and just starts talking about relevant things to her talk, but doesn't jump into her talk until they figure out the technical glitches about a minute or two into it. And then her slides are ready and then she notices, and then she jumps right into it without missing a beat. A true mark of someone with executive presence.

And the quality that she's exhibiting here is equanimity. It's just a fancy way of saying cool under pressure.

Now a lesser person would have gotten upset, would have gotten flustered. And the reason why equanimity is important is when things go wrong, that's when you really need your leaders to step up. So a leader who can only lead when things are going well, isn't really going to be the type of leader that you want to follow.

I experienced this sort of equanimity, as well in my own career, with one of my bosses who was an amazing presenter as well. His name was Louis Sapirman. We were in Argentina, I believe, giving a presentation and he had this gimmick where he would have a pen and he would use a pen as an example of what was going on.

So he had these pens printed out for Compliance, with a nice little logo on them, “Do the right thing!”, that sort of thing and he would hand them out to the audience. So it was always sort of a big fan favorite. So I was there to support him and I had one job that day, one job. Guess what that job was?

Bring the pens to the presentation.

So I'm watching him give this masterful kind of Compliance presentation. Everything's going so great. I'm jotting notes. I'm, I'm learning from the master and he walks over and he goes, “Joe, you got the pens?” He whispers. And I go, “OH, um, I left them at the hotel.” And the hotel was like a five minute cab ride away.

So he didn't even miss a beat. No one in the audience noticed anything. He just looked at me and whispered, “Get the pens.” So I got up, walked out to the door and then I sprinted, got a cab, got up to my hotel room, grabbed the pens, came back. Sprinted some more. Once I got to the room I walked and then I brought the box of pens in, I handed him the pens and then he went on with his presentation.

So no one in the room knew that anything was wrong because he maintained equanimity.

Another quality that Cathy Wood exhibits in her talk is stillness. If you watch the video, you'll notice that she only takes up a small portion of the stage. She doesn't need to roam around and be all over the place and gesticulate wildly. She's in total control of her content and her presentation. And she moves only as much as she needs to, to make her point or to connect with the audience.

So leaders with executive presence, as well as being proactive, which is another of the Six Degrees of Executive Presence, they also have the quality of stillness. They move when it's time to move, but not a single second before. And that makes all their movements that much more effective. And those types of leaders are the ones that inspire confidence.

So thank you so much for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. This is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. There's a great function on Anchor.fm where you can leave a message. So if you'd like, please leave a message as to who you think would be a great person to profile next, or leave me your questions or thoughts on executive presence. I'd love to hear from you.

Remember, it's not what you say or do or wear, it’s how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.