What is Executive Presence?

Executive presence is not looking and sounding like a particular kind of human being. It's simply you, but importantly, you when you are the most other-focused.

The phrase "executive presence" was popularized by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who wrote a book in 2014 called Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success. In that volume, she identifies three components of executive presence: gravitas, communication, and appearance. In her survey of 268 senior executives, 67% named gravitas as what matters most, 28% communication, and 5% appearance.

A recent article from MIT Sloan Executive Education (Building Executive Presence in Today's Workplace) refines those categories and lists three core components of executive presence:

• Confidence in communication

• Gravitas and the ability to inspire trust

• Emotional intelligence

Those three main components are a good place to start, but in order to think about how to improve your executive presence, it's useful to break them down into more concrete behaviors, so that you can begin to think about what to work on to improve. To help us do that, let’s start by reframing the definition of executive presence.

How does GK Training define executive presence?

Let’s go back to GK Training’s counterintuitive definition of this widely used term: it's simply you, but importantly, you when you are at your most other-focused. The goal should not be to look and sound like a certain CEO, or a business leader you admire, or even a politician that has won your vote. Rather, the goal should be to look and sound like you already look and sound when you are most intent on connecting with your audience, helping them to understand a point of view, or supporting them in the work they're doing. When you're the most connected with others, you naturally exhibit all of the behaviors described below, and those behaviors, taken collectively, lead to an impression of confidence, gravitas, and emotional intelligence.

The good news here is that everyone on Earth knows how to do this when they are less concerned with themselves and more concerned with the people they're speaking to.

What are the core executive presence skills?

Let's take each of those broad buckets and break them down further.

Confidence in communication

Confidence is an inner state or feeling, but it's relatively easy to go beyond that and start to identify what we call the behaviors of confidence. Things like:

• Speaking with linguistic precision (i.e., reducing or eliminating filler sounds and conditional language)

• Comfort with silent thinking time

• Using the 5 P's of Vocal Variety (Pace, Pitch, Pause, Power, and Placement) to emphasize key ideas and keep an audience engaged

• Using eye contact skillfully to gather information from the audience or listener

• Using enough breath to speak with a relaxed but resonant voice

These behaviors identify the way we tend to communicate when we are in fact confident, but they are not reliant upon feeling that way. One can pause, use vocal variety, make eye contact, breathe, and support the voice even if internally there isn't a feeling of confidence.

Gravitas and the ability to inspire trust

We can break this category down into concrete behaviors as well:

• An upright but relaxed physical presence that doesn't change in high-pressure situations

• Physical composure during difficult conversations

• Continued access to the 5 P's of Vocal Variety when things get tough

• Using transparency to acknowledge the dynamics present in an interaction, without defensiveness

Rather than trying to figure out what an adjective like gravitas means, you can focus on these practical behaviors and develop the ability to embody them in a variety of situations

Emotional intelligence and reading the room

Leaving aside the general concept of EQ (there's a whole other book about that topic), let's focus on the reading-the-room part of this. What does reading the room look like, behaviorally?

• Asking questions in a skillful and sophisticated way

• Pausing enough to allow other people to get their voice into the conversation

• Using the skill of eye contact to gather nonverbal information from your listeners

• Using the 5 P's of Vocal Variety to mirror or contrast the communication style of the folks you're talking with

These are also all skills that can be learned and developed.

Why is executive presence important?

Executive presence is a collection of behaviors and skills that improve effectiveness in the workplace in several important ways.

First, communicating with clarity. Communication skills are the delivery system for all of your best ideas. The ability to communicate clearly and effectively, that first executive presence bucket, is table stakes for getting anything done in the workplace. At a basic level, if you can't get other people to understand your ideas, you can't hope to get them to act on those ideas, or support them, or implement them, depending on the circumstance.

Taking that a step further, gravitas and credibility allow you to get buy-in from other people and to become the go-to colleague in tough situations. If the only constant is change, then the ability to calmly, with composure, guide people through shifting environments, priorities, and agendas is a key leadership skill.

Finally, reading the room, being attuned to the people that you work with, allows you to build consensus, to anticipate issues, and to deliver feedback to a receptive listener.

How can you improve your executive presence?

Rather than think of executive presence as a character trait or innate ability that some people have and others don't, begin by breaking it down into executive presence characteristics: consisting of concrete behaviors. The more practical, the better.

Once you've identified those behaviors, you can identify for yourself where your gaps lie. Once you know the one or two or three behaviors you don't have access to reliably across all the kinds of interactions that you have, then you can begin to build a practice plan.

GK Training founder Michael Chad Hoeppner's best-selling book, Don't Say Um, is a perfect starting point to begin your skill-building journey. With chapters like “Conciseness: How to Talk Less (and Say More)”, “Articulateness: How to Choose Your Words (and Avoid ‘Um’,”, and “Eye Contact: How to Focus on Your Audience (and Not Your Eye Contact),” think of it as a step-by-step how-to manual for building executive presence.

What should I do next?

Buy Don’t Say Um and get to work. Sign up for GK Training’s newsletter, Good Talk. Book a Free Communication Skills Assessment.

P.S. – How this post was made. Shawn Fagan dictated the first draft out loud. Claude cleaned up the transcript, fixing transcription errors but leaving the words and their order alone, and Shawn wrote the draft from there. We then asked Claude to review it for search and AI-answer optimization, and we took all nine of its substantive recommendations. The most useful was structural: our own definition of executive presence, the point of the whole post, didn't arrive until ten minutes into the dictation, so we moved it to the top. It also checked our sources and caught a claim we'd have published wrong (Hewlett popularized the term; she didn't coin it). The thinking and the words are ours. The fact-checking was a collaboration.