Being Strategic - Improving Executive Presence
Guidance on executive presence for Directors trying to get to the next level.
“You need to be more strategic”
It’s feedback a lot of people receive as they try to move from middle management to the executive level. Yet, few can define what it actually means or entails.
Is it an innate talent, or some magic “X”-factor?
No. Being strategic can be taught and learned. It requires learning new ways of approaching problems, changing your mindset, and a bit of unlearning of the things that got us to where we are now. It requires picking up a few hard-skills and learning some very hard soft-skills.
Whether it’s analyzing problems, speaking the language of the business, or improving your bearing - the skills of being strategic can be taught.
Executive Presence
You might think just a buzzword. You’ve probably searched for tips on “power poses” or “presentation skills” as if picking up some simple tips is all it takes.
It’s way more than that.
Executive presence is a hard, challenging skill to master because it requires overcoming your natural instincts. You need to do everything from learning to manage your ego and emotions to willingly damaging your own credibility if it helps the company.
Here’s advice on how to “show up” as an executive.
Own everything, especially the bad stuff
They call it the “executive role” for a reason. You take on a set of responsibilities with the “VP hat”, and that’s to act as the person fully accountable for every outcome of your function.
You have to take ownership of everything - particularly the issues, problems, and challenges.
What does owning it look like?
Bad decision from leadership despite your best effort? It’s your bad decision now.
Your report’s report’s report makes a mistake even though you explicitly warned them beforehand? You’re fully to blame.
Miss a target due to a market issue? You should’ve done better.
You don’t get to blame someone else. You don’t get to justify it. Your job is to provide the solution.
Where directors fall short
When a Director has to communicate unpopular decisions, there’s always a temptation to say “Leadership is wrong, I’m on your side, I understand, I’m fighting for you.” but it rarely leads to a positive outcome.
It damages the chain of command - the very place the director gets their authority from in the first place, and it likely leads to a loss of hope as the fighting never materializes into a reversal of a decision. Even if it did, you’ll be known as the person who fanned the flames of an antagonistic relationship.
It might get the team on your side, but the executives won’t be.
Unlearn the instinct to always participate
As a manager or director, you contributed through always engaging and participating. As an executive, you have to know when to speak and when to stay silent.
Your title carries a lot of weight. If you say something, your voice and opinion suddenly becomes the most important in the room.
Share an opinion at the wrong time, and you shut down healthy discussion. Tell someone to do something - you might’ve damaged the chain of command or prevent a key learning opportunity.
Even just being present can cause others to behave differently to the detriment of the outcome - self preservation instincts can override even the most optimistic people.
You have to know when to not be there but balance it with ensuring outcomes. It’s hard, but good executive presence can mean you not being present at all.
Never lose control of your emotions
As humans, when something bad happens, our base instincts kick in. When the pressure is on, it’s fight, freeze, or flight. Arguments, withdrawal, snarkiness, emotionality - all of these completely natural reactions can dramatically alter the course of an organization.
Even a single slip-up can cause harm. It can make people stop communicating, take the air out of a productive discussion, or even lead to churn.
Executive presence demands our ability to unfailingly regulate ourselves and re-aim conversations towards a productive solution. You don’t get to have a bad day without long-term consequences.
Emotions and authenticity
It might be difficult to reconcile being an ice-cold robot with the importance of being authentic.
Split authenticity into two: negative authenticity and positive authenticity.
Positive authenticity drives neutral or positive outcomes. Maybe you like to tell puns, or have challenges you’ve overcome and dealt with. This kind of authenticity can and should be shared. Perhaps it can inspire others, or lighten the mood during stressful times.
Negative authenticity causes damage at the executive level. If you have anger issues, you yell. If you have anxiety, you worry. If you have confidence issues, you get sarcastic. You don’t get to damage the organization and claim to be authentic.
Executive presence demands a level of professionalism even during stressful situations.
Never be fuel to a negativity fire
Work isn’t always fun and games. Anyone can lead a team during good times, but it’s when the good times go bad that effective leadership stands out.
While a team might want a leader to have empathy, it actively harms them to stay in a headspace of ‘everything is wrong’. The executive has to pull them out of their negativity.
Some make the mistake of over-commiserating and adding fuel to the fire, harming retention and effectiveness. They become an energy drain on their team instead of uplifting them.
Good executive presence requires a balance - to acknowledge what the team is going through while also supporting them in getting through it with their heads held high. They acknowledge challenges but refocus their teams on solutions, not problems, to keep the teams moving forward and motivated.
Where directors fall short
When deadlines get missed, or the pressure gets high, teams become morose and dismayed.
A director that can’t re-orient their team towards the common goal, to pull them out of their negativity, won’t have a team for long - the team will quit because they lose hope, or the director will be replaced because they lose trust.
Make decisions that hurt, especially if it helps the business
As a director or manager, you may have optimized for your team, but as an executive you optimize for the company.
You need to be rational - to look from the lens of how to best leverage the opportunity for the company’s success, what’s needed to help it succeed, and how to best mitigate risks.
You’ll face hard calls:
Cutting a project the team loves and worked hard on
Giving your best people to another team that needs them more
Backing a change that makes your own job harder
It often even means negatively impacting yourself by making your job harder, and you have to be OK with that.
Where directors fall short
I see a lot of Directors tie their success and identity to the size of their team, and fear when people are taken away from them and their empire gets tinier. They consider it a win when they get a larger team or more budget.
This very behavior holds them back from advancing. When executives see a person optimizing for their local success instead of the company’s, it is a sign that they aren’t ready for the next level. A director that’s ready is one that thinks about how to do more with less, so that the company can better pursue its goals elsewhere. They don’t tie their identity to the size of their team.
Being an effective executive requires you to want to win more than you’re afraid to fail.
Take feedback with zero defensiveness
How you react to feedback dictates the flow of information. If you have even a hint of negativity, you will start getting less feedback, or couched feedback, and your information flow becomes less clear leading to worse decisions.
You need to ensure you never have any form of defensiveness.
What does defensiveness look like?
Arguing against the feedback
Asking for proof or evidence
Demonstrating and form of disbelief
Acting like you’re already aware
Providing feedback immediately after
Making sarcastic remarks
Complaining about the feedback to someone else
Having a visible negative reaction to the feedback
Blaming others for the issue
Retaliating
Anything other than a true, honest “thank you” is the wrong reaction to receiving feedback - no matter how it’s delivered, where it comes from, or the timing of it.
Where directors fall short
Directors are used to harmonious discourse. The scope of the role makes it so much problems have relatively isolated solutions that benefit everyone.
As an executive, all solutions to a problem will harm someone. There’s no easy decision. Everyone comes in with a different perspective and idea, and feedback is quickly provided on the merits and validity of an idea. There’s no time for couched words or beating around the bush.
No sugarcoating, no pulled punches. Executive conversations can and should be direct. If you can’t handle that, you aren’t ready.
Know your business inside and out
An executive’s job is to know their organization inside and out. When asked a question, you only get so opportunities to say “I don’t know” before others lose confidence in you ability to lead. For some key projects, just once is enough.
As an executive, it should be your day job to know and have a handle on the ins and outs of your organization and be able to speak to it.
Be a vault
At the executive level, confidentiality is non-negotiable. Leaking information can result in massive consequences. Leaks can collapse deals, violate laws, heavily disrupt operations and even jeopardize the company’s success.
Executive presence requires you to have the trust of others to be a vault - discretion is a responsibility and sometimes a legal obligation. Failing to maintain confidentiality damages your credibility in the room and can quickly lead to a loss of confidence.
You’ll be required to coordinate communication plans:
Who says what, where, when, and what words
Who learns first, then second, then third
Where directors fall short
Managers and early directors develop bad habits.
Sensitive information they are privy to is low stakes, so they tend to find utility sharing it to build rapport with others, streamline upcoming changes, or assuage frustrations from their reports. The negative impact of these leaks is relatively minor, and limited to unnecessary frustration should the plan change.
But, every time it occurs - it damages trust from the executive team. It makes me less likely to share information with them, and certainly less like to advocate for increased exposure as an executive to even more sensitive information.
Get to the point - fast
Presenting something to an executive? Keep it brief:
State your point in the first sentence.
Give a sentence of supporting evidence or impact.
Follow up with a next step or action.
Stop.
The whole thing should take 15-20 seconds. If there’s follow-ups, you’ll get asked for
it. Share a document before-hand with your deeper detail thinking.
Control the temperature of the room
A leader’s job is to set the tone through their actions, decisions, and communications.
Tone is all about how you communicate something. If you have bad news, you can communicate it in a way that quickly causes others to spiral out of control. Likewise, you can communicate it in a way that people become over-optimistic and don’t take it seriously. Tone needs to be appropriate and intentional with every communication.
Tone can be imparted through words, body language, facial expressions, even vibes. People pick it up easily. If leadership seems fearful, they become fearful. If leadership seems frenzied, they get frenzied. If leadership seems negative, they become negative.
It’s a leader’s job to set that tone towards things that result in positive outcomes for the company and maximize not just the understanding of the message but what follows afterwards.
Executives aren’t just measured by their results, they're judged by how they show up. Showing up requires control.
Control over yourself, by mastering your emotions, reactions, and composure.
Control over the room, by directing energy, focus, and direction.
Control over perception, by ensuring your actions lead to confidence and trust
Don’t dismiss it as a checkbox or “nice to have”. It’s a difficult skill.
Executive presence isn’t optional, it’s the price of admission to operate at that level.