How to Increase Your Executive Presence at Any Stage of Your Career

And inspire confidence in your potential to achieve great things

I remember the knot in my stomach like it was yesterday. An executive passed me in the hallway on his way to another meeting. “Have you heard about the email your trainee sent to the man in the corner office?” he asked with a smirk.

My heart started racing as my mind slowly began to connect the dots. I had no idea what email he was referring to, but there were two things I did know. First, the man in the corner office was our CEO. Second, I had just onboarded a group of trainees who had joined us in their first full-time jobs out of college.

One of those trainees must have emailed our CEO, and whatever that email said had made enough of an impression on him that he’d told other executives about it.

The odds were that this wasn’t going to be good, and I had some digging to do.

The downside of being the recruiter responsible for hiring recent grads into their first big-kid jobs was that they didn’t always have a full appreciation for the importance of executive presence. And when they failed to demonstrate this competency at work — and there was always at least one who did — their bad behavior unavoidably reflected poorly on me. At least that’s how it felt.

Gerry Valentine, an executive coach and Forbes contributor, was quoted as saying that “executive presence is about your ability to inspire confidence.” Who exactly you need to inspire confidence from may change throughout your career but, in the case of a recent grad, it’s about “inspiring confidence among senior leaders that you have the potential for great achievements.”

I define executive presence as exhibiting maturity and the ability to flex your communication style and professional carriage to match the situation at hand, whatever that situation may be.

Those of us with executive presence are mindful of the dynamic situations we find ourselves in, and we adjust how we carry ourselves accordingly and in real-time.

This group of trainees had recently sat down for a roundtable Q&A session with our CEO, among other executives. It was one of the capstone events of their training program and was designed to give them visibility with top leadership and a chance to learn more about who our executive leaders were as people.

Apparently, their takeaway from the session had been that our CEO was super approachable. Perhaps, a bit too approachable. Their email to him following the meeting read something like this:

Hi, Thanks again for taking the time to meet with our training class this week! It was great to learn more about your career path. A couple of us have tickets to the Brewers game this week. Would you want to come along and grab a beer with us?

Yikes.

I was humiliated for them because they didn’t even realize how inappropriate this was or how badly they had misjudged his offer to “email him anytime with questions.”

All this to say that none of us started out as experts, and I’m sure we’ve all learned many things the hard way over the course of our careers. We may have even done things at work that, looking back, make us cringe.

As leaders, it’s important that we teach our less-experienced team members the importance of executive presence. Perhaps, by doing so, we can help them avoid similar blunders and protect their professional reputations.

The tricky thing about executive presence is that it’s one of those elusive traits where you know it when you see it, but it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is without seeing it in someone else.

So the question then becomes — how do we actively teach our team members how to exude something we can’t always put our finger on?

I find that asking team members questions that challenge them to think about how those around them might perceive them is the most effective strategy. And, like all coaching, the best way to do this is to do less lecturing and more questioning.

Here are five coaching questions I’ve used to get employees to think about executive presence and consider how they might adjust going forward:

1. If someone who knew nothing about you or your personality heard you make that comment, what might their impression of you be?
2. What do you think should be different about how you communicate with your friends compared to how you communicate with leaders at work?
3. When you think about the level of detail required for this presentation, what do you know about your audience that you might use to guide your talking points?
4. What could you do to convey more confidence and competence when speaking with leaders?
5. How will you respond if you’re asked a question in this meeting that you don’t know the answer to? What might that response say about you as a professional?

And, finally, remind your team not to invite the CEO out for a beer. Cheers!

Not a member of Medium yet?

Join here to directly support my work and get access to every story on Medium. You can also subscribe to my free newsletter or connect with me on Linkedin.