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So, what are the key skills to build “Executive Presence”?
Show Confidence through Competence
As a John Maxwell Team member, I subscribe to the daily Minute with Maxwell. Last week, he spoke about “Presence.” He pointed out that presence starts with Confidence.
Monarth explained that competence is one of the most attractive things we can cultivate as long as we don’t dress it up with arrogance and ego. He noted how competence leads to confidence, pointing out that Dale Carnegie was on to something when he taught that the more we show a genuine interest in others, the more they’ll be attracted to us.
Demonstrate Awareness of Self and Others
If your goal is to get others to appreciate and follow you, you need to get clear about who you are and what you expect. Awareness is the ability to read people and the moment (think of it as a social radar) and respond with behaviors that fit the situation. Authentic awareness is playing to the social radar of others by being genuine, honest, and respectful.
Adopt another person’s point of view by really putting yourself into that person’s shoes and imagine what it—whatever “it” is—feels like for him or her.
When we can see their perspective clearly and demonstrate empathy, we can start communicating in a way that appeals to their unique path of filtering. Doing this puts people at ease and breaks down barriers of mistrust and feelings of distance and strangeness.
These four steps are fundamental to reading people:
- Establishing a baseline
- Recognizing patterns
- Challenging and refining your assumptions
- Drawing a conclusion
The better you know someone, the more valid the model becomes, because with strangers and casual acquaintances the baseline by definition is one of your own making, derived from your own distorting beliefs, biases, and experiences.
Relate to Others
You need to know your audience. Do what you can to understand the way the members of the audience will filter your message, which includes their biases and preconceptions. Work toward an understanding—if not complete acceptance—of the underlying values and belief systems on which those biases and preconceptions are based. The more you speak their language—particularly in terms of context and framing—the better off you’ll be when it is time to tell them something that challenges or stretches the status quo.
As we empathize with the experience and feelings of others, we’ll better relate to them.
If you deliver a clear and direct message with awareness—and with empathy—of how the message feels and how it affects the person’s self-image, you can adjust your approach to get the best of both objectives. You need to establish both directness and sensitivity as soon as possible in the discussion. Research shows that when this is accomplished in the first 30 seconds, the recipient remains open and the message gets through efficiently.
Be You
What better way to show “Executive Presence” than by Ribbon Dancing?
Here are 10 tips that can contribute to the strength of your executive presence:
- Be Authentic: Don’t pretend to be something you are not. Your passion can’t be explained. It is felt. If it doesn’t come easily, think about it and focus your thoughts on the aspects of the idea that you can feel in your gut. Then amplify that feeling and share your message.
- Be Likable: If you’re likable, you will find that nice things—not in all cases; everyone has a critic—will be written about you and the brand you have created.
- Overdeliver: Always do more than what’s expected. The effort alone will pay dividends.
- Stand for Something: When people get confused about what you stand for, it’s time to regroup and think of a message that will create trust again.
- Be Timely: Has it been a while since people have heard from you personally?
- Be Unpredictable: Do this in a good way, of course.
- Create a Culture: There is no point doing all you can to maintain the integrity of your brand when other stakeholders are pulling in a different direction. From the most remote frontline employee all the way to the CEO, the message that comes from your brand has to be consistent or you will lose the trust and weaken the presence you’ve worked so hard to build.
- Get Involved: Create a scholarship. Establish a charity. Champion a cause. The more you get involved in making this planet a better place, the more reciprocal response you will see online and offline.
- Be Accessible: Sometimes people need to complain. Make that easy to do.
- Keep Your Promises: Break promises even once and you’ll get caught. Today’s Internet Age is unforgiving—and remembers everything.
Deliver Your Message
No matter what the situation is, it’s imperative that you find a way to tell your side of the story. “What the executive says is always on the record…. They need to be conscious of what they’re saying at any given time, and the effect it will have at that moment, and at moments to come.” Here is the strategy in a nutshell: Know your message and get it across, considering both the short-term and long-term effects of your words. Effective media communicators:
- Choose the Topic of the Message or the Broadcast. It seems obvious, but public opinion is shaped very heavily by whether the media choose to run a story at all.
- Create the Title of the Message. Even if the content of a news story or broadcast is neutral, an opinionated title can have a huge influence on the way the audience perceives and processes the content of the message.
- Determine the Timing of the Message.
Although we encounter certain events through personal observation—such as hunger, cold, and rain—for the most part “we learn of facts and events through someone’s communicating them to us.” Thus, the people who describe the events not only shape how we perceive those events, they decide whether we perceive them at all. Contrary to what its detractors say, a well-crafted and strategic sound bite gives the listener context as opposed to voiding it.
If you’re the boss and they have to listen to you, you especially want to make sure to insert sound bites so they capture the essence of what you’re saying. When you know what your audience expects from you, you can shape your message from their perspective. Whatever is on their minds, your sound bites have to answer that question, solve that problem, give them hope, teach them something, or tell them something they didn’t know.
Communicate through Storytelling
In his book Meatball Sundae, the marketing guru Seth Godin writes: “People just aren’t that good at remembering facts. When people do remember facts, it’s almost always in context.” The way to put facts into context for people is to transfer those facts through the use of a story because a story is all context, all the time.
Understanding that your executive presence is strongly tied to your ability to craft case studies—or business stories—that explain, teach, inspire, and help solve problems for employees, peers, and bosses alike takes you another rung higher on the ladder to the top.
The more the audience members recognize themselves and relate to the characters in a success story, the better. Similarly, the more closely the challenges that must be overcome match a situation your audience members are facing or are familiar with, the better the chances are that they’ll be drawn emotionally into the tale.
Great stories have a central theme that transcends the story: an insight to share, a lesson to be learned, a heroic deed to emulate, or a danger to avoid. Pick a single theme that will be crystal clear from the beginning to the end.
And remember the advice of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said:
Build Your Brand
Your brand is not just what you can do; it is a sum that includes how you do it and who you are in the process. It is the power of that sum total—its ability to influence choices and consequences—that can make you stand out.
Consider Google. It’s not a search engine—it’s a reputation management system. As Wired Magazine notes, “Online your reputation is quantifiable, findable and totally unavoidable.” What are you doing to manage it?
In the world of business and the world of politics, heartfelt convictions and passionate beliefs often feel like the exception rather than the rule.
Use your passion to build your brand and enhance your presence, as you shoot for the stars!