Executive Presence Isn’t What You Think It Is

Gravitas, communication and appearance? Check, check and… check. But the latest research shows it takes a lot more than these three attributes to lead in today’s world.

In 2014, when Sylvia Ann Hewlett first published Executive Presence, the world looked a lot different than it does today. Back then, Hewlett — an economist, entrepreneur and founder of the Center for Talent Innovation — identified gravitas, communication and appearance as the three things that give leaders their “it” factor.

But that was pre-pandemic, pre-doomscrolling and pre-hybrid workplaces. In 2012 and 2022, Hewlett surveyed high-level U.S. business executives and asked them to rate 25 leadership traits — the results revealed that what we look for in an ideal leader has shifted significantly in the last 10-plus years (a finding that prompted Hewlett to pen Executive Presence 2.0 in 2023).

Yes, confidence and decisiveness are still important, but now you can’t get anywhere if you’re not building trust, being transparent and projecting authenticity. As a result, today’s executives are having to rethink — and refine — their leadership styles.

Executive presence is about more than how you look, it’s about how you make others feel

Dr. Maja Djikic, a personality psychologist, associate professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and author of The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development, has dedicated over a decade to exploring executive presence and says your leadership potential is about much than your appearance or what you do when you enter a boardroom, it’s the impact your unspoken cues have on other people’s motivations, emotions, thoughts and behaviours. “It’s the non-verbal trust that you emanate all the time,” says Dr. Djikic.

For instance, leaders who feel stalled or stuck can have a negative impact on those around them. “They have trouble building trust and instead leave people doubting themselves,” she says. “Whereas those with strong presence tend to leave others feeling hopeful and that they, too, can be authentic.”

“When you look at charismatic people, you get a sense that they are unapologetically themselves. It’s a strength that all of us are drawn to — somebody who can be themselves comfortably in public as they lead.”

To develop the authenticity required of today’s leaders, Dr. Djikic says it’s important to understand the psychological roots of executive presence, which may be linked to your earliest memories and unconscious, internalized beliefs. “I became interested in leadership presence when I started studying how adults grow,” she says. “There’s a host of beliefs about women and the workplace that we carry in the form of transgenerational trauma. It’s not as easy for us to understand our value or negotiate with the world, but that’s not a personal fault, it’s a historical fact that we’ve internalized — and that needs to be healed.”

We sat down with Dr. Djikic to explore the psychology of leadership presence and to better understand how to harness it in today’s world. Prepare to explore your unconscious, transform your confidence and evolve your leadership style.  

ROOM: Why is developing leadership presence so important?

Dr. Maja Djikic: Presence is the basic building block of trust. Most people think of trust as relational and long term. But what most of us don’t reflect on is that to build that a long-term relationship, you actually have to trust a person in the moment. When we go from one team or organization to another, we encounter people we haven’t met before and learning how to build trust very quickly is essential.

R: What qualities, aside from the ability to build trust, define someone who embodies today’s definition of executive presence?

MD: There are two things. There is integrity, which is simply that you as a person are whole. So, all parts of you — your emotions, thoughts, behaviour, motivation — are moving in the same direction. You’re not fragmented.

If you have imposter syndrome, for example, you behave as if you belong in the room when your mind is telling you that you don’t. That affects your integrity. As women, we can be “in pieces,” and putting ourselves back together makes us whole. This integrity is clearly visible to others.

The second thing is transparency. When you put yourself together and focus on your integrity, then you can open the curtain to who you are in a way that inspires others, and it’s that authenticity that can have a significant impact on the people that you work with.

R: What is the most important thing about developing leadership presence that you most want people to know?

MD: That it does not take 20 years. You can have confidence and presence, and you can have it quickly.

I always ask people: “Did you have confidence when you were three years old?” Everybody says “yes.” And I joke that three-year-olds don't contribute to anything, and they feel fantastic about themselves. They’re expressive, they demand attention, they think that they deserve everything. What happens between that age and when you’re six or 10 years old and you suddenly start thinking that people are going to humiliate you if you speak up in a particular way?

What I want women to know is that they already had confidence and presence. They do not lack it. What has happened is that they have internalized noise from outside, and the inner work is how to get rid of that noise to be their confident, authentic selves again.

R: What role does gender play in building executive presence?

MD: When it comes to gender, there is a set of external barriers that we battle, such as the glass ceiling, or other people who don’t believe we belong in the room — these are things that stand in our way. What I like to focus on instead are the internal barriers. The ways in which we have internalized the cultural discourse that we’re not good enough, that we don’t belong in the room, that we have to pick between a family and a career.

When you look at men, they never think that they’re in conflict. They feel like, “Oh, I can be a CEO and I can have three children.” But there is a discord narrative for women where you can’t have it all.

R: How can you recognize — and overcome — the internal barriers that prevent you from being a stronger leader?

MD: We internalize things unconsciously when we’re young — from our parents, teachers, media — and then these prejudices start to speak to us almost as our own voice. And that’s dangerous, because it seems like an intuition that you should not apply for that job or position or that you won’t make a good boss. But even though it’s inside of you, it’s not yours. It’s somebody else’s voice reinforcing these beliefs.

We can expel the stereotypes that we’ve internalized, making us better able to meet external barriers in a more level-headed way. The attack from the outside is no longer going to land on an active wound, it’s going to land on a scar — and that makes you even stronger. It also allows you to make the pragmatic moves necessary to get to where you want to go in your career.

R: What does that inner work look like — and where do you start?

MD: Expelling stereotypes requires the inner work of examining your motivations, behaviours, emotions, thoughts or beliefs and how you carry your past inside of you. Once you identify where these constructs originated, you can start laying down new neural pathways relatively rapidly.

You’re not rewriting your history; you’re adding to it. For example, if you have an underlying belief that you’re not smart enough, ask yourself Where did that come from? You can usually pinpoint early experiences, for instance, maybe in fourth grade a teacher made you feel “less than” your classmates. But the transformative part, which is the part where things change in the unconscious, is when you take these experiences, re-open them and pour in new information.

Usually, the experiences are from earlier in our lives, elementary or high school, even preschool. It can be very small, simple things that have laid down their neural pathways. It’s like you get this construct of what you can or cannot do poured into you, and the lid is shut down and you just sort of carry it through your life. Now, you just need to pop open that lid and build another experience, based on what you know now. You know that you’re smart, that you can do it or, even if you don’t know how to do it right now, you’re going to learn how to do it. Eventually, you don’t even think, “Can I do it?” — you just do it. And if that past experience comes up from your unconscious again, you no longer feel a sense of loss, or confusion or whatever it is that you felt before and instead you feel a sense of self-confidence.

R: Was there a time where you had to use this approach to establish your own executive presence?

MD: Yes. When I started teaching in grad school, I was terrible. I was very uncomfortable speaking in public and in front of the students. I would literally break out in hives from the stress.

So, I looked at the emotions that were constantly in the background of my teaching and explored some of the beliefs that I had about myself and the students. Then, I went deeper to examine the memories from when this construct I had of myself were formed.

I discovered that my construct was that teaching is all about knowledge, which was stressful because I felt that my knowledge was imperfect and therefore, I couldn’t be in front of the students comfortably. That internalized belief didn’t leave any space for the students, or the relational part of teaching, which is what makes it work. When I opened my mind to the relational part of teaching (that the student-teacher relationship is as important as the knowledge of the teacher), my transformation happened.

R: How do you measure success when it comes to leadership presence overall? Is there a moment when you know someone has truly "owned" their leadership presence?

MD: I’ll give you my personal experience: after I’d done the work, I would go into the same situation that used to cause a lot of emotion, and there would be nothing. I thought, “so this is what it feels like to teach without stress.”

That level of confidence is visible. We can walk into the room without having our sense of self-esteem externalized. It’s not that when I walk into the room, I have to see who’s in there so that I know how I need to feel about myself. Instead, it’s about being able to walk into the room and just be who you are, which is that integrity of being yourself in public.