If I had to identify one key strategy that could help women—or anyone—advance their career, I’d point to enhancing your executive presence. If your executive presence is strong, you stand out as a leader, which can lead to a promotion, new opportunities, and career advancement.
Executive presence isn’t easy to define—it’s that je ne sais quoi that indicates a person with leadership potential and abilities. While it’s easy to get bogged down in your operational role and assume that your day-to-day performance is all that matters when seeking a promotion, executive presence, which relates to the signals you send out in your interactions and communication, can be even more important.
Executive presence is crucial to your leadership effectiveness, which is why developing a stronger executive presence can be the perfect next step in preparing yourself for a promotion. Whether in talent reviews or succession planning, your executive presence serves as an important factor to your manager and other stakeholders on whether you appear ready and able to advance to the next level.
What’s Your Current Executive Presence?
You may not be aware of it, but like everyone else, you have a unique professional presence that you convey while you’re working. In short, executive presence means your leadership substance, style, character, and communication. It’s your multi-dimensional behaviors, attitudes, traits, and attributes that you use to express your ideas and influence others.
Think about the presence you currently project. Are you confident and able to communicate your vision, or do you find yourself unable to speak up and clearly share your viewpoint? Are you able to leverage your relationships strategically, or do you stick mostly to people in your own department, focused just on your own daily tasks? Do you have the emotional intelligence that allows you to stay calm under pressure, or do you panic and point out problems without offering solutions? Do you have an executive voice that allows you to demonstrate your strategic leadership abilities and be relevant to senior executives? Once you understand your starting point with executive presence, you’ll know what you need to work on.
How Can You Improve Your Executive Presence?
Once you recognize where your strengths and weaknesses lie in terms of your executive presence, what’s next? It isn’t a simple thing to change your presence overnight, particularly without feedback and guidance. Mentors and managers can sometimes provide insight but don’t always have the bandwidth to tackle the stickier work of helping an employee or mentee revamp their presence.
Executive coaching is an effective way to boost your executive presence. An experienced coach can give you specific strategies to leverage that can improve your leadership presence and influence as you build your self-awareness and emotional intelligence. The feedback and support of an executive coach—whether you work one-on-one or with a coaching program—can lead to a transformation in how you conduct yourself as a leader and “show up strategic.”
Next Steps
If you want to kickstart your executive presence, I invite you to join our upcoming Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) Program on September 17-18 and October 22-23. This not only brings you together with a cohort of other ambitious women, but also provides an opportunity to learn and apply key practices and behaviors for taking your executive presence to a higher level.
At the WILL Program, you’ll also engage with a SHAMBAUGH certified executive coach in a series of one-on-one executive coaching sessions throughout and after the program. This unique opportunity will be instrumental in helping you to apply these important insights back to your immediate role as a leader. Contact Kate Alves at kalves@shambaughleadership.com to learn more.
SHAMBAUGH executive coaches have a minimum of 10 years experience in an executive coaching role and a coaching certification earned from a recognized coaching program. Everyone on the SHAMBAUGH coaching team has been a leader themselves, and has experience coaching in multicultural/international institutions and organizations.
Our coaching process is based on grounded research, proven methodologies, and best practices. We prioritize being less theoretical and more practical, incorporating a solution-based approach that includes relevant tools and resources that support each individual’s key growth goal. You can learn more about our coaches here.
If you or your team have advice for women in leadership that you’d like to share or questions you’d like to ask about this topic, please reach out to me at info@shambaughleadership.com.
Link to SHAMBAUGH’s offerings on Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Coaching and Development Programs for Women, Keynotes, and Fireside Chats.
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I’m also happy to share a recent Forbes.com article where I stressed how important it is for us to keep a strong pipeline of women who are ready to lead effectively in the C-level.
While we’ve seen progress in women’s leadership over the years, that progress has also made us complacent and our focus and prioritization on DEI programs has waned. For the first time in 20 years, we’re seeing a decline in the percentage of women in key leadership roles. If we don’t build a strong pipeline today, we will continue to see this trend for years to come.
Producing the next female CEO will not happen overnight. Organizations need to give women the opportunities to expand their business acumen and build mastery. But women also need to advocate for themselves, recognize their strengths, and position themselves for those strategic and value-adding roles.
Do We Have The Pipeline Of Women To Fuel Future CEOs? (forbes.com)
Rebecca Shambaugh is a recognized author and speaker on leadership best practices. She is president of SHAMBAUGH Leadership, founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, and author of the bestselling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor. Read Rebecca’s best-selling Harvard Business Review article “To Sound Like a Leader About What You Say and How and When You Say It.