Decoding Leadership Presence: 3 Steps to Confidence

Does someone with leadership presence always make a good leader? Can someone without presence lead effectively?

Many career gurus will say leadership presence is essential to becoming a good, and ladder-climbing, leader. In my experience, however, many good leaders get ahead with only a mild ability to be noticed when they enter the room, depending on the company’s leadership culture. In addition, research shows that confidence and presence often help you get ahead even if you don’t deserve it. Leaders who get ahead on confidence alone flame out and fall prey to the Peter Principle before they get to the top.

Bottom Line: There’s more to being a good leader than just confidence and presence.

That said, when presence and confidence are added to talent and skill, they can absolutely grease the wheels of your upward career trajectory.

How do you get leadership presence? I’ve spent a lot of time decoding presence because I coach many women who struggle to project confidence. Their struggle is founded in the disconnect between what they feel authentically within them and what they believe it should look like outside them. Most confident role models in business are men because statistically business leaders are mostly men and historically, the archetypal ones we think of are all men (e.g., think any dead U.S. President in the biography section of the bookstore). However, authentic confidence looks different for a woman than it does for a man. It’s not enough to say to a woman, “watch the male CEO’s presence and do that.” As research confirms, most women just can’t get away with what the male CEO can get away with.

So my clients and I have had to become more creative in decoding what presence is and, more importantly, where it comes from authentically.

Here’s the short answer:

• Confidence and presence come from a place of authentic strength of conviction and knowing what you believe about a situation, absent the confusing veil of self-doubt.

• It comes from a place where failure and uncertainty are comfortable companions to success and clarity.

• It comes from knowing why you’re doing the thing you’re asking others to do.

• It comes from a place of purpose and willingness to be disagreed with – where you’re willing to change your own approach with grace and without shame – in pursuit of that higher goal.

How can you walk with presence?

STEP 1: Get clear on why you’re doing something, and why it’s important.

STEP 2: Become accountable to yourself for doing your best to make it happen, refusing to give voice to the self-doubt we all have in favor of becoming a voice for possibility.

STEP 3: Believe that you can be successful.

This is the kind of Leadership Presence that comes from deep within.

I’m often asked whether it matters how we stand, how we dress and the tone of our voice. Yes, it matters, but all the external accouterments are powerless to lead without the inner beacon of true presence. Start on the inside and you amplify any external investments you make on the outside. This is how some people make a $400 suit look like a million bucks.

Curious about how to apply these principles in your own life and career? Let’s talk about it.