Executive Presence for Women: What does it even mean?

Discussions about how women can rise to the top have traditionally focused on discriminatory dynamics. And there are many of those dynamics to discuss, but that’s not all there is to it. In addition to navigating unconscious bias, harassment and discrimination, women often succeed by cultivating an effective executive mindset. Yet even the most executive minded of my clients still find one piece of advice their mentors and sponsors give them confusing: the advice to work on their executive presence. And executive presence for women is often anything but straightforward.

Key Takeaways:

1. Executive Presence Defined: Often misinterpreted as lacking confidence or conforming to a certain style, executive presence for women is about instilling confidence in others amidst uncertainty.
2. Navigating Unconscious Bias: Women face a double-bind in leadership, being penalized for behaviors that their male counterparts are rewarded for, due to unconscious biases that expect a stereotypical leadership style.
3. Beyond Style and Confidence: While style and confidence play a role, mastering an executive mindset—effectively leading amidst competing priorities—is essential for reaching the top of the corporate ladder.

“I keep hearing that I don’t have ‘executive presence.’ What does that even mean?” – every female executive coaching client I’ve ever had. Via @DanaTheus <=click to tweet

Executive Presence for Women: More than Style

Many women bumping up against the invisible barriers to the top hear a particularly mystifying piece of feedback, which they often bring to their coach for interpretation. That would be me. So I often ask their bosses, the executives who give them this feedback, what they mean when they tell these promising female leaders to develop a stronger executive presence. Struggling to describe this secret sauce of executive abilities they’re looking for, these mostly male executives generally explain it to me as a lack of confidence. 

Sometimes the confidence they’re looking for is truly a function of style. For earlier generations conforming to the expected leadership style meant wearing a masculine-but-feminine style of clothing. Thinking back on my own early career wardrobe (*cough*), this was rarely the answer to being taken seriously in meetings. By the 90’s, researchers “discovered” that women were not being mentored as often as men, so companies instituted more intentional mentoring programs. When women still didn’t make it into the leadership ranks, researchers in the early aughts focused on the critical role of sponsorship, in addition to mentorship, and how it helped leaders rise. Over the ensuing decade numbers of women in leadership have barely budged, their C-Suite representation growing a mere 4% (to 21%) since 2015. Today, in decrypting why women don’t make up a larger percentage of the executive suite, we better appreciate the role of unconscious bias in screening women and other underrepresented leaders from the top jobs. 

Viewing “the problem” of getting women into leadership through the lens of unconscious bias is helpful. It helps us work to become more conscious of things we just don’t see very clearly. Style truly does affect us unconsciously. Different kinds of people have different styles of leadership, expression and presence, and a woman in particular can struggle to code switch into the stereotypical leadership style others expect in an executive leader. Where men are often rewarded for an aggressive style, for example, women are far more apt to be penalized. You’ll hear this unconscious bias when both men and women describe a kick-ass female leader as “a bull in a china shop” and for this reason “not a good cultural fit for our executive suite.” 

This dynamic often leaves women leaders in a double-bind, penalized for the same behaviors their male counterparts receive rewards and recognition for, and it’s a particularly challenging road to navigate. Yet, in my experience, leadership style is not the most important block to the top. All the style in the world won’t help someone get to the top who hasn’t mastered the ability to come at issues with an executive mindset, get out of the weeds and lead effectively among competing priorities, strategically across disciplines all while instilling confidence in others. And yet, even an executive mindset does not always help women avoid the nebulous trap of executive presence.

After having coached many highly competent female leaders, I have come to believe there is more to the criticism about women’s lack of presence than style, or even confidence. I believe that in seeking people with ‘executive presence’, many executives are essentially looking for a particular kind of confidence, which is the ability to instill confidence in others in the face of extreme uncertainty.

Executive Presence for Women: instilling confidence for others in the face of extreme uncertainty

All the style in the world won’t help someone get to the top who hasn’t mastered the ability to help others believe success lies on the other side of chaos. Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet 

If leading a business is anything, it’s uncertain. Change, whether from customers, employees or the market as a whole, is constantly threatening a business’ ability to survive, much less thrive. And it’s the executives’ job to steer the ship and keep everyone focused on the horizon instead of the deadly waves and gale-force winds bashing against the hull. [Having recently rewatched Master & Commander, a testosterone-saturated flick about a benevolent but tough-minded and strategic male sea captain in the body of Russel Crowe, I am reminded that the masculine myth of confident bravado is highly celebrated in Western culture. How many ships lie at the bottom of the sea because of it?]

‘Executive presence’ essentially means the ability to ‘demonstrate confidence in the face of extreme uncertainty.’ Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet  

Even women who are the most confident in their knowledge and expertise can find this call to extreme levels of confidence required to keep up morale in others deeply challenging. Women do struggle, in ways men often don’t, with achieving the kind of confidence that–to a reasonably rigorous analysis–may seem unwarranted. Here are only a few of the reasons:

• they believe, not unfairly, that they have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as the guy in the next cube, to be taken seriously and that extra bravado only increases their workload and others’ expectations to possibly unrealistic levels
• they have been acculturated to take failure personally
• they have been acculturated to expect to have to clean up other people’s messes
• they have been talked over, ignored and treated less seriously than their male colleagues throughout their entire career, to the point where part of them believes that maybe they aren’t ‘all that’

For women, the combination of these experiences can be truly exhausting. Making confident statements that you’re not sure you fully believe, especially when you expect to be left having to clean up the mess when reality reasserts itself, takes a special kind of energy, and not everyone has it. This decision not to step up to unreasonable claims can be costly in more ways than one. One client of mine refused to back up a C-Suite colleague who made claims not supported by company data. Instead of being rewarded for finding a vulnerability in the business plan, she was let go in an effort to sweep the data that jeopardized overly confident projections under the rug. A year later, the board discovered the deception and fired the offending colleague, but not in time to save her job, or the company as it turned out. Did she lack executive presence? Or did she have ethical judgement?

In hindsight, that question is easy to answer. But in the moment, to her colleagues, my client simply looked as though she lacked confidence in the business. She felt like a risky company representative to put in front of the board. Worried she would undermine their efforts to keep the board on board with the business plan, they got rid of her for her lack of ‘board readiness’ and ‘executive presence.’

Should she have gone along to get along? Probably not in that case, since the CEO was sued for personal liability when the truth came out, and she may have been equally liable had she stayed to toe the line. However, in less liability-laden situations, there may well have been strategies she could have pursued to become a trusted voice of truth, a voice that could instill confidence in the board that the company’s risks, based on truthful data, were worth taking.

Executive Presence for Women: turning risk into success

For every story like my client’s above, there is a Master & Commander-version of the opposite, which we see when business titans such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson are lionized in the press for their mythical ability to create riches out of risk. In fact, some executives have described a woman’s lack of executive presence to me as a discomfort with risk. 

Looking closely at the women I coach and their comfort with risk-taking, I don’t really see this risk aversion in the best of them. Research has found that women are equally competent at managing risk as their male counterparts. The women who enjoy the game of leading a business understand that while more serious than your average game of Risk, achieving success is very game-like. And taking considered risks is part of every winning strategy.

Yet the challenges mentioned above, which every working woman experiences on a regular basis, often encourages women to play the game of business from a more personally conservative position. They hold back from making bold claims, feeling inauthentic because they expect to be blamed when a risk goes bad. (Not always an unwarranted concern considering the prevalence of the glass cliff at the top of many companies struggling to stay afloat.) This conservatism isn’t always a bad thing. As we saw in my client’s case above, such conservatism can help an organization steer clear of the wrong kinds of risk.

While a potential benefit to the health of the business, sadly for too many women, such conservatism is exactly the opposite of the “executive presence” many male CXOs and boards are looking for. 

While often healthy for the business, conservative risk-taking behavior is the exact opposite of the kind of ‘executive presence’ many male board members are looking for.’ Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet  

Where’s the Win-Win for Women?

How can women exit these double binds? Women who understand these dynamics can learn to more effectively manage risk, project confidence for others and develop a reputation for knowing the difference between considered risk and foolhardy risk. They can learn to step out from behind their personal discomfort with failure and bring others along to help clean up after the plays that don’t pay off. They can avoid the trap of being either a risk taker or a safe player and learn to champion well-founded risks and caution against more dangerous plays. 

Eyes open have the ability to see. Becoming conscious of unconscious bias starts by looking for what you’re not seeing. Via @DanaTheus <==click to tweet

When they take this gameswoman-like approach to leadership, they can more easily develop confidence in the kinds of bold plans stakeholders and shareholders expect top executives to develop. They can more easily champion the business and lead others through the uncertainty that is all around them.

In doing so, everyone will see their executive presence for the leadership asset it is, and more doors will open. 

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

What Other People Think of Executive Presence

If you ask a bunch of high-level executives what they think executive presence is — for any gender — what would they say? Here is the answer, according to the Harvard Business Review!