How to give your team unshakable confidence through "executive presence"
As a value-driven leader, you want to be effective in your leadership by increasing your influence and having maximum impact, while contributing to a healthy, inclusive organizational culture that creates the expected (or better) results. You also want to make sure your team is optimally engaged, with each team member contributing their best self.
This obviously requires leadership skills. But skills alone are not enough. Competence doesn’t automatically make you a great leader. What else then is necessary?
It is a compelling leader presence.
By the way, I just created a free leadership worksheet called “Outstanding Leadership of Self & Teams.” You can download it here.
There are two key elements that constitute a leader presence, often called “executive presence:” Attitude and Energy.
Let’s start with ATTITUDE.
What is attitude? We could say it’s a combination of our thoughts, feelings and actions. Our mindset plays into our attitude. Our thoughts are determined by our beliefs, especially our thought patterns. Our feelings are a result of our thoughts and vice versa. And our actions are a consequence of our thoughts and feelings, at least to a large extent. We could fill pages and pages talking about each of these: thoughts, feelings and actions, but that would go beyond the time you have available to read this article, so allow me to simplify this part a bit for the sake of moving into the practical side of leadership attitude.
Some examples of valuable leader attitudes are:
The “can do” attitude. It’s an attitude of looking for something better when you don’t like what you see, rather than complaining about it.
The “I see you” attitude. This shows your team members that you don’t only care for the work and the results they produce but also for them as humans with unique brilliance and needs.
The “appreciation” attitude. It expresses appreciation for your team’s work and each individual’s contribution.
The “winning” attitude. This is about celebrating team wins (which has a nurturing effect), rather than focusing only on problems or challenges (which can feel depleting over time).
The “solutions” attitude. This is about being focused on solutions rather than problems.
The “shared success” attitude. This is about personal success vs. team success. While you have a role in your team’s creativity and productivity – namely to promote it through specific leadership actions and tools, you don’t get to take credit for their results. It’s your entire team’s merit, and it needs to be verbally acknowledged as such.
The “serving leader” attitude. It’s important to remember that you as a leader are there to serve the people you lead. Leadership is not the same as authority; quite the opposite: Great leadership doesn’t require any outside transfer of authority to the leader.
The list goes on, you get the idea…
Want to know how you shift to a positive attitude quickly under stress? Type “Attitude” in Comments (or DM me).
If you look at all the attitudes described above, I think you would agree that enthusiasm plays a role in every single one of them. Enthusiastic attitudes is what inspiring leaders have in common. It’s a key success factor for value-driven, authentic leaders.
When you bring your leadership skills, talents and attitude together in action, the results will show. So if you’re looking to achieve better results with your teams, try upgrading your attitude, and expect your results to change… because they will.
Above, we said that attitude is a combination of our thoughts, feelings and actions. And thoughts, feelings and actions hold energy. They carry the vibrational frequency (energy) that you fuel them with. So, we could even say, attitude is energy…
So, let’s have a closer look at ENERGY.
If all you are and do in business is determined by the energy you give it, then why do people hardly ever talk about energy in business? Why is it such a neglected topic, despite its massive role in your presence?
You could say, “it’s too woowoo!” But that’s no longer a sustainable argument because science has caught up with what some have known since ancient times: That everything and all we are is energy.
Plus, the techniques I teach my coaching clients are evidence that a few simple shifts can completely change how you show up, how confident you feel, and how you are perceived by others. Your energy influences your charisma, your magnetism… or lack thereof. It plays into your ability to build trust, which isn’t just a critical leadership skill; it’s also essential to drive your career. The energy you convey can make or break your success; it co-determines how effective you are as a leader.
We often hear people say that it takes seven seconds to make a first impression… When in reality, it takes a mere 0.07 seconds for our brains to figure out whether we can trust someone. That’s less than the blink of an eye. It’s that fast! Why? – Because it’s part of our survival mechanism, which relies on picking up other people’s energy.
So yes, you want to be aware of your visuals, your voice, your body language… and in fact, your energy flows into all of that anyway. But if your energy tells a different story than your words, then your words become hollow, and you come across as inauthentic and untrustworthy.
When you are connected to your inner power energy and you add it to your genuine intention to lead your team to success, that’s when they perceive your high-vibrational frequency. This isn’t so much about your level of energy as it is about the quality of your energy.
So if you go into a team meeting (virtual or in person) and your energy is off, your team will pick up on that before you even say a single word. They may not be consciously aware of it, but we all continuously interact on an energetic level, whether we are aware of it or not. Your energy can make them feel at ease or the opposite, resistant and potentially fearful. If you know how trust works, you also know that fear and trust are mutually exclusive. And greater trust leads to a higher level of confidence: confidence to participate, to share, to be creative.
In all leadership, the magic word is trust. If you want to be seen as a trusted leader, verbal communication and actions matter, for sure. But what matters even more, is the energy that flows into them. Words alone are not appealing enough to our human survival instincts, and when your words and energy are not aligned, it just doesn’t work as well because this misalignment doesn’t make coherent sense to the subconscious mind. Good intentions need favorable energy to succeed.
I invite you to explore your own energy and to learn how to master your energetic presence so you can intentionally enhance your perceived presence. This is just one of many transformational processes we go through in my work with my coaching clients, but it’s an important one.