Your “Executive Presence” Needs a Second Look.
Summary: Evaluating, hiring or promoting leaders based on the idea of “Executive Presence” is risky. The term itself lacks a clear common definition, leaving it subjective and ambiguous. And yet, Google the term and you’ll be hit with 293,000,000 results. Clearly it carries importance. But it also carries the danger of unconscious bias.
When I hear the term “Executive Presence” I cringe.
Something about it just feels creepy. I’ve heard it used by hiring panels aiming to hire the next vice president. They put forward names of equally qualified candidates for the requisite sniff test to determine who has more “Executive Presence,” the litmus test for the final decision.
“I like her as a candidate, but I just don’t think she has Executive Presence.” And then everyone ponders that for a moment, conjuring up images of an “Executive” and comparing the candidate to that visual before moving on to the next.
It’s as ambiguously subjective as making a house purchase based on curb appeal.
It’s not that executives shouldn’t have an impactful presence, they should — all leaders should. Given that executives hold overarching accountability for leading the organization in a positive direction, they must have a presence that inspires a sense of trust, confidence, and hope.
But what exactly does “Executive Presence” mean in a promotion or hiring decision, both explicitly and implicitly? And does it mean the same to us collectively?
What is “Executive Presence” anyway?
As a proponent for authentic, conscious, purpose-based leadership, my recent research into Executive Presence has left me disheartened and a wee bit cynical. Executive Presence is quite well accepted as both ambiguous and important. “You can’t describe it,” they say, “but you know it when you see it.”
The Center for Talent Innovation (now called Coqual) conducted a 2012 study that included surveys of almost 4,000 college-graduate professionals, 40 focus groups, and over 50 one-on-one interviews with high-level executives.
They concluded that Executive Presence is viewed as having three universal dimensions: gravitas, communication, and appearance.
The 268 senior executives surveyed concluded that “gravitas” is the core characteristic of Executive Presence. They believe it contributes 67% toward one’s Executive Presence, while communication contributes 28% and appearance rounds us out at 5%.
Coqual’s Founder (and author of the book “Executive Presence”) Sylvia Ann Hewlett states clearly that Executive Presence “is not a measure of performance… it’s a measure of image.” And yet, Executive Presence constitutes 26 percent of what senior leaders say it takes to get the next promotion.
Such is the problem with our accepted ambiguity of Executive Presence, especially when it comes to choosing from a pool of candidates. We interpret Executive Presence based on the behaviours and styles of the executive leaders to whom we’ve grown accustomed.
And, sadly, that’s a very specifically curated sample group.
Who are our Role Models for “Executive Presence”?
You’ve likely answered the question already, but let’s look at the numbers. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity’s Commission, in 2018, 86% of leaders classified as an executive, senior official or manager were white.
The representation of white leaders, at around 765,000, matched the population of all of North Dakota. The representation of BIPOC leaders, at around 130,000 matched the population of a town called Kent in the state of Washington.
The numbers become even more stark. Since it’s launch in 1955, the Fortune 500 list has included only 19 Black CEOs out of 1,800 chiefs. Four of those were interim and at the helm for less than a year.
According to the 2018 EEOC, male representation at the executive, senior, or manager level is more than double that of female — 69% versus 31%.
McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 report tells a similar story from a global perspective. Since 2015, their research shows “only modest signs of progress.” The number of women in senior vice president roles grew from 17% to 21% and in the C-suite from 23% to 28%.
The growth is even slower for women of colour, who represent only 14% of executives in 2020.
In 2020, the Fortune 500 hit an all-time high representation of women: a whopping 37. Bonus factoid: there are almost as many women CEOs in the Fortune 500 as there are CEOs named “John”.
At the same time, we lack LGBT+ representation in our executive offices with just four publicly out LGBT+ CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and no publicly out LGBT+ CEOs in the FTSE 100.
Even height matters. In his 2012 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcom Gladwell polled Fortune 500 companies and found that:
“…on average, male CEOs were just a shade under six feet tall… In the U.S. population, about 14.5% of all men are six feet or taller (but) among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58%. Even more striking, in the general American population, 3.9% of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.”
Our role models for Executive Presence — and the descriptors we conjure when we consider whether a candidate has it or not — are based on the prototype of a tall, straight, white male.
Language Holds Power: Let’s Shift our Language
The language we use holds power, reveals our biases, perpetuates stereotypes, and shapes our culture. With our current state of Executive Role Models clarified, let’s consider the limitations and consequences of our ambiguous-but-important definition of Executive Presence.
Weighing in a 67% of Executive Presence, gravitas is of particular concern. Notice the language used in the word’s descriptors:
“Exude” confidence.
“Show Teeth.”
“Burnishing” reputation.
This language leaves me scratching my head. Isn’t it possible for executive leaders to inspire a sense of trust, confidence, and hope without exuding, snarling, or burnishing anything?
Since the onset of our pandemic, we’ve seen such examples in non-profit, healthcare and government sectors. Jacinda Arden’s Executive Presence at the UN last year included a baby, kisses, and cooing. Perhaps with role models like these, our world would be a bit less hostile.
Gravitas is subjective and laden with cultural and contextual meaning that’s baked into our gut notion of who is prepared to lead us. Even our deference to tall leaders may stem from unconscious evolutionary psychology, where leadership entailed physical risk that doesn’t exist in the boardroom.
The Risk of Using “Executive Presence”
The use of “Executive Presence” as a criterion for hiring and promoting is parallel to the use of “culture fit,” something Facebook has recently reckoned with. As a previous Facebook recruiter summarized: “the culture here does not reflect the culture of Black people.”
Both “Executive Presence” and “culture fit” run the risk of implicit and explicit bias, while placing the burden of adapting oneself to those biases on the shoulders of the under-represented.
Coqual’s study dug deeper into the impact of Executive Presence on women and multicultural professionals, uncovering that they “struggle with (Executive Presence because there is) an intrinsic tension between conforming to corporate culture and remaining true to oneself.”
Vivienne Ming, named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, articulated the challenges she’s faced as transgender leader as a “Tax on Being Different, the quantifiable cost of not being a straight white male in the workplace.”
She explains that the “choices aren’t only about participating or not. The range of options include code switching, being one of the guys, leaning in, staying in the closet, going stealth… so many choices to be someone other than you.”
Contorting to our dominant image of Executive Presence costs women, BIPOC, and LGBT+ professionals a thick slice of their authenticity, if not their very identity.
It costs our workplaces too.
With qualified candidates and under-represented leaders alike sacrificing parts of who they are so that they can increase the scope and span of their leadership and steward our organizations, how many of our employees feel the pressure to do the same?
And what perspectives, ideas, energy, passions, and humanity do our organizations lose out on for the sake of comfort and the status quo?
We’re in an age where the impact of competition, divisiveness and individualism is revealing itself as the dead-end it truly is. Meanwhile, the paradox of a global pandemic is that it’s opening us up to our shared humanity — and that we’ve turned our eyes to a humbler kind of leader, the kind that inspires trust, confidence, and hope regardless of “gravitas.”
It’s time to Recover to the better parts of ourselves, to open our minds and hearts to a broader understanding and welcoming of all the many ways we can lead — even at the top.
Especially at the top.
