Why ‘Executive Presence’ Can Be a Touchy Topic

It’s been a couple weeks since my company finished putting on a virtual seminar called “Executive Presence for Exec Comms Pros,” and I’m still thinking about it. 

Obviously, teaching about rhetoric can be loaded. But I and most of our teachers have been doing it for a long time, and we know how to separate the communication techniques we’re teaching from the politics they might be used to push. Whether you’re writing speeches for a Republican or a Democrat, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence works equally well.

But “executive presence” is more political in and of itself. Or at least it can be, depending on how the student feels about trying to look, talk and act in a way that garners attention and credibility from people much more powerful than them, like corporate CEOs or university presidents.

From the opening minutes of the four-day, 7.5-hour course, you could tell the participants showed up with feelings about the subject. And why wouldn’t they, having tried everything they could think of to win the boss’s trust, and to one extent or another, having failed.

Happily our seminar leader, Jeff Davenport, had a lot of concrete suggestions to offer about showing up confidently, presenting well, staying composed and helping leaders find solutions—and he offered them in a gentle and understanding, but firm manner. Meanwhile, the participants used the chat liberally and enthusiastically to offer one another suggestions. It was probably the most interactive webinar we’ve ever done. Afterwards people said they felt empowered to go back to the office and really try some stuff. In a survey, they rated the course very high.

But the last session is the one I’m still thinking about. That was a freewheeling “office hours,” where people could speak and exchange ideas in a Zoom call format. Soon, we weren’t talking about executive presence techniques as much as we were veering into a world closer to … social justice? We didn’t record the session and I won’t reveal anyone’s identity, but folks were asking one another what people—people of color, young people, women and neurodiverse people came up specifically—are obligated to do to please and comfort and impress and curry favor with people in power, who (it went without saying) are still often white men and in any case are upholding the cultures of institutions usually founded and dominated by white men.

Suddenly it was a different conversation, and one that often rose above both Jeff’s and my pay grade, and outside the scope of this instructional business seminar. But it was good anyway, and it roiled along largely without Jeff’s and my moderation. It was a conversation that’s stayed with me—and that will stay with me, until the next time we offer this webinar, which was as well-attended as it was intensely experienced, by all involved.

In the end, I think people felt they were facing a plain truth, after so much has been said and done and hoped for and promised about diversity, equity and inclusion in the last few years: Unless you are an irreplaceable genius, if you want to get ahead in an institution you really do have find ways to be pleasant to be around, easy to work with and, yes, generally agreeable to the powers that be. If you can find a way to be that way and still feel true to your own humanity, good. And if you don’t want to do all that to get ahead, then you’ll need to forge another path. (I feel the same damn way myself, and I guess I did forge my own path.) But only in the rarest workplaces and in fantastical LinkedIn blather about “authenticity,” is it ever going to be any other way.

Plain, and painful—clearly.