Some people are born to lead. Others learn to lead. The real question is: how do people become leaders? If so, what is the foundation for effective leadership? The answer to that is Executive Presence.
Executive Presence is the ability to listen and communicate in a manner that inspires confidence among peers and subordinates. It’s a trait that serves as a foundation for leadership, one that brings out a leader’s true potential.
What Makes for An Authentic Executive Presence
An authentic Executive Presence is an amalgam of many primary and secondary competencies, which translates into improved perceptive, cognitive and emotive attributes. These competencies are:
– Primary Competencies
- Self Control
- Leadership
- Emotional Intelligence
- Empathy
- Critical Thinking
– Related Competencies
- Creative Thinking
- Interpersonal Skills
- Team Management
Building these competencies requires time, focus and practice. As one progresses through to more senior roles, they will need to spend more time honing these skills to lead their teams efficiently and effectively.
Executive Presence At Work
While it may sound a little generic as a concept, a polished Executive Presence entails many tangible benefits for a leader at a workplace. Some of them are:
- Effective leadership, assertive communication and efficient delegation.
- Authentic engagement with team members.
- Trust among team members, and perception of being reliable, courageous, and a team player.
- Improved body language and non-verbal communication.
- Critical, creative and agile thinking.
At Dale Carnegie, we believe that leadership is an imperative for those aspiring to be trendsetters in the professional world. Based on the world-renowned principles published in How To Win Friends And Influence People, we have dedicated resources that can help you better your Executive Presence.
While these benefits may not exhaustively sum up its overall importance, they do bring out the fact that Executive Presence is crucial for being present as a leader. Mindful, skillful interactions will result in your team members, colleagues, customers and stakeholders relying on you for direction and honest feedback.
Your first steps towards Executive Presence
Executive Presence is not an intrinsic attribute. Like any other skill, with support and encouragement, anyone can embark on this path. Development of Executive Presence begins on a personal level. Getting a better understanding of your team’s dynamics, and then using that as an interpersonal benchmark for establishing a connection with your subordinates or colleagues is a good place to start from.
As this slice-of-life Dale Carnegie nugget goes: “Arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”