Communicate Like a Leader

CHAPTER 24

Increase Your Executive Presence

How you act (gravitas), how you speak (communication), and how you look (appearance) count for a lot in determining your leadership presence.

—SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT, AUTHOR AND CONSULTANT

Consider personal presence like physical fitness or intelligence. Simply rate yourself somewhere on a continuum from diseased to healthy, unfit to fit, grotesque to attractive, ignorant to genius. There’s always room to slide the gauge a notch or two along the scale.

Polling audience after audience, I hear the same 25 to 30 attributes mentioned repeatedly when I ask what skills, traits, attitudes, characteristics, or habits come to mind when they think of executive presence. My book Creating Personal Presence divides ...