Executive Presence 2.0: Leadership in an Age of Inclusion

Dedication

To the amazing young adults at the center of my life: Shira, Alex, Lisa, Barry, David, Luana, Adam, RB, and Emma. You’ve taught me most of what I know about authenticity, inclusivity, and how to show up in this world in 2023.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part I: Executive Presence 1.0

Chapter 1: What Is Executive Presence?

Chapter 2: Gravitas

Chapter 3: Communication

Chapter 4: Appearance

Chapter 5: Feedback Failures

Chapter 6: Walking the Tightrope

Chapter 7: Authenticity vs. Conformity

Part II: Executive Presence 2.0

Chapter 8: Gravitas 2.0

Chapter 9: Communication 2.0

Chapter 10: Appearance 2.0

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Executive Presence Self-Diagnostic

Index of Exhibits

Notes

Index

About the Author

Praise for Executive Presence

Also by Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

My first run-in with executive presence (EP) occurred when I was seventeen. I was in the second year of the sixth form at my grammar school in the UK and applying for the ultimate reach schools—Oxford and Cambridge. I’d gotten a certain distance, having passed the rigorous entrance examinations, but was now facing a round of interviews. I anticipated a rough time. I knew enough about the world to understand that I came from the wrong background (Welsh, working-class), and my knees knocked and I broke out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of facing the scrutiny of Oxbridge dons. I feared they would size me up and decide I did not have it, which of course they had in spades.

Seeing my distress and eager to be helpful, my mum volunteered to dress me for my first interview at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She’d read a ton of Nancy Mitford novels and thought she knew what kind of clothes the upper crust wore. I didn’t push back—I knew I was clueless. I’d grown up in a backwater coal mining community and had few clothes and no social graces. I was eager for help. Having battled huge odds to pass the entrance tests, I knew that this interview was the only thing standing between me and a coveted place at one of the most distinguished universities in Europe. And I had a good shot—half of those interviewed got a place. I just had to figure out how to look the part of someone who moved in the right circles.

So early one December morning we hit the winter clearance sales—rising at the crack of dawn so that we would be at the head of the herd storming C&A (a department store in Cardiff, Wales). And did we score! In the sales racks of the ladies’ suits department my mum found exactly what she was looking for: a nubby tweed suit with a fox collar. And I don’t mean the collar was made out of fox fur. I mean the collar was a fox—or most of a fox. The tail was a big feature (you were supposed to fling it around your neck as extra protection against the winter cold), and then there were two beady eyes and two sets of claws.

As might be expected, my Oxford interview was a disaster. The admissions committee was gobsmacked. I literally took their breath away. They simply did not know what to make of a seventeen-year-old who wore a fox and seemed to be trying to look like the Queen Mother—especially since this particular seventeen-year-old spoke English with a thick working-class Welsh accent (more on that in chapter 3). I did not get in . . . and was devastated. But it was hard to blame my mum. She had tried so hard.

To my great relief I got a second shot at my dream. A month later I learned that I’d also passed the Cambridge entrance examinations (in those days the two top universities in the UK crafted their own rigorous tests). I was invited to go for an interview. I told my mother that she was off the case—this time I was dressing myself. Remembering the look of the other female candidates at Oxford, I borrowed a pleated skirt and a simple sweater from a friend and ironed my unruly hair so it fell in the shining sheets that seemed to be in vogue. Despite an acute attack of nerves, I did well enough in the interview. Three weeks later I learned that I had won a place. I was over the moon. I knew that a Cambridge education would transform my life prospects.

Looking back, I realize that I didn’t need to do brilliantly in those interviews. I merely needed not to stick out like a sore thumb. The fact is, back then, Oxford and Cambridge universities were under pressure from the British government to diversify and had committed to increasing the number of female and working-class individuals in the student body. Unbeknownst to me, I was a prime candidate, and those admissions committees were leaning over backward to give me a place. But the fox collar and the Welsh accent were just too much for class-conscious Oxbridge dons. I just stuck in their craw. Losing the fox was a winning idea.

Given the travails of Oxbridge entrance, you would have thought I’d learned a thing or two about the power of appearance. Perhaps I did, but it was hard to hang on to. Time and time again I made costly mistakes.

Take my hippie professor phase. My first job was in academia, and when I joined the Barnard College faculty as assistant professor of economics, I assumed that since I was working on a college campus, and not on Wall Street, it was okay to be young and fun. So I wore my hair waist-long and I specialized in flowing ethnic skirts—my favorite was hand-stitched and had a rather loud patchwork quilt pattern. I failed to understand that looking as though I was on my way to Woodstock got in the way of establishing authority on the job. I was facing a tough sell even without the hippie skirts. I was twenty-seven when I started this job, and it was a stretch to convince anyone I was a professor and not just another student. The last thing I needed was to compound the challenges I faced as the youngest faculty member—and one of the few females in the economics department. Looking back, I now understand that my early struggles to command attention and respect in lecture halls and faculty meetings did not center on content or delivery (I was a clear, crisp speaker and knew my material cold), but rather on the way I presented myself.

Time passed and after some painful experimentation, I eventually fixed the way I looked, evolving a signature style that combined elegance and professionalism with a safe amount of idiosyncratic flair (more on this in chapter 4). But I wasn’t out of the woods on the EP front. Twenty years later I hit another—and much more serious—brand problem. It turns out that EP is a fragile thing: It needs to be nurtured, invested in, and curated. I failed to do this and fell flat on my face—necessitating an EP makeover.

Here is what happened.

In 2002, Tina Brown (who, at that point, headed up Talk Miramax Books) published my book Creating a Life. It launched on April 7. The weekend before, Time magazine ran a cover story on the book and the CBS News show 60 Minutes aired a feature. This coverage triggered a maelstrom of media attention. The New York Times and BusinessWeek did feature pieces on the book; so did People and Parade magazines. I appeared on the Today show as well as on Oprah and The View. The coup de grâce: In late April I was lampooned on Saturday Night Live, confirming the fact that my book had briefly entered the zeitgeist.

Alas, the good news did not last.

On May 20 I picked up the New York Times and glimpsed on the front page a noisy headline that blared The Talk of the Book World Still Can’t Sell. Halfway through the first sentence my blood ran cold—the subject of the article was my book. In gleeful tones the reporter, Warren St. John (a young, male, hotshot business writer), walked the reader through how Creating a Life was shaping up to be a total bust on the sales front. He found the explanation all too simple: Women are just not interested in shelling out $22 for a load of depressing news about their biological clock, he opined smugly and snarkily. I was stunned. These dismissive words did not describe the book I had written.

I didn’t even need to finish the article to understand the damage it would do—which was swift and devastating. In a matter of weeks, Creating a Life was DOA—and, figuratively speaking, so was I. I went from being a much-feted author to a pariah, since one of the results of being trashed on the front page of the Times is that everyone knows. It’s like being stripped in public. My entire circle of friends and colleagues read this piece. In fact, one reason I felt so bad was that I knew that many more people would read the alpha-male spin of Warren St. John on page A1 of the Times than would ever read Creating a Life. That article effectively buried what was my most deeply felt and pain-filled book.

I tried to rebound, of course. Over that summer I threw myself into a new book project. In early September I met with Molly Friedrich, my longtime literary agent, to pitch my new idea. It’s something more fine-grained, more academic, I offered. Looking me in the eye, Molly let me have it. Sylvia, she said, there’s not going to be a next book. Given your recent track record, you’re not going to get a decent publisher or a decent advance. You need to get a day job.

I was stunned. How had this happened? How could my livelihood be in jeopardy and my reputation—carefully built over years—be in tatters? The explanation dawned painfully and slowly: I had constructed, but hadn’t protected, my personal brand. I’d invested in it—establishing myself in both academia and public policy circles as an intellectual heavyweight with the chops to take on the really thorny questions of our time—but I hadn’t proactively looked after it. I might have realized, when the Time story broke, that I was seriously out of my depth. Although I’d written high-profile books before (When the Bough Breaks had received a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award), it didn’t occur to me to arm myself with a PR professional, someone who could craft a media campaign that would amplify, rather than distort, my message. Instead I reveled in the immediate impact of Creating a Life and had plunged in with naïve delight, doing every radio show and print interview that came my way. Quite quickly the content of the book was dumbed down, making me vulnerable to attack. It’s one thing to be thoughtfully critiqued by the New York Review of Books, and quite another to be bent out of shape by the National Enquirer.

So, having squandered my hard-won gravitas, I had little choice but to start over, building my credibility and authority brick by heavy brick. As a woman north of fifty, I did not have time on my side. But decades spent doing good work in both academia and the public sector had given me a network and at least a few sponsors that I could turn to for a fresh start. That fall I applied for, and got, two adjunct teaching positions—one at Columbia and one at Princeton. I poured immense energy into these gigs and by the spring was able to convert the Columbia position into a continuing part-time job—as director of the Gender and Policy Program at the School of International and Public Affairs. With my brand refurbished, I had fresh currency in the very circles I wanted to reengage with: professional women and their employers. Because, of course, I hadn’t changed my focus: I still wanted to make a difference, to transform the lives and career prospects of women and other underrepresented groups. This time around I decided to focus on changing the face of leadership, to help create the conditions that empower many more women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ employees and others to sit at decision-making tables. In 2004 I founded a think tank (the Center for Talent Innovation, now called Coqual) that has become an influential research organization globally and done much to accelerate the progress of women and other previously excluded groups around the world. In driving this tranche of work I’ve written four books and twenty-seven articles—for Harvard Business Review Press. I’ve learned my lesson. Nowadays I proactively curate where I publish and avoid the popular media. I want to be seen as an intellectual heavyweight, not as tabloid fodder.

My bumpy ride on the EP journey has contributed special energy as well as important perspectives to this book. To flag two of the more significant:

Appearance challenges are not trivial, but they do tend to be easily fixed and pale in comparison to other, more profound EP problems. Remember that fox collar? Although it blew my chances at St. Anne’s College, I was able to quickly ditch that look and improve my chances when I got a second shot.

Reputational glitches are much more serious—and immensely difficult to recover from. Resurrecting my brand after the disastrous launch of Creating a Life took about six years. I didn’t breathe easy until my body of new work had spawned a fifth Harvard Business Review article. At that point I knew I had reestablished my gravitas.

The irony, of course, is that this entire discussion centers on image, not substance. Whether we’re talking about appearance or gravitas, we’re focusing on what we’re signaling to the world rather than what we’re really accomplishing. What kind of outfit I wore to my Oxford interview had no bearing on my intelligence or my preparedness for an Oxford education. Seen from that vantage point, it should not have mattered. But it did. Enormously. Similarly, the fact that Creating a Life was dragged into the gutter by the tabloid press (and talk radio) had no bearing on the intrinsic value of the book. After all, it made it onto the BusinessWeek list of the ten most important books of 2002 and I still meet women whose lives were transformed by its content. But messaging matters. Enormously. The wrong message and the wrong messenger can destroy careers, whatever the substantive reality.

So read this book. Understanding EP and cracking its code will do wonders for your ability to achieve success and do something wonderful with your life.

Part I

Executive Presence 1.0

1

What Is Executive Presence?

Steve Jobs had it and Michelle Obama has it. It’s embodied by people as varied as Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the much admired president of Ukraine who’s leading the heroic resistance to the Russian invasion, and former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, known by the moniker the Iron Lady, who led the rebirth of free-market conservatism in late twentieth-century Britain. The legendary leader Nelson Mandela exuded it—when he donned the Springboks’ jersey and shook the hand of the captain of the winning all-white national rugby team, the world knew that South Africa had found a leader intent on reconciliation.

It is executive presence—and no man or woman attains a top job, lands an extraordinary deal, or develops a significant following without this heady combination of confidence, poise, and authenticity that convinces the rest of us we’re in the presence of someone who’s the real deal. It’s an amalgam of qualities that telegraphs that you are in charge or deserve to be.

And here I want to underscore the word telegraph. Executive presence is not a measure of performance: whether, indeed, you hit the numbers, attain the ratings, or increase market share. Rather, it’s a measure of image: whether you signal to others that you have what it takes, that you’re star material. If you’re able to crack the EP code you’ll be first in line for the next plum assignment and be given a chance of doing something extraordinary with your life.

The amazing thing about EP is that it’s a precondition for success whether you’re a management consultant, a Wall Street banker—or a cellist.

Every October, a distinguished jury assembles at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City to judge the finalists in the Concert Artists Guild’s international competition. Several weeks of rigorous auditions have already taken place, and an applicant pool of 350 instrumentalists and singers from all over the world has been whittled down to 12 extraordinary young musicians. Last fall, I attended the final auditions.

A twenty-three-year-old Korean violinist was first up.¹ He entered the auditorium from stage left and after taking a detour behind the Steinway piano, sidled onto the apron of the stage looking painfully ill at ease. Head bowed, violin dangling, he stared at the floor, doing his best to avoid eye contact with the jurors as he waited for his accompanist to get settled. Unfortunately, it took a while, since she had trouble adjusting the piano stool to the right height. The violinist shifted his weight awkwardly from side to side. I could feel restlessness rising in the audience. One juror blew his nose; another started tapping her foot.

Finally the accompanist struck the first chords of a glorious—and immensely difficult—Beethoven sonata, and the violinist raised his instrument and started playing. But it took a while for the audience to be drawn in—to give this musician a chance.

An Irish mezzo-soprano had slot number two. The energy was very different from the get-go. She walked confidently onto the stage, shoulders squared, head held high. Her dress was perfectly chosen, a simple navy blue sheath that conveyed elegance and seriousness of purpose. I spent a moment silently applauding her choice, but my attention was quickly drawn to her face, which was adorned with a radiant, joyous smile. She seemed to be telling me that something immensely pleasurable and exciting was about to begin. The jury caught the vibe and leaned forward in anticipation, lips parted, wanting and expecting to be impressed.

The other finalist who stood out was number seven—a twenty-year-old cellist who had just received an outstanding review for a recording she’d done of the Dvořák cello concerto. As she started playing, I sensed trouble. It was her arms. They flapped. Every time she tackled her cello with a vigorous down-bow, the flesh bounced up and down. I was mesmerized—and so were the jurors. The problem was not excessive weight (she was of medium build) but her choice of clothing. Her dress was a disaster—a black silk number with a skimpy, ill-fitting halter top. No wonder her arms flapped—anyone’s would in such a getup.

My heart went out to this young musician. A distracted jury is never a good idea. Throughout her twenty-minute program the judges failed to focus their full attention on her music, and her powerful playing did not get its due.

These are the finalists that stand out in my memory: Musicians number one and seven did not receive prizes. The mezzo-soprano did.

I’ve gone to these auditions several times over the years and am always impressed by the number of seemingly peripheral factors that feed into the judging process. For sure, each finalist in this international competition clears a high bar of excellence. All of the young musicians I heard at Merkin Hall last fall were enormously skilled. They wouldn’t have gotten through the early rounds of the competition if they weren’t outstanding practitioners of their musical craft.

But in the finals what distinguished one musician from another was all the nonmusic stuff. The way they walked onto the stage, the cut of their clothes, the set of their shoulders, the spark in their eyes, and the emotion that played on their faces. All of these things established a mood either of tedium and awkwardness or of excited anticipation.

Richard Weinert, who was president of the Concert Artists Guild between 2001 and 2019, marvels at the importance of what he calls presence. As we’ve grappled with launching the careers of these extraordinarily talented artists, we’ve learned that how they present themselves matters enormously. Yet oftentimes they don’t see it as being part of what they need to do. Graduates of the top conservatories—Juilliard, Curtis, and the like—have had little training in it and haven’t given it much thought. It often comes as a shock when we explain that how they move on stage and what they wear—how they establish rapport with the audience—is as important as their musical skills.

A recent study underscores the importance of image (or EP, to use the language of this book) for classical musicians. In a piece published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of London researcher Chia-Jung Tsay, working with a sample audience of one thousand, reports that people shown silent videos of pianists performing in international competitions picked out the winners more often than those who could also hear the sound track.² The study concludes that the best predictor of success on the competition circuit was whether a pianist could communicate passion through body language and facial expression.

This evidence from the world of music underscores the tremendous power of EP: How musicians present themselves creates an indelible impression. We might like to think that we’re evaluating a performance of Bach or Shostakovich based solely on what we hear, but in reality we’re profoundly conditioned by the visuals. Judgments are made before the first note sounds in the concert hall.

It’s no different in the workplace.

CRACKING THE EP CODE

So how do we figure out this image thing?

One financial sector CEO told me in an interview, I can’t describe it, but I sure know it when I see it. The fact is, many of us find EP a woolly and elusive concept. We can’t define it, and we have a hard time putting our arms around it.

Which is why I wrote this book.

Ten years ago, my research team at the Center for Talent Innovation (now Coqual) set out to crack the code, fielding a national survey that involved nearly 4,000 college-educated professionals—including 268 senior executives—to find out what coworkers and bosses look for when they evaluate an employee’s EP. In addition to this survey research, I conducted a number of focus groups and interviewed some forty executives.

As we shall see in chapters 8 through 10, I went back into the field a decade later, using the same questionnaire and similar protocols. This new work, which I carried out in 2022 and early 2023, allowed me to lay out in rich detail, using both qualitative and quantitative data, precisely how EP has evolved over the last decade, pointing in particular to what has changed and what has stayed the same. We shall explore this material in Part II. For the moment, suffice it to say that, despite seismic shifts wrought by a global pandemic, the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements, and a European war, the core principles of Executive Presence laid out ten years ago remain remarkably constant.

In both 2012 and 2022, I found that EP rests on three pillars and comprises a dynamic mix of:

How you act (gravitas)

How you speak (communication)

How you look (appearance)

While the specifics vary depending on context (what works on Wall Street doesn’t necessarily work in Silicon Valley), these three pillars of EP are universal. They are also somewhat interactive. For example, if your communication skills ensure you can command a room, your gravitas grows exponentially; conversely, if your presentation is rambling and your manner timid, your gravitas suffers a blow.

One thing to note at the start is that these pillars are not equally important—not by a long shot. Gravitas is the core characteristic. Some 67 percent of the 268 senior executives we surveyed said that gravitas is what really matters. Signaling that you know your stuff cold, that you can go six questions deep in your domains