A Practical Guide to Executive Presence: Earning Respect

This is a follow-up to one of our most popular posts, which contained practical advice on executive presence. As a refresher, I define executive presence as a set of behaviors that will influence others to fully listen to what you say – because they respect you, view you as reliable, and otherwise think that listening to you is important for the company’s success.

It can be somewhat circular, but one of the best ways to build executive presence is for other executives to obviously care about what you have to say. This time, we’re going to dive into the behaviors that earn respect from other executives – the traits that help make them allies, and that prevent them from resenting you or taking you for granted.

Execs Demonstrate Deep Expertise

People respect strength. At the end of the day we’re all just mammals trying to map every organization we’re a part of onto a primate dominance hierarchy. And since it’s generally not acceptable to club your coworkers over the head or bare your canines at them, the measure of strength that most teams revert to is expertise.

To have strong executive presence, you need to have skills, knowledge, or capabilities that are beyond everyone else along at least one dimension. What is the one thing that you know how to do, or that you know everything about, where nobody else is remotely close to your level? It doesn’t have to be something huge, but it has to matter. There must be a domain where you are the king or queen.

Some signs that you have the right level of expertise:

• You are the keeper of the truth for your area of expertise. If it’s retention, you know the biggest needs and the customers most at risk. If it’s competition, you know the most important competitors, and you know more about them. When people need to get to the bottom of the topic, they call you first.

• You cannot be out-debated in your area of expertise; people can disagree with you due to matters of opinion or different values, but you won’t lose a duel of facts. If you are presenting on something in your area of expertise and people grill you intensely, you cannot be shown to be a fool.

• You demonstrate excellence at the important skillsets in your area of expertise. If your area of expertise is technology cost reduction, you have identified or directly built solutions that meaningfully reduced costs. If your area of expertise is sales, you’ve successfully sold a lot of deals.

Execs Never Exhibit Uncontrolled Lateness

Executives who are losing their grip consistently demonstrate what I call uncontrolled lateness – tardiness or lack of follow-through due to a systemic breakdown of control. Uncontrolled lateness manifests in two main ways.

The first is being significantly late to appointments without notifying others: No email or Slack message saying “hey I’m running late,” or worse, no response when others ask where you are. This is often accompanied by showing up to meetings looking disheveled or frazzled, or being unable to rapidly shift gears into the next conversation. (Note: significantly late means more than 2-3 minutes – longer than a generous margin of error on a mechanical watch)

The other is missing deadlines for the most important one-third of your TODO list. Most executives literally have more demands on their time than there are hours in the day, so for better or worse they’re going to drop stuff – I’m not talking about being late to approve an expense report. But the top ⅓ of items on an exec’s plate are usually really important, and things that only they can do. It’s a red flag when these items start to meaningfully slip.

The typical executive schedule is absolute fucking chaos. In my experience this is not widely known, and is the source of much resentment from people who are less busy (“Why doesn’t our CEO remember that important detail we told him on Monday?” “Well, it’s been 3 days and he’s had 32 meetings in between that conversation and now…”). Most humans are not adapted to the sort of schedule that the modern hyper-connected workplace imposes on them, but effective executives find ways to keep all of the important balls in the air.

Uncontrolled lateness erodes executive presence. It makes you less reliable in the moment, and more importantly it’s usually an early symptom of other latent issues which indicate operational dysfunction:

• Signing up for too much work; miscalibration of personal or organizational bandwidth

• Ineffective delegation, often due to bad hiring and weak performance management (you can’t delegate if your team are incompetent)

• Indecisiveness, manifesting in the inability to end meetings promptly or get artifacts completed on time

If you’re late in an uncontrolled way, I may not know exactly what you messed up, but I know you messed up something.

Execs Work Hard

Being an executive can be great. Your manager is the CEO or some other leader with a very distributed focus – they probably don’t (and can’t) follow your day-to-day very closely. You have the power to promote and fire; even the boldest people on your team are wary. Outside of your team, people generally don’t want to get on your bad side. You can get away with a lot.

As a result, many executives are able to set up a life of leisure. They start the day late. They delegate a lot, so their day mainly consists of commenting and approving. They never handle follow-ups – they have people for that. They simply preside over meetings and chime in with a few specific wishes that others scramble to heed. Most critically, they can remove themselves from taking any initiative; their role is to hire and judge, but not to actually instigate anything. Typically this sort of person only responds fast to their own manager or someone more senior than them.

You might think people don’t notice. They do. If your title starts with VP or anything more senior, you should assume that people are observing you regularly. The hardest working people on your team will notice, and will begin to resent – over time they may quit and your team quality will erode.

Worse still – competent leaders know to lead by example, and know that poor work ethic is contagious. As a result, other executives won’t trust you, even if your laziness has no effect on them. They literally won’t want their teams to be around you, because they’re worried that your bad attitude will infect them. They will find every way to block your career to quarantine the bad precedent that you’re setting.

The solution? Hit the following minimal standard for how hard you should work: You should be above the 75th percentile of your team in terms of hours worked, or work at least ~45 hours per week (whichever is higher). You should also be reasonably available outside of working hours – roughly defined as being reachable for anything very important within 12 hours regardless of weekends or vacation (this roughly just means that you don’t ignore texts and phone calls). Your team will notice, and it will help. And honestly – you owe it to them.

Execs Don’t Take Things Too Literally

There is something fundamental about taking things too literally that makes you a poor executive.

Over the years, I’ve observed that junior team members are significantly more likely to take things too literally, especially when compared to senior leaders:

• When something is delegated to them, they’ll take pains to deliver exactly what was asked of them, in exactly the format requested.

• They’ll follow through on 100% of feedback they receive, even if they don’t agree.

• If they hear a fact that doesn’t make sense in a presentation, they’ll assume that it was an intentional statement (and often get stuck in a rabbit hole investigating) rather than considering that the presenter just made a mistake.

Taking things too literally erodes your executive presence for several reasons:

• In some cases it’s subordinate behavior – subordinates care more about their manager’s opinion than they care about getting the job done correctly.

• In other cases, taking things too literally occurs simply because someone’s mind operates in a hyper-literal way. This often causes tunnel vision, which violates one of the most important expectations of a leader: That they have more perspective than their team.

As an executive you are being paid to question the orders you were given, and you’re being paid to consider a wide range of possible explanations for anything you observe. Executives don’t take things too literally, and if you take things too literally you look like you’re not a leader.

Execs Have a Life Outside of Work

To be fully respected, you can’t let people take you for granted. And a fast way to get taken for granted is to make it seem like you have absolutely no life outside of work.

Being taken for granted gives people around you license to very subtly throw you under the bus: We don’t need to promote them this cycle, they’re really loyal. We don’t need to get their opinion on this org change, even if they dislike it they’ll never quit. What else are they going to do? All (competent) execs technically have career options elsewhere, but if it seems like the company is your whole life, you’re opening the door to being taken for granted.

Don’t let this happen to you. Let people know that you have other options emotionally. You’ve got kids; you love vintage motorcycles; you’re traveling the world spearfishing. It’s a terrible thing, but people discount the value of those who give them unconditional love. Your greatest power is your ability to care about something else.