The Executive Presence paradox

Most leaders (and influencers) still treat executive presence as a vague mix of charisma, confidence, and personal style.

The assumption is simple: if you look impressive and sound impressive, then you're impressive, and people (impressed) will follow you.

I have to tell the (ugly) truth. At early management levels, this belief can partially work. At the VP and Head-of-level, however, this simplification becomes very dangerous, for both your mental health and your career.

So let's kill the persistent myth: At this altitude, executive presence is no longer about commanding a room but about stabilizing a system. And that system is composed of the managers hierarchically under you and their own teams.

This is the silent mechanism that determines whether your vision travels horizontally, which is now a very important playground for you as an upper-echelon stakeholder.

This article is not about defining executive presence (I already wrote one to explain it here), but about how executive presence functions as an organizational authority mechanism at the senior leadership level. Let's say that we go beyond the concept.

The classic framework: The three pillars — and their limits at senior level

If you're too lazy to read my previous article, let's sum it up once again. Anyone researching "executive presence" on the Internet will quickly encounter Sylvia Ann Hewlett's framework,
built around three pillars:

• Gravitas: how you stabilize the environment, reduce uncertainty, and project a level of authority that others can rely on under pressure

• Communication: how you speak, structure ideas, and command attention,

• Appearance: how you look and project professionalism.

This model is a useful and powerful entry point, particularly for managers building credibility for the first time, as it focuses on observable traits that others can see, hear, and interpret. When it comes to senior leaders, however, I question this framework and its limits.

From experience, at the VP level, authority is first built through signals. Hewlett's model describes what is visible, but it largely ignores the organizational mechanics that determine leverage, trust, and decision velocity at the top of the system. This gap exists because her framework is strictly declarative, capturing subjective perceptions of leadership rather than its operational impact.

While the three pillars facilitate initial promotion, they function as surface-level descriptors that fail to address the systemic challenges of senior leadership. Consequently, relying solely on Hewlett’s model risks prioritizing a "theatre of leadership" over the structural clarity required to drive results in high-stakes environments.

Executive Presence as an organizational signal system

At this altitude, I believe presence is less about personal style and more (or at least also) about how the organization behaves when you are in the system.

I see it through three critical levers:

1. Reducing organizational uncertainty

Here, Organizational Uncertainty refers to the systemic "noise." In other words, the noise generated by the system itself (and this system might be the results of your decisions). It can also be seen as the state of paralysis where an organization stops moving because employees are consumed by the need of interpreting blurred signals, contradictory mandates, or executive silence (aka arrogant silence, used by weak egos).

To reduce that uncertainty, you first need to understand what I call the cost of "Maybe". In other words, every minute your team spend second-guessing your intent is a huge waste and creates structural paralysis plus a debt in trust. The second action you can undertake is “chaos absorption”. I’m not talking about eating all the stress sent by the Board to make your teams believe that everything is fine when it’s not.

I’m talking about the fact to transmute that pressure, converting top-down panic into cold, actionable instructions. Teams generally know that it’s almost always the chaos, the crisis or that everything is urgent. Most of them can still operate under such a tension, but a one condition: the fact that you keep driving. Therefore, don’t hesitate to do trade-offs. Always prioritize a clear, imperfect direction over a perfect, stagnant hesitation.

To sum it up, infrastructure over not emotion keeping stability as a structural organized anchor rather than a personality trait.

2. Driving system-level influence

This is "influence in absentia." The capacity to hardcode your intent into the organization's reflexes so that decisions align with your vision even when you are not in the room. It marks the shift from managing individuals to configuring the structural architecture of the company through, departments.

The main question is: Do you need to be physically here to influence decisions? From experience, if you want the answer to that question be “no”, you’ll have to work on what I call “programming the organizational brain”. It means that the way you process information, use it and enforce it, is so clear and bold that people don’t even need you to remind them.

To completely master the system-level influence, you’ll have to think about the cross-silo coherence. In other words, making divergent functions (e.g., Finance and Tech) onto a single, shared reality. In this specific case, either you’re in charge of both departments or you’ll need a good relationship with you VP peer.

3. Establishing Horizontal Influence

In the continuity of system-level influence, I’m now going to focus on the transversal power or power without hierarchical leverage. It is the ability to move your VP peers, who have no formal obligation to report to you and often hold conflicting agendas. So, how do we move those who have the formal right to say "no"? Well, you have two choices.

The first one is credibility. Are your teams (N-1 managers and their teams) happy working with you? What about your performance? What about your last idea in ExCom? The second one is fear. But let’s be clear, being scary to your peers mainly goes through the network you’ve established inside the company. People in networks might leave. Keep your allies for something else.

The signals of a weak executive presence at VP level

Let’s be clear. No one will ever tell you that you have a diluted executive presence. Everybody will see it. Nobody will talk. And there is something even more terrible than that: the organization feels it long before the leader does. And because I’m a nice guy, I’ll tell you some signals you should be continuously monitoring.

1. Decision erosion

This is the decay of commitment. It occurs when a decision you made, or help made, in a meeting fails to survive the walk to the parking lot, the "yes" becoming a "maybe”. You could see it differently: The invisible (and exhausting friction) of having to win the same battle three times because your initial signal didn't have enough "bite" to close the door on alternatives. So, here, pay attention to the following:

• Soft reversals: When "final" decisions morph back into "discussions" the moment you leave the room, or you’re about too,

• The tax of justification: Having to repeatedly defend a path that was already agreed upon,

• Quiet bypassing: When teams nod in agreement but execute a different, "safer" version of your intent.

2. Shadow priorities

Here, we approach more of a strategic drift. It happens when the direction you gave is treated as a suggestion rather than an anchor and, therefore, a command, allowing lower management layers to "filter" your intent through their own fears or biases. Without a strong hold on that point, your department creates its own "shadow" agenda based on what they think you actually meant or what is easiest to do. Here, check these points:

• The intent filtering: How your strategy gets "translated" (and diluted) by every layer of management it passes through,

• The interpretation gap: Teams working on what they think you want because your signals were too weak to anchor reality.

• Execution drift: The slow, silent departure from the original goal toward the path of least resistance.

• Signal decay: The loss of strategic "heat" as your message moves further away from your immediate circle.

3. Escalation load

For that last point I approach what I call the upward migration of responsibility. In a system where the leader’s presence doesn't provide cover or stability, people become risk-averse. They stop solving problems locally because they don’t trust that your command will protect them if they fail.

Basically, your inbox becomes a graveyard for decisions that should have been made three levels down, not because the teams lack skill, but because they lack the "psychological safety" that only a stabilizing presence can provide.

What to monitor here:

• Cover-seeking Behavior: People escalating issues to you not for your expertise, but to
  avoid being blamed for the outcome,

• The "bottleneck" leader: Becoming a high-paid traffic cop for low-level problems,

• Resolution paralysis: The organizational inability to close a topic without "The VP's" explicit blessing.

As a conclusion for that section, I want you to keep in mind that, the above lists are, not only, not exhaustive, and constitute a starting point if you want to investigate the way you’re position is perceived across your teams and the level of influence you have through the company.

Strategic signaling: How senior leaders build influence under pressure

Now we seen what Executive presence is and is not, let’s dive into the “how” and “what” you can do to develop it.

1. Leading with decisions

This is the reversal of the information-to-decision flow. In junior management, you build a case to earn a decision; at the VP level, you lead with the decision to anchor the room. It is a genuine shift from "convincing" to "commanding the narrative." By leading with the conclusion, you eliminate the "interpretive drift" that happens when stakeholders are left to guess your stance while you provide context. First thing you can do is placing the conclusion at the start to prevent the audience from wandering during the explanation.

The context, then, becomes a support. Finally, the use of data is made to reinforce a path already chosen, told at the beginning rather than as a shield for indecision. I know it might sound bossy for some of you, but keep in mind that there is a time for everything. Brainstorming, evaluating and deciding. The last one is for you, always. After the first two done, the search for consensus is no more appropriated. You’ll have to signal that the window for debate is closed and the window for execution has opened.

This will also bring the clarity of your command by reducing the cognitive load on your team giving them the "what" before the "why."

2. Controlling the cadence

This is about the rhythm you implement. It is the realization that when you speak and how long you wait is often more influential than what you actually say. Cadence is about owning the clock. A leader who controls the tempo of a meeting or a crisis signals that they are not being driven by the system’s anxiety, but are instead the ones regulating it. You would have understood it, this part is a direct echo of the Communication part, presented by Sylvia Ann Hewlett.

Use strategic silence by pausing to make sure others have the time to process the information and to signal that you are not rushed by pressure. Here, I want you to understand that it’s no question of “owning the room”, but really allowing people to digest and understand what you are saying. And you’ll have to go further explaining the agenda, not just the topics, but the speed at which the organization will be allowed/required to move.

Doing this, you allow people matching your discourse with their daily operational reality. The last two things you can do are not only regulating “organizational heartrate” by deliberately slowing down the pace of communication, for example during a crisis to prevent panic driven errors but also valuing substance over volume. Don’t lie, don’t hide things, but don’t speak for nothing.

3. Maintaining behavioral consistency

You can call that one the compounding of trust. The higher you get in the hierarchical pyramid the more fragile your authority will be, mainly because it fluctuates with the weather of the business. That said, you, as an upper-echelon manager has no choice but: consistency.

The signals you send must remain the same regardless of whether you are in a board meeting, a 1-on-1, or a crisis.

This is the way you’re going to signal your reliability:

Your "yes" in public is the same as your "yes" in private, across all layers of the system. The more predictable you’ll be the more the organization will align around you. Reciprocally, the more erratic is your behavior, the more your presence would become a source of noise and anxiety. You must become a “known quantity” to allow subordinates acting confidently on your behalf without constant check-ins. I know, this might sound a bit poetical as political games are, sometimes, rude in the corporate world.

But maintaining your position even when political winds or incomplete data make it uncomfortable brings more stability and influence than a thousand discourses Well…writing this line, I realize I just talked about integrity here and its compound interests.

4. Using pressure as a training ground

Okay, here, we must be very careful. This is the hardening of intent not a clearance for psychological torture. You could see the Executive presence as a "muscle" that only grows under a controlled load.

While theory provides the vocabulary, true presence is forged when the stakes are high and the outcomes are irreversible.

It is the transition from reacting to pressure (the survival mode) to using pressure as a deliberate signal to show the organization exactly what you are made of. It’s moving from "how do I survive this crisis?" to "how do I use this crisis to set the standard for leadership?".

You can see the crisis as a medium to shape and transform, not only your teamates, but also what you can expect from it. Conflicts are also great clarity revelators, using high-stakes disagreements to define boundaries and signal your non-negotiables to the system. One last concept that might be worth exploring: Antifragility, viewing high-pressure moments as the only environment where "theater" falls away, and true leadership architecture is built.

You can find the full article: “Antifragility in Leadership: How to Become a Solid Manager”, here.

The science of presence: Research that supports Senior-Level impacts

For those interested, you’ll find below some resources. Executive presence is often discussed intuitively, but research supports several of its core mechanisms:

• Cuddy, Kohut & Neffinger (2013) Presence emerges when warmth (intent) and competence (capability) are perceived simultaneously.

• Judge et al. (2002) Emotional stability is one of the strongest predictors of perceived leadership influence under pressure.

• Goffee & Jones (2000) Credibility stems from selective authenticity—revealing intent in a way that reinforces influence rather than diluting it.

From abstract theory to Executive Partnership

I guess you’ve got that understanding executive presence intellectually is not enough. At VP and Head-of level, presence is shaped in behavioral mechanisms and managerial structure design. The Executive Partnership provides senior leaders with a confidential, structured space to examine how their signals operate in real time, meaning inside their actual decisions, tensions, and power dynamics. Few deep theory. Training, mentoring and coaching, to deal with operational reality.