Leadership Presence

Leadership presence is difficult to define exactly, but it can be felt and experienced when you meet or interact with someone who has it. Presence is not one isolated quality but a magical integration of the head, heart, and hands. It is a combination of personal and interpersonal qualities that draw people.

The journey of leadership presence is a journey inward—a reflective, introspective look at oneself. To save a beautiful dying tree, you cannot simply paint its leaves green; you have to work on the roots. In the same way, our roots need to be very strong to sustain a strong presence called “ME.” Our roots are our attitudes, values, and beliefs. Leadership presence is enhanced through clarity versus confusion, explicitness versus ambiguity, and decisiveness versus indecisiveness. These become core behaviours only through knowing oneself and moving towards self-mastery.

Often, personal presence is trivialized by assuming that it is solely about external image. However, the core truth is that leadership presence is seeded in self-belief and self-acceptance. One needs to believe in and accept oneself unconditionally and move away from self-criticism, comparisons, and negative self-perceptions.

Leaders with influencing presence do so by having: insane work ethics, going beyond, being their best selves, aligning thoughts, actions, and promises, passion, authenticity, genuineness, and sharp nonverbal communication skills, which lead to personal gravitas. This enables engagement, retention, and higher productivity.

Here are a few everyday practices to build presence:

• Be adaptable.
• Maintain a positive attitude.
• Cultivate high emotional intelligence.
• Master the art of listening.
• Be sensitive to nonverbal cues of others and your own during communication.
• Be rooted in win-win values.
• Be willing to take calculated risks to attract talent.
• Focus on people development as your number one priority.
• Share credit and success with the team.
• Be participative in decision making.
• Pay attention to personal grooming.

Remember: People first buy into you before they buy from you.