Have you ever been told that you need more executive presence—but given no useful explanation of what is actually missing?

Years ago, Ros received a very good performance rating and asked what she needed to do to achieve the highest rating next time. Her manager considered the question and replied, “You probably could smile more.”

The advice gave her something to change, but it didn’t identify the leadership problem her smile was supposed to solve.

Episode overview

Executive presence is often treated as a quality someone either possesses or lacks. We recognise it when a person enters a room, speaks with authority or steadies a difficult conversation. Yet when women are told they need more presence, the feedback can become frustratingly vague: appear more senior, show more gravitas, be more confident, take up more space - or become warmer and more approachable.

In this episode, Ros explores why executive presence is not simply a personal quality. It is also a judgement made by other people through an organisation’s largely unspoken recognition system: its internal picture of what credible leadership is supposed to look and feel like.

That distinction matters. Feedback about presence may reveal a genuine signal problem. Your thinking may be sound, but your recommendation may be difficult to find. It may reveal a reception problem, where your authority is interpreted differently by particular people or in particular relationships. Or it may reveal a recognition-system problem, where leadership that does not resemble the familiar prototype is repeatedly discounted.

The answer is not to reject every piece of feedback - or to obey every expectation. It is to diagnose what is actually happening before changing yourself.

Ros introduces grounded presence as the ability to remain connected to yourself, your purpose and the room you are in. She also explores three deliberate choices for making authority more legible: amplify the signal, translate for the audience or challenge the standard doing the judging.

In this episode

• Why “you need more executive presence” is often a verdict rather than useful feedback
• The difference between an observable behaviour and the interpretation attached to it
• How organisations develop unspoken recognition systems for credible leadership
• Why the same behaviour can be read differently depending on who displays it
• The difference between performing leadership and cultivating grounded presence
• How leaders influence a room’s emotional climate without becoming responsible for everyone’s comfort
• Three possible diagnoses: signal, reception and recognition-system problems
• How to choose whether to amplify, translate or challenge
• A practical experiment for making your genuine authority easier to recognise

Free companion Field Guide

The companion Field Guide takes you through the Presence Translation Test.

It will help you examine a specific piece of feedback or important interaction, separate observation from interpretation, and consider whether the issue sits with your signal, its reception or the recognition system doing the judging.

Access the free Field Guide here:

https://www.courses.shapingchange.com.au/womens-programs-homepage

One question to carry forward

What does this moment require from me—and how can I meet it without abandoning myself?

What’s next

Next episode: Influence Without Losing Yourself

We’ll explore how women can navigate power, visibility and workplace politics while remaining connected to what they value and who they are.

Stay connected

Listen to The Archetype Effect:

https://the-archetype-effect.captivate.fm/

Watch the podcast and leadership explainers on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@ArchetypeEffectPodcast

Follow The Archetype Effect on Instagram:

@archetypeeffectpodcast

Working with organisations

Rosalind Cardinal works with leaders and organisations through Shaping Change, providing leadership development, executive coaching and organisational consulting.

Learn more:

https://www.shapingchange.com.au

[00:00:23] Many years ago, I was relatively new to senior management. I'd been promoted about twelve months earlier and was working as an organisational development manager. I was ambitious, I wanted to do well, and I was still learning what excellent performance looked like at that level. During my performance review, my new manager gave me a very good rating, but not the highest one.

[00:01:13] Those were his exact words, "You probably could smile more." I remember saying, "Oh, okay, I'll take that on board." And I did. I tried to smile more. My face naturally looks serious when I'm not actively smiling, and I'm very introverted. I can become so absorbed in my own thoughts that I don't immediately notice somebody speaking to me.

[00:02:39] Would he have given the same feedback to a man? I don't know. One conversation can't prove that he would not have. But the question itself matters. Why was smiling presented as the gap between very good performance and excellent performance? What leadership problem was my smile supposed to solve? Was I genuinely difficult to approach? Was information not reaching me? Were relationships being affected? Or did my serious face simply fail to match an expectation about how a senior woman should make her authority feel? Those are different questions and different diagnoses, and smile more gave me no way to distinguish between them.

[00:03:54] There's a free companion field guide for this episode. If this conversation brings to mind feedback you've received about your presence, your confidence, style, or readiness, the guide will help you examine what was actually observed, what was inferred, and where the issue may really sit. You'll find the link in the show notes. Because before we try to become more like the leader someone expects to see, we need to understand the standard doing the judging.

[00:04:57] She needs to appear more senior. She needs more gravitas. She needs to communicate with greater authority. Each phrase sounds meaningful. None necessarily tells her what happened. That's the first distinction we need to make, the difference between an observation and an interpretation. An observation describes something another person could have seen or heard. Your recommendation came at the end of a detailed presentation, and several people were unclear about what you wanted them to decide.

[00:05:54] My manager's instruction to smile more was unusual because it sounded like an observation. It named a visible behaviour, but it still didn't identify the impact. Had people found me difficult to approach? Had I missed attempts to engage me? Was my serious expression affecting trust or communication?

[00:06:41] This happens frequently in conversations about executive presence. A woman is given a verdict and left to reverse engineer the standard behind it. Be more confident, speak with more authority, become more visible, be warmer, take up more space.

[00:08:19] A firm statement may be heard as decisive from one leader and inflexible from another. Quiet consideration may look like gravitas in one person and uncertainty in someone else. Warmth may strengthen one leader's authority while becoming a quality that causes another to be underestimated.

[00:09:15] And that's where the problem deepens. When executive presence is treated as something we need to manufacture, leadership development can turn into performance. After my review, smiling became another task to remember. I was no longer simply walking through the office or listening during a meeting. Part of my attention was on the interaction. Another part was standing outside it, checking my face. Was I smiling enough? Did I look approachable? What expression had I had before someone spoke to me? The feedback didn't make me more present with other people. It made me more preoccupied with how I appeared to them.

[00:10:32] Performance begins somewhere else. Its central question is not, what does this moment require? It's, what version of me will look sufficiently senior? And executive presence advice offers plenty of material from which to build that version. Stand taller, lower your voice, use fewer words, hold eye contact, stop qualifying your statements, take up more space, dress for the next level, smile more.

[00:12:15] There is another cost. When you repeatedly receive the message that your natural way of carrying authority is not quite right, you begin editing out the very qualities that can make you effective. Thoughtfulness becomes over-explanation. Curiosity becomes hesitation. Warmth becomes a credibility risk. Seriousness becomes an approachability problem. The ability to hold complexity gets traded for the appearance of certainty. This doesn't mean adaptation is always wrong, or that authenticity requires us to behave identically in every situation. We all translate ourselves. We all choose how to communicate according to the people, the purpose, and what's at stake. The question is whether the adjustment is a conscious leadership choice or an attempt to disappear into the role the system is prepared to reward.

[00:14:02] When I look back at that performance review now, the most interesting question is not whether I should have smiled more. It's what did a smile represent to my manager? Perhaps he was trying to tell me that I could seem more approachable. Perhaps he'd noticed a genuine effect on other people, but didn't have the language to describe it clearly. Or perhaps a smiling woman simply fitted his picture of a leader better than a serious-faced one did. I can't know which one of these things was true. One sentence isn't enough to establish his intention or to prove that gender bias was at work. But the ambiguity itself tells us something important. He observed, or thought he observed, something about me. Then he interpreted it through an internal picture of what a highly rated leader should look like.

[00:15:53] The behaviour doesn't arrive with a label attached. The observer provides the label, and that judgment isn't made in a vacuum. Our picture of leadership is shaped by the leaders we've known, the culture around us, the behaviour that's been rewarded, and the kinds of authority we've learned to trust. If authority has usually appeared in one particular form, that form becomes familiar. Familiarity can begin to feel like credibility, and before long, the organisation may be recognising resemblance to its existing model of leadership as evidence of leadership itself.

[00:16:57] Those interpretations can also shift depending on whose behaviour is being judged. Many women will recognise the narrow corridor this creates. Be warm, but not so warm that you lose authority. Be confident, but not so confident you become intimidating. Be visible, but don't appear to be seeking attention. Be decisive, but remain likable while you do it. There is no perfect performance that permanently resolves those contradictions because they don't exist solely inside the woman being assessed. They exist in the expectations surrounding her.

[00:18:47] Those questions return some intelligence to the conversation. They allow us to consider our impact without assuming that every expectation deserves obedience. They also allow us to examine the system without pretending that our behaviour has no consequences. Because the aim isn't to become oblivious to how we're perceived. Leadership is relational and impact matters. The aim is to stop confusing recognition with truth. Once we can separate the authority we carry from the template through which others recognise it, a much more useful question becomes possible. If executive presence is not a performance designed to satisfy the template, what are we actually trying to cultivate?

[00:20:55] Sometimes the moment requires clarity without false certainty. A leader doesn't have to pretend she knows what she doesn't know. She can say, "This is what we understand, this is what remains unclear, and this is the decision we can make with the information we have." There's authority in that, not because the uncertainty has disappeared, but because she's able to hold it without handing responsibility for the moment back to everyone else.

[00:22:00] Sometimes the moment requires authority without dominance. Authority doesn't always need volume. It may look like naming the issue everyone is circling around, holding a boundary after it's being challenged, making a decision when continued discussion is no longer useful, or taking responsibility for an unpopular call without becoming defensive. You don't need to overpower the room, but you do need to occupy your role.

[00:23:32] Grounded presence doesn't require you to choose between being human and being authoritative. It asks you to remain connected enough to know what the situation needs, and self-trusting enough to respond without abandoning yourself. You may have witnessed this kind of presence in a difficult meeting. The person with the most presence is not necessarily the one speaking most often. It may be the person who waits, listens, and then puts words around the real issue. She doesn't rush to fill the silence. She doesn't pretend the answer is obvious. She doesn't make herself smaller to reduce the discomfort in the room. She helps the room become more able to face what's happening. And perhaps that's a better way to understand executive presence, not as an image a leader projects, but as a capacity she brings. The capacity to stay oriented when the situation becomes uncertain, emotionally charged, or politically complex. Because presence doesn't stop at the edge of the individual, it changes what becomes possible in the room.

[00:25:46] Leaders strongly influence a room's emotional climate. Their pace, tone, and reactions can steady people or amplify anxiety, open conversation or close it down. That influence comes with authority and must be held responsibly. But responsible influence is not the same as keeping everyone comfortable. Naming avoided problems can make a room anxious before it becomes honest. A boundary may frustrate someone who benefited from its absence. A necessary decision can disappoint people. So the test is not, did everyone feel good? The test is, did the leader help the room become more able to engage with reality?

[00:27:09] The leader didn't prove her presence by having the best idea. Her presence made a better idea possible. The room became more intelligent. That is leadership impact, but it's easy to miss because our attention is so often drawn to the performance of the person at the front. We notice eloquence, confidence, and certainty. We're less likely to notice the conditions that allowed other people to think more clearly. A leader's presence may be visible in the quality of the attention around her, in whether people understand the terrain, in whether decisions become more easy to navigate, in whether anxiety is acknowledged without being allowed to run the meeting, in whether disagreement can occur without becoming personal or disappearing underground. It may also be visible in what happens after she leaves. Do people know what they're responsible for? Can they act without continually seeking reassurance or approval? Has the conversation built collective capacity or merely reinforced the leader as the most important person in the room?

[00:29:02] Because if someone says you lack executive presence, the next task is not to automatically become more impressive. It's to diagnose what's actually happening. Is there a problem with the signal you're sending? Is the signal being distorted in the way particular people receive it? Or is the organisation's recognition system unable or unwilling to recognise the authority already there?

[00:30:42] The second possibility is a reception problem. Here, the signal is present, but it's being interpreted through a particular relationship, history, or set of assumptions. A woman may communicate with clarity and be understood perfectly well by most of her colleagues, yet one influential stakeholder consistently reads her directness as aggression. Another may trust her operational judgment, but resist when she moves into strategy because it exceeds the role in which he knows her. This is why one person's response is data, but not necessarily a verdict. We need to look for patterns. Who responds this way? In which settings? Does the interpretation change when the same idea is voiced by someone else? Do people who work closely with you experience your leadership differently from people who see you only in senior forums? The answers help distinguish a broadly unclear signal from a reception problem located in particular relationships or particular contexts.

[00:33:07] These diagnoses are not mutually exclusive. When my manager told me I could smile more, there may have been a signal issue. Perhaps people genuinely experienced me as less approachable than I realised. There may have been a reception issue. Perhaps my serious expression carried a meaning for him that it didn't necessarily carry for others. And there may have been a recognition system issue. Perhaps his picture of an outstanding woman leader included a degree of visible warmth he wouldn't have required from a man. I don't know. I didn't have enough evidence then, and I can't manufacture certainty now. What I can see is that I treated his interpretation as an instruction before I'd diagnosed the problem.

[00:34:41] The aim isn't to find the diagnosis that feels the most affirming or morally neat. The aim is to form the most accurate working hypothesis we can, then choose our response deliberately because each diagnosis opens a different choice. We can amplify the signal, we can translate it for a particular audience, or we can challenge the standard doing the judging.

[00:36:20] The second choice is to translate. Translation means expressing your authority in a form a particular audience can recognise without abandoning the substance of what you want to say. Leaders translate continually, changing context, sequencing information, and deciding whether to begin with the commercial implication, the human impact, or the operational risk. That's not automatically inauthentic. Communication always involves making meaning available to someone other than ourselves. But translation becomes costly when the distance between your natural way of leading and the acceptable version becomes too big. If you must continually soften, reassure, diminish, over-prepare, or perform warmth so that others will tolerate your authority, you're not merely communicating skillfully, you're carrying the limitations of the recognition system. So the question is not simply, can I adapt? It's, what does this adaptation cost, and is the outcome worth it? Sometimes it is. Political intelligence includes knowing when a small adjustment will help an important idea travel.

[00:38:36] Sometimes challenge is individual. Sometimes it requires allies, shared language, or a broader conversation about how leadership is recognised and promoted. And challenge obviously carries risk. The person naming an unfair standard is not always the person with the power to change it. Women should not be told that if they were simply braver, every biased system would change. Context matters. Position matters. Timing matters.

[00:39:45] When I was told to smile more, I adapted before I understood what problem I was solving. Today, I'd ask different questions. I might still decide that being more visibly responsive would help my relationships, but it would be a considered choice connected to an impact, not an attempt to earn a better rating by performing the expected version of a woman leader. That's the difference. The question isn't how do I look more like leadership? It becomes what will help my genuine authority become legible here, and what am I unwilling to erase in that process? And we can begin answering that with one small experiment.

[00:41:28] Afterwards, resist the temptation to ask only, "How did I come across?" But instead, examine what happened. What did you actually say or do? What changed in the conversation? What appeared to land? Where did attention, confidence, or responsibility shift? And what evidence suggests the issue is with the signal itself, the way a particular person received it, or the recognition system through which your authority was being judged?

[00:42:55] If I could return to that performance review, I wouldn't simply dismiss the feedback, but I wouldn't accept smile more as a sufficient explanation either. I'd ask what my manager had observed, what effect it was having, whether the pattern appeared across relationships and situations, and whether the change he wanted would improve my leadership or merely make it look more familiar to him.

[00:44:19] Next, in Influence Without Losing Yourself, we'll explore how women can navigate power, visibility, and politics while staying connected to what they value and who they are. Until then, notice what changes when you stop performing presence and begin practicing it.