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Business Communication

Executive Presence: “Gravitas”, Communication…and Appearance?

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Executive Presence is intuitively considered essential to effectively execute key leadership roles.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, economist, prolific researcher and CEO of Center for Talent Innovation, conducted 18 focus groups and 60 interviews to systematically investigate behavioral and attitudinal aspects of “Executive Presence” (EP).

She acknowledged that organizational advancement assumes knowledge, skill, competence, and “authenticity” tempered with “cultural fit.”
Interviewees opined that three elements are crucial components of “Executive Presence,” required for advancement to highest organizational levels, and estimated that  “EP” accounts for more than a quarter of factors that determine a next promotion:Executive Presence

  •  “Gravitas” – Authoritative Behavior
    • Confidence, composure
    • Decisiveness
    • Integrity
    • Emotional Intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, interpersonal skills
    • Clear personal “brand” reputation
    • Vision for leadership
    • Communication
      • Strong speaking skills  – Voice tone, clear articulation, grammatical speech convey competence, credibility
        Avoids:

        • Racially-biased comments
        • Off-color jokes
        • Crying
        • Swearing
        • Flirting
        • Scratching
        • Avoiding eye contact
        • Rambling
        • Giggling
        • Speaking shrilly
        • Posting critical or provocative online content
  • “Presence”, “bearing”,  “charisma” including assertiveness, humor, and humility
  • Ability to sense audience engagement, emotion, interests
  • Appearance
    • Attention to grooming, posture
    • Physical attractiveness, normal weight
    • Well-maintained, professional attire

Executive Presence - MonarthHarrison Monarth, author of Executive Presence: The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO, emphasized “Image Management” via communication and self-marketing skills:

  • Creating and maintaining a compelling personal “brand” to influence others’ perceptions and willingness to collaborate
  • Managing online reputation, and recovering when communications go awry
  • Effectively persuading those who disagree, and gaining followers
  • Demonstrating “Emotional Intelligence” skills of self-awareness, awareness of others (empathic insight)

Monarth emphasized appearance’s importance less than Hewlett and Stanford legal scholar Deborah Rhode, whose The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, reported long-standing findings of the “Halo Effect” – that appearance and non-verbal behavior influence available options for education, relationships, career advancement, salary negotiation, social status, and other life opportunities.

The Beauty BiasRhode estimated that annual world-wide investment in appearance is close to $200 billion in 2010 currency, and she contended that bias based on appearance:

  • Is prevalent
  • Infringes on individuals’ fundamental rights
  • Compromises merit principles
  • Reinforces negative stereotypes
  • Compounds disadvantages facing members of non-dominant races, classes, and gender.

“Executive Presence” is widely recognized as a prerequisite for leadership roles, yet its components have remained loosely-defined until systematic investigation by Hewlett’s team, Monarth’s consulting-based approach, and Rhode’s legal analysis.

-*Which elements seem most essential to “Executive Presence”?

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“Nudging” Compassion, Resilience to Reduce Conflict, Stress

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David DeSteno

David DeSteno, directs Northeastern University’s Social Emotions Lab, where he investigates cognitive and neurological mechanism related to social behavior.
In Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us , and at his PopTech talk, he shared how he investigated whether evoked compassion and empathy is associated with reduced aggression.

He described experiments in which volunteers solve math problems for money.
In some conditions, one of DeSteno’s associates posed as another volunteer and noticeably cheated to earn more money than the real volunteer.
In other conditions, the confederate abided by the rules.

For some experiments, the cheating confederate, a professional actor, evoked empathy and compassion by saying that she was  worried about her brother, who was just diagnosed with a terminal illness.

In these situations, the volunteers were less likely to intentionally inflict discomfort on her in the following study of “taste perception,” a measure of aggression.

In this experimental trial, the volunteer measured a discretionary amount of extra-hot sauce into a cup for the cheating or non-cheating confederates to taste.

Volunteers poured five times more hot sauce for cheating confederates than non-cheating confederates, but they treated cheaters who evoked empathy the same as non-cheaters.

DeSteno noted most people are willing to help others who have some similarity to them, such as a shared identity of sharing a religious faith or hometown, or even are moving together as in conga lines, military drills.

He suggested that movement “synchrony causes separate identities to merge into one,” and demonstrated this trend in a music perception study, where volunteers in the same room tapped their hands on sensors when they heard tones.

In some conditions, the tones were synchronized so the volunteers were tapping at the same time as other volunteers, and in other conditions, the tones were independent.
De Steno found that 50% of volunteers who tapped at the same time were willing to help other volunteers, whereas 20% of those who tapped at different times helped others.
He concluded that volunteers felt more similar by tapping together, so felt more compassion, and were more likely to help others.

DeSteno is investigating social media like Facebook as a platform for sharing similarities to reduce aggression in conflict, cyber-bullying, victims of distant natural disasters.

He  said uses Cass Sunstein’s and Richard Thaler’s idea that small behavioral and organizational changes can “nudge” people to healthier, safer, more productive, and prosperous habits outlined in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness 

Their practical recommendations for designing effective “choice architecture” are consistent with DeSteno’s research-based findings:

* Align incentives with desired outcomes
* Identify possible alternative outcomes in familiar terms
* Provide default options that favor desired outcome behaviors
* Offer prompt, relevant feedback about choices and outcomes.
* Expect deviation from the targeted outcome, and build in ways to prevent, detect, and minimize this variance.
* Structure complex choices to reduce the difficulty of decisions-making

-*How have you seen “similarity” affect workplace collaboration and support?

-*Where have you seen organizations implement “choice architecture” to encourage employee behaviors toward positive goals?

BJ Fogg

See related Post –  “Tiny Habits” Start, Maintain Changes

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Performance Excellence linked to Recognizing, Preventing, Correcting Failures — and Coaching

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Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande a Harvard Medical School professor, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and New Yorker staff writer, investigated excellent performance across disciplines in search of ways to improve global medical care.
His findings suggest simple behavior changes, such as following a structured checklist, can avert poor performance and related negative outcomes.

In a recent talk at Harvard, he said, “people that were focused on achieving something more than competence…weren’t smarter than anybody else, they weren’t geniuses…Instead they seemed to …come to grips with their inherent fallibility—fallibility in the systems that they work in, and with what it took to overcome that fallibility.”

Gawande discusses three elements of better performance in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

  • Diligence – Attending to details, to avoid errors and overcome obstacles.
    Gawande offers a rationale for checklists and principles for their optimal structuring in his The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
  • Doing Right –Ensuring that skill and will and incentives are aligned to drive excellent performance
  • Ingenuity – Deliberate, mindful monitoring of potential and actual failures, continuously seeking innovative ways to improve performance and solutions

All of these elements can be improved with attentive coaching observation and feedback

Gawande distinguishes making mistakes because we don’t:

  • Know enough (ignorance)
  • Make proper use of what we do already know (ineptitude)

He notes that because we have extensive access to information, ignorance occurs less frequently than ineptitude.
In addition, he argues that both can be improved by systematic analysis through tools such as checklists to detect, avert, and remedy failures.

Geoffrey Smart

The application of systematic checklist-based analysis was linked to Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in Geoffrey Smart’s study of investments by Venture Capital (VC) firms,  The Art and Science of Human Capital Valuation

He described the VC firm’s approach to assessing the “human capital” that would lead new ventures in seven categories:

  • The Art Critic – The most frequently-used approach in which the VC assesses leadership talent at a glance, intuitively, based on extensive experience.
  • The Sponge – Conducts extensive due diligence, researching and assimilating information, then decides based on intuition
  • The Prosecutor – Interrogates the candidate, tests with challenging questions and hypothetical situations
  • The Suitor – Woos the candidate to accept the leadership role instead of analyzing capabilities and fit
  • The Terminator – Eliminates the evaluation because the venture is funded for the best ideas, not the originators, who are replaced
  • The Infiltrator – Becomes a “participant-observer” in an immersive, time-consuming experientially-based assessment
  • The Airline Captain – Uses a formal checklist to diligently study past mistakes, which rendered the top average Internal Rate of Return (IRR), 80%, in contrast to all others, which were 35% or less for all of the other types.
    This approach had 10% likelihood of later having to fire senior management, whereas the others had at least 50% likelihood.

Smart said that Venture Capitalists said that two of their most important mistakes are:

  • Rushing to close a deal and investing insufficient time in analysis of the talent and the deal
  • Being influence by “halo effect”

Both Gawande and Smart present evidence for the value of systematic reminders to execute all elements required for expert performance, to prevent failure and alert to potential failure points.

-*How do you improve performance?
-*What value do you find in expert coaching?

See related posts on Performance Improvement:

Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated and

Anders Ericcson’s Making of an Expert in The How and Who of Innovation 

K. Anders Ericcson

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Developing a SMARTER Mindset for Resilience, Emotional Intelligence – Part 2

Power Tactics for Better Negotiation

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Selena Rezvani

Selena Rezvani

Selena Rezvani points to research documenting women’s tendency to negotiate for salaries, promotions – and even task-sharing in relationships, less often than men in Pushback: How Smart Women Ask–and Stand Up–for What They Want

Her book offers guidelines to speak up assertively while developing the resilience and “thick skins” many in sales have mastered.

These recommendations echo those suggested in research studies and popular articles, and perhaps more Machiavellian, realistic, and perhaps disconcerting come from one of her endorsers, Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Jeffrey Pfeffer

He analyzes individual power dynamics in corporate hierarchies, and offers recommendations to acquire and use power in Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t 

Power-Jeffrey PfefferIn Rezvani’s book, Pfeffer notes that “Power is about 20% conferred and 80% taken.
Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who ask, negotiate, and push.
For women—or men—to get what they deserve, they must get over the platitudes and attitudes that hold them back.”

Pfeffer debunks the hopeful idea that the world is fair and just,  and counsels those seeking to have the power to “get things done” to promote themselves, avoid giving up or delegating power, but instead,  give up the wish to be well-liked.

Because the work world is not fair, Pfeffer says that intelligence, performance, and likeability alone are not the most important factors in advancing in an organization.
Instead, he argues that ambition, energy, and focus drive key power behaviors:

  • Self-promotion and seeking organizational visibility
  • Building relationships, networking, and supporting the immediate manager
    Cultivating a reputation for control and authority by managing information and first impressions (halo effect, attention decrement, cognitive discounting, self-fulfilling prophecy, biased assimilation)
  • Embodying powerful demeanor in speech, dress, posture

Useful skills in acquiring power are:

  • Self-reflection and self-knowledge
  • Confidence and self-assurance
  • Ability to “read” others by empathically understanding their perspectives
  • Capacity to tolerate and remain calm in conflict

Although power is valuable to enable execution and results, there are downsides and “prices to pay” for having and using power.
Often, the costs of power are not fully considered or anticipated by those who aspire to it, so Pfeffer usefully suggests the following drawbacks of power:

  • Loss of privacy due to public scrutiny
  • Loss of autonomy
  • Necessary investment of time and effort that might be spent in other ways, such as with family, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, pursuing non-work interests
  • Trust, confidentiality, conflict-of-interest, ethical dilemmas
  • Possible intoxication with power as an “addictive drug”
Kathleen Kelly Reardon

Kathleen Kelly Reardon

It's All PoliticsPfeffer’s Stanford University colleague, Kathleen Kelly Rearson shares specific examples of skillful, modulated application of power in her book, It’s all Politics.

-*How do you ask for what you want at work?

-*What power tactics do you employ to influence your negotiation outcomes?

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Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact

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Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons asserts that the power of stories derives from stimulating feelings and focusing these sentiments on a goal or action in her book, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact

Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte, who designed Al Gore’s original Inconvenient Truth slides, concurs in her most recent book, Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences 

George Lakoff

George Lakoff

UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff, in his classic, Metaphors We Live By, contends that stories create a framework that directs and filters attention, and enables the speaker to “control the conclusions.”

Simmons suggests the following sources of stories:

1.Personal stories of your successes
2.Personal stories of failures, to demonstrate learning, and to build trust and credibility
3.Stories of mentors and other people who influenced you
4.Memorable stories from books, movies, and current events that influenced you.

Aristotle

Aristotle

She referred to Aristotle’s premise that the best stories contain knowledge (logos), feeling (pathos), and credibility (ethos) when she offered guidelines for effective story-telling:

1. Describe events in a way that evokes a concrete, sensory experience, as it is the way to stimulating emotion
2. Be brief
3. Offer measurable outcomes
4. Enable the listener to similar situations, organizations
5.Solidarity, or enabling the listener to experience another person’s point-of-view

-*What practices enable you to craft influential, memorable “stories”?

LinkedIn Open Group – Psychology in HR (Organisational Psychology)
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©Kathryn Welds

Powerful Non-Verbal Behavior May Have More Impact Than a Good Argument

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Deborah Gruenfeld

Deborah Gruenfeld

Deborah Gruenfeld is a social psychologist and professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, who co-directs its Executive Program for Women Leaders.

Her research focuses on power and group behavior, and she notes that power can corrupt without conscious awareness.
She notes that power can disinhibit behavior by reducing concern for the social consequences of one’s actions, and by strengthening the link between personal wishes and acts that fulfill these desires.

Her recent work demonstrates that power leads to an action-orientation, limits the ability to take another’s perspective, and increases the tendency to view others as a “means to an end.”

This talk reviews her research and its practical implications, such as non-verbal behaviors that anyone can adopt to increase the impression of being a powerful individual.

-*How have you seen powerful non-verbal behavior trump the content of an argument?

LinkedIn Open Group – Psychology in HR (Organisational Psychology)
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©Kathryn Welds

Five Elements to Construct a Good Story

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Robert Dickman

Robert Dickman

Robert Dickman and Richard Maxwell weigh in on storytelling as a business persuasion tool in their book, The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business

Richard Maxwell

Richard Maxwell

They discuss storytelling as a persuasion method in this four minute video

They assert that a high-impact story contains the following elements:

1) Passion conveys authenticity, and makes the story memorable

2) Protagonist or hero (which might be an individual, group, or community) can be respected, liked, and engages and inspires interest, caring

3) Antagonist presents a challenge to the Protagonist, and this conflict engages interest and caring about the characters and outcome

4) Awareness, in which the protagonists, antagonists, and observers learn something, the kernel of the story’s dramatic impact

5) Transformation, or meaningful change during the story

Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte

These elements have also been identified by well-known story experts including Nancy Duarte, whose books, Resonate and slide:ology, have been best-sellers.

Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons  is another expert whose book, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact, has garnered attention.

Jonah Sachs

Jonah Sachs

Jonah Sachs’ 2012, Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future, weaves together examples from various disciplines including marketing, advertising, classic mythology, as well as psychology and biology.

He characterized it as “a call to arms”, but its more practical contribution is highlighting the transformative power of social media in contemporary story-telling aimed at influencing and persuading.

-*What elements have you seen in stories that have most persuaded and motivated you?

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3P Marketing to Define, Communicate Personal Brand

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Rita Allen

Rita Allen

Rita B. Allen defines 3 Ps Marketing to create personal brand and effectively market yourself in an increasingly competitive, global employment landscape.

.Preparation:
-Conduct self-assessment and “due diligence”
-Define brand differentiators and subject matter expertise
-Articulate positioning statement (“elevator pitch”)
-Curate your professional network

.Packaging:
-Create your portfolio (resume, CV, performance reviews, awards, presentations, articles, references, testimonials, community and professional service, continuing education)
-Expand alliances with relevant thought leaders

.Presentation:
-Practice and refine delivery of your brand message
-Develop strong active listening, presentation, and interpersonal skills
-Continuously enhance your brand

This approach helps answer:
• What are your “value-adds”, your unique differentiators?
• What is your personal brand?
• How comfortable are you articulating your brand?
• How do you continuously enhance your brand?

-*What elements do you consider when communicating your personal brand?

LinkedIn Open Group – Social Media Marketing
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©Kathryn Welds

Developing “Charisma” and “Presence”

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Olivia Fox Cabane

Olivia Fox Cabane

Olivia Fox Cabane integrated research findings from social psychology and neuropsychology with principles of Emotional Intelligence and “Practical Buddhist Philosophy” in her book, The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

She concluded that charismatic behaviors are based on managing internal state and beliefs through self-awareness to focus on others and “make them feel good.”

 

She found that “charisma” or “presence” is composed of:

•Presence – mindful attention, patient listening, avoiding interruption

•Power – appearance, clothing, occupy space, positive wording (avoid “don’t”), placebo effect

•Warmth – chin down, eye contact, Duchenne smile (mouth corners, eye corners), gratitude, compassion, appreciation – counteract “hedonic adaptation”

•Goodwill – wishing the other person well

•Empathy – understanding the other’s experience

•Altruism

•Compassion – a combination of empathy+goodwill

•Forgiveness of self and others

•Self-compassion – self-acceptance. Positively correlated with emotional resilience, sense of personal responsibility, accountability, sense of connectedness, life satisfaction, positive relationships with others, self-confidence, willingness to admit errors, low self-pity, low depression, low anxiety, improved immune system functioning

•”Metta” – loving kindness to self, others

Fox Cabane offered three “quick fixes” to increase your “charisma”:

•Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences (no “Valley Girl talk”…)
•Reduce the speed and rapidity of nodding
•Pause for two seconds before you speak

-*When you see a charismatic person in action, what behaviors and attitudes add to the interpersonal impact and appeal?

LinkedIn Open Group – Women in Technology (sponsored by EMC)
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Self-Marketing: Improve your PVI: Sharpen Perception, Increase Visibility, Exert Influence

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Joel Garfinkle

Joel Garfinkle

Joel Garfinkle emphasizes the importance of making your accomplishments and contributions visible to peers and executive: Self-marketing as a career development strategy in his book, Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level

His extroverted persona encourages even the most introverted professional to speak up and showcase work contributions to guide career development instead of waiting to be noticed among a field of many able contributors.

-*What practices are effective and acceptable to increase professional visibility?

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