At some point in your career, probably around the director level, someone will tell you that you need to develop “more executive presence.” They’ll say it like it’s helpful. They’ll say it in a performance review or after you’ve been passed over for a promotion, and they’ll move on to the next topic as if they’ve just given you something actionable.
They haven’t.
“You need more executive presence” is one of the most common and least useful pieces of feedback in corporate life. It sounds specific. It feels like it should mean something. But when you press on it – what exactly should I change? – most people can’t tell you. They know it when they see it, they say. Which is great for them and completely useless for you.
So let’s actually break it down. What does executive presence mean, what does the research say about it, and most importantly, what can you do about it starting this week?
The Research: Three Pillars, and One That Dominates
The most cited framework comes from the Center for Talent Innovation (now Coqual), which surveyed nearly 4,000 professionals and hundreds of senior executives to understand what executive presence actually consists of. They found it breaks into three components, and the weighting isn’t close.
Gravitas: 67%. This is the biggest factor by far. Gravitas is your ability to project confidence, poise, and substance. It’s how you hold yourself in high-stakes moments. It’s whether people trust your judgment.
Communication: 28%. How you speak, how you structure your ideas, how you listen. This includes both formal presentations and informal interactions – hallway conversations, one-on-ones, how you respond to an unexpected question in a meeting.
Appearance: 5%. Yes, it matters. No, it barely matters. You need to look put-together and appropriate for your environment. Beyond that, the data says it’s a rounding error compared to the other two.
That 67% number for gravitas is the important one. It tells you that executive presence is overwhelmingly about substance and composure, not about being polished or charismatic or having a commanding voice. Plenty of quiet, understated leaders have tremendous executive presence. Plenty of loud, charismatic ones don’t.
What Gravitas Looks Like When Nobody’s Talking About Gravitas
The word “gravitas” is a bit unhelpful because it sounds like something you either have or you don’t. Like it’s a character trait that was assigned at birth. It’s not. It’s a collection of behaviours that show up in specific situations.
Here’s what it looks like in practice.
Holding your position under pressure. Someone pushes back on your recommendation in front of the CEO. Do you fold immediately, hedge everything, and start backpedalling? Or do you acknowledge the concern, engage with it directly, and hold your ground on the parts where you have conviction? Leaders with gravitas do the second thing. They don’t get defensive or combative. They stay steady. They engage with the substance, not the social pressure.
Making decisions with incomplete information. This is one of the things that separates senior leaders from everyone else. At a certain level, you’ll never have all the data you want. Leaders with gravitas make the call anyway. They’re transparent about what they don’t know, they explain their reasoning, and they commit. People who wait for perfect information before taking a position don’t signal readiness for senior roles.
Staying calm when things go sideways. A project blows up. A client threatens to leave. The quarterly numbers come in below plan. What people watch in those moments is the leader’s reaction. Not what they say five hours later after they’ve had time to process – the initial reaction. Gravitas is being the person who stays composed, asks the right questions, and starts moving toward a solution while everyone else is still processing the shock.
Speaking hard truths without losing the room. This might be the hardest one. Can you tell the CEO that their pet project isn’t working? Can you give a peer honest feedback about their team’s performance? Can you tell a room full of optimistic people that the plan has a fatal flaw? Doing this without being dismissed as negative requires a combination of courage, timing, and framing. Leaders with gravitas deliver hard messages in a way that people can hear.
Communication: More Than Public Speaking
When people think about executive communication, they tend to jump to presentation skills. Standing in front of a room, projecting confidence, using hand gestures. That stuff isn’t irrelevant, but it’s a small part of the picture.
The communication component of executive presence is really about structured thinking made visible. It’s about whether people can follow your reasoning, whether you get to the point quickly, and whether you adjust your message for different audiences.
A few specific things matter a lot.
Leading with the conclusion. Senior leaders don’t have time for your buildup. Start with your recommendation, then provide the reasoning. “I think we should exit this market. Here’s why.” Not the other way around. This sounds simple but it goes against how most people are trained to communicate. We’re taught to build a case, lay out the evidence, and arrive at a conclusion. That works in academia. In business, it signals that you’re not sure of your own position.
Knowing when to talk and when to listen. Some of the best executive communicators barely speak in meetings. When they do, the room goes quiet because people know it’s going to be worth hearing. There’s an enormous difference between contributing frequently and contributing well. If you’re talking in every meeting and people’s eyes are glazing over, you have a communication problem – just not the one you think.
Framing complex ideas simply. If you can’t explain your strategy in two sentences, you don’t understand it well enough. This is especially true for technical leaders. The ability to take a complex data architecture or AI implementation and explain it in terms a non-technical board member can understand is one of the highest-value communication skills in business. If you’re working on this, our review of the Wharton Executive Presence program covers how they teach this specific skill.
The 2026 Angle: Your Writing Is Your Presence
Here’s something that wasn’t true ten years ago and is very true now: executive presence lives in your written communication as much as your in-person interactions.
Think about how much of your leadership happens in writing. Emails to the executive team. Slack messages. Strategy documents. Board memos. Project updates. Performance reviews. For many leaders, especially in distributed organizations, their writing is how 80% of the company experiences their leadership.
And the signals are identical to in-person presence. A rambling, disorganized email signals the same thing as a rambling, disorganized presentation: this person hasn’t thought this through. A crisp, well-structured Slack message that cuts through ambiguity signals the same thing as a confident, clear verbal response: this person knows what they’re talking about.
If you’re getting feedback about executive presence, take a hard look at your writing. Are your emails too long? Do you bury the point? Do you hedge everything with caveats? Do your strategy documents read like they were written by a committee? These are presence problems, and they’re fixable.
Writing is actually the easiest place to start building executive presence because you can revise. You can’t take back a stumbling response in a meeting, but you can rewrite an email three times before sending it. Use that advantage. Train yourself to write the way you want to show up: clear, direct, structured, and confident.
Building Executive Presence: Behaviours, Not Personality
The most important thing to understand about executive presence is that it’s a set of skills, not a personality trait. You don’t need to become someone else. You need to adopt specific behaviours in specific situations.
That distinction matters because a lot of executive presence advice basically says “be more confident” or “project more authority,” which is about as helpful as telling someone to “just be taller.” Confidence and authority are outcomes. They’re what people perceive when you do certain things consistently.
Here are the behaviours that build presence over time.
Pause before responding. When someone asks you a tough question, resist the urge to fill the silence immediately. Take two seconds. This does two things: it gives you time to formulate a better response, and it signals to everyone watching that you’re thoughtful rather than reactive. This single habit, once internalized, will change how people perceive you more than almost anything else.
Cut your word count in half. In meetings, in emails, in presentations. Whatever you’re about to say, figure out how to say it in half the words. Conciseness is the most underrated executive skill. Every unnecessary sentence dilutes your authority. People who speak less but say more carry more weight in the room.
State your position early. Don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing before committing to a view. Walk into the meeting with a perspective. Say it early. “Here’s where I come out on this, and here’s why.” You can always update your view based on new information – that’s called being reasonable. But starting from a position signals that you’ve done the work and you trust your own judgment.
Prepare your opening 30 seconds. For any important meeting, rehearse the first thing you’re going to say. Not the whole meeting – just the opening. Those first 30 seconds set the tone for how everything else lands. If you start strong, you carry that confidence through. If you stumble out of the gate, you spend the rest of the meeting trying to recover. This is one of the highest-return investments of prep time you can make.
Follow up on what you say you’ll do. This sounds basic, but it’s where a huge amount of presence is built or eroded. When you tell the CEO you’ll have an answer by Friday and you deliver it Thursday, you build trust. When you say you’ll follow up and don’t, you lose credibility in a way that’s hard to measure but deeply felt. Reliability is a massive component of gravitas that rarely gets talked about.
The Harvard Business Review’s coverage of the new rules of executive presence gets into some of these behavioural shifts in more depth, particularly around how expectations have evolved since the pandemic.
When Executive Presence Advice Goes Wrong
I want to address something that gets glossed over in most writing on this topic.
Executive presence feedback can be – and sometimes is – used as vague gatekeeping. When someone says “you don’t have executive presence” without being able to articulate what that means in behavioural terms, it can be a way of saying “you don’t look or sound like the people who are currently in senior leadership” without saying it directly.
This is a real problem, and research backs it up. Studies have shown that executive presence assessments can carry biases related to gender, race, communication style, and cultural background. A woman who speaks directly might be perceived as “aggressive” while a man doing the same thing is seen as having “strong presence.” A leader with an accent might be rated lower on communication even if their content is superior. An introvert might be overlooked because presence gets conflated with extroversion.
If you’re giving executive presence feedback, you have a responsibility to be specific. “You need more gravitas” is lazy feedback. “In the last board meeting, you backed off your recommendation too quickly when the CFO pushed back, and it undermined confidence in your analysis” – that’s useful. That’s something someone can work with.
And if you’re receiving this feedback, it’s worth asking for specifics. “Can you give me two or three concrete examples of where my executive presence fell short?” If the person can’t, the feedback tells you more about their biases than your capabilities.
None of this means executive presence isn’t real or doesn’t matter. It is, and it does. But the concept needs to be handled honestly, with an awareness that it can be weaponized – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
Putting It Together
Executive presence isn’t magic. It’s not something you’re born with or without. It’s a collection of behaviours that can be observed, practised, and improved over time.
If you’re working toward senior leadership, whether that’s a VP role or a CEO track, presence will be a factor in whether you get there. The good news is that it’s buildable. The bad news is that nobody’s going to build it for you, and the feedback you receive about it will often be frustratingly vague.
Start with gravitas – it accounts for two-thirds of the equation. Work on staying composed under pressure, committing to positions, and speaking hard truths with skill. Then sharpen your communication: lead with conclusions, cut your word count, and pay close attention to your writing. The appearance piece will take care of itself if you’re in a professional environment and paying reasonable attention.
For a deeper look at the communication and influence side, MasterClass has a good overview of the foundational concepts. And if you’re evaluating formal programs, we’ve reviewed several that address presence as part of a broader leadership curriculum – including programs focused on executive education ROI, where presence training is one of the clearer areas of measurable return.
The leaders I’ve worked with who developed the strongest executive presence didn’t do it by reading a book or attending a weekend workshop. They did it by picking one or two behaviours, practising them relentlessly in real situations, and being honest with themselves about the results. That’s boring advice. It’s also the only advice that works.
Ben is a full-time data leadership professional and a part-time blogger.
When he’s not writing articles for Data Driven Daily, Ben is a Head of Data Strategy at a large financial institution.
He has over 14 years’ experience in Banking and Financial Services, during which he has led large data engineering and business intelligence teams, managed cloud migration programs, and spearheaded regulatory change initiatives.