Opinion: Executive presence is often mistaken for polish, confidence and the ability to command a room. But the leaders people trust and follow are defined less by how they look than by how they behave when the pressure is on.
Think about the last time you walked out of a difficult conversation knowing you hadn’t quite nailed it. Your team nodded along and then nothing changed. Or someone challenged you in front of the room and you felt yourself go slightly defensive, exactly what you’d promised yourself you wouldn’t do.
You knew exactly what good looked like and what you should have done. You just couldn’t do it when the pressure was real and people were watching. This isn’t a willpower problem, and it isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a teaching problem.
Most leadership development spends its time on the wrong aspect of executive presence entirely, and the part that actually matters gets handed to leaders as a framework instead of something they ever practise. No wonder it disappears the moment the room gets hard.
What the research says
When most people hear the term executive presence, they think about how someone looks and sounds, the authoritative voice, the polished delivery, the ability to command a room. Leadership coaches have built entire practices around these things, and the leadership development industry has followed.
But researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett has spent over two decades studying executive presence, publishing her findings through Harvard Business Review, and they tell a very different story.
Hewlett says three components drive executive presence: gravitas, or how you act, accounts for 67 per cent. Communication, how you speak, accounts for 28 per cent. Appearance, which often gets most of the airtime, accounts for just five per cent.
We’ve spent the majority of our investment optimising for the least important elements, and left gravitas, the thing that actually determines whether a leader can move people, almost entirely unaddressed.
So what is gravitas?
Gravitas gets confused with gravity, or seniority, or the ability to sound authoritative in a boardroom. What it really comes down to is how people feel when they leave a conversation with you.
Take decisiveness, one of the six elements Hewlett’s research identifies as core to gravitas, alongside confidence, inclusiveness, respect for others, vision, and integrity.
On paper it sounds simple. In the room, it looks like this: A leader who has gravitas makes the call before all the data is in, names it clearly, and owns it if it turns out wrong.
A leader without it asks for one more round of opinions, waits for someone else to commit first, and lets the moment pass disguised as due diligence. Both leaders may eventually arrive at the same decision, but only one of them was leading.
Or take inclusiveness, which has become one of the most underrated parts of gravitas in Hewlett’s more recent research. It’s the leader who asks the quiet person in the room what they think, and waits for the answer, versus the one who moves the meeting along because silence makes them uncomfortable.
The first builds a room full of people who trust they’ll be heard, while the second builds a room full of people who’ve learned to stop offering.
You can’t fake it
This is what makes gravitas so hard to fake, but possible to build. Gravitas is a series of behaviours, not a personality trait, which means it’s learnable.
But it only gets tested in the moments that matter, such as the restructure conversation, the peer who won’t cooperate, the team that nods enthusiastically and then does nothing. Nobody develops gravitas in a workshop. They develop it, or fail to, in every meeting, every one-to-one interaction, and every presentation.
When I ask leaders to describe someone they’d genuinely choose to follow, the words are consistent across every industry, every level, every organisation. Trusted. Steady. Calm. Decisive. Someone who has your back. Nobody ever says the “most polished presenter” or “the best dressed in the room”.
The leaders people follow tend to be the most consistent ones, more than the most impressive ones.
Why it fails in real life
The data backs this up. Three in four HR leaders report their managers are overwhelmed by their responsibilities, and despite organisations updating their leadership programs and increasing spending on development, Gartner’s research finds they are largely not seeing results.
Part of the reason is that traditional formats like seminars and lectures, the backbone of most corporate leadership training, were found to work against the kind of development that sticks.
Here’s what this looks like in practice. A senior leader walks into a difficult team conversation. She knows she should open with clarity instead of apology, and she knows she should stay grounded if challenged. She knows that when silence comes, she should sit in it instead of filling it with more words, because silence almost always means someone hasn’t yet said the thing that matters.
But then the moment arrives. She opens with “I know this is going to be hard to hear,” which tells the room she has already decided how they will receive it. Someone pushes back and she goes slightly defensive, then the silence comes and she talks through it because the discomfort is unbearable.
She’d been told what a good presentation looks like. She could have described it accurately in a debrief. What she’d never done was practise it under any real pressure, so when the moment came, there was nothing automatic to fall back on.
This is a presence failure. Workshops and slide decks can transfer knowledge, but leaders build presence through deliberate practice in real conditions, supported by honest feedback over time. Most leadership development doesn’t produce it because producing it is genuinely hard.
How leaders can build executive presence
The leaders I work with who consistently build executive presence all have specific habits in common.
They prepare for the emotional conditions of a conversation as much as its content. Before any significant interaction, they run a short internal audit, asking whether they should solve the problem themselves or create the conditions for others to solve it, and whether they are addressing a symptom or a broader pattern.
It takes about ninety seconds, but it’s the difference between reacting and leading. They arrive settled. The physical signals a leader sends before they’ve said a single word – their pace, their stillness, whether they look grounded or already on the back foot – all register with the room first.
And they own the silence. When challenged or asked something hard, the instinct is to fill the gap immediately. Leaders with genuine gravitas pause instead. Pausing for two seconds before responding signals that you are thinking and leading the conversation, rather than allowing it to drive you.
It’s one of the highest credibility moves available to any leader in any room, and almost nobody does it on purpose.
The leaders who develop genuine presence treat every interaction as an opportunity to practise, and they are honest enough to notice when their behaviour falls short. The knowing was never the problem. It was simply never going to be enough on its own.
Lauren Ryder is the founder and CEO of Leading Edge Global, a leadership consultancy specialising in AI transformation, culture, and organisational capability. She is a regular contributor to Forbes Australia.
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