Your impact as a leader with Personal Executive Presence

The Positive Power of a Leader

Personal Executive Presence (PEP) is partly in the eye of the beholder: how others experience you. Someone might describe a leader with w well-developed PEP in these words:

“I trust her and I have confidence in her. She knows who she is, what she can do, and she will get the job done. She’s calm, kind, competent and down to earth. She really sees me and supports me to be my best self. When she’s in charge, I feel myself relax.”

There’s a lot in this statement; let’s unpack it.

This leader inspires trust and confidence

“I trust her and have confidence in her”. A leader with PEP instills trust and confidence that things are handled and will be all right, and that those involved will be treated well. This trust results from her record of past performance, but even more importantly, it is a direct result of her own trust and confidence in herself, her character and her competence. This leader exudes these genuine qualities and transmits them to those around her.

This leader brings self-knowledge into action

“She knows who she is, what she can do, and she will get the job done.” This self-knowledge is the result of self-awareness, deliberate introspection, actively integrating feedback, and conscious self-development. The result is a clarity about herself, her values, her purpose and her capacities. This allows a singular focus on execution of the task at hand. Once again, this leader's clarity about who she is and what she can do is palpable, and those around her pick up on this.

This leader is calm, kind and competent

“She’s calm, kind, competent and down to earth.” This leader embodies certain specific qualities that affect those around her: A calm that reduces free-floating anxiety, a kindness that enables a real, warm, personal connection, and a competence that inspires confidence. Yet all this skill and competence does not make her arrogant and distant; instead, there’s a down-to-earth quality that draws others in.

This leader truly connects with those she serves

"She really sees me and supports me to be my best self." This leader knows how to be truly, Personally Present with another and their personalities, values, talents and issues. She listens and tunes in, not led by knee-jerk judgments, stereotypes and comparisons based in history. Her response is to the actual person, not some idea of them, and emerges effortlessly.

This leader responds from her Presence to the unique person in front of her, integrating what she hears with what she sees and senses. Her response is always fresh, sometimes surprising, but always lets those she's with feel heard, understood, and cared for. Secure in her inner confidence she may share of her own experiences, be they triumphs or struggles.

Grounded in the quiet openness of her Inner EP, she may be able to perceive the unspoken, deeper issue at hand. From that same Presence, she may also be able to speak to these issues. Perhaps she perceives a deeper problem that could use a suggestion. Or a budding new capacity that will blossom with just an encouraging word. Or a long-lingering dream that has been waiting to be spoke out loud in the Presence of a true listener. Or a tender difficulty that simply needs the compassion of a silent witness.

In a world where so many speak, being listened to from the depth of Personal Presence is a rare gift. Being spoken to from that same depth can be life-changing

Have you ever taken something something very private, or something very grand, or something you had never before put into words, and said it to someone who was truly Present with you? Have you experienced how that simple act caused your words to take on a meaning that was surprisingly deeper, or even totally new? As a leader with PEP, one of the ways you can served the people you lead is through your ability to deeply connect, listen, respond and inspire.

This leader inspires the relaxation of unnecessary tension

“When she’s in charge, I feel myself relax.” When this leader is at the helm, the crew trusts that things are going to be okay. As a result, everyone relaxes. This doesn’t mean going slack or passive, but dropping physical, mental and emotional tensions including tight shoulders, anxiety, workaholism, and emotional reactivity. Everyone can relax and simply engage their work. How rare, and what a gift, to have a leader whose very Presence helps you relax as you work!

Your PEP is contagious – in a good way!

One of the impacts a leader with PEP has "beneath the surface" is that their When you embody your PEP, your trust and self-confidence ripple outward and evoke the same qualities in those around you. This is also true for other ways you show up, such as relaxed, personable, relational, focused, and competent. The impact of your PEP is infectious in a good way; it rubs off.

Let's face it - your employees talk about you!

Since organizations are made up of people, the impact you have as a leader on the people you serve similarly impacts the organization at large. Your organization’s culture is strongly set by your actual leadership behavior, and leaders with PEP strum a powerful chord that resonates throughout the organization.

Anyone who has worked in an organization knows how much time is spent among employees in any rank or position to “discuss and evaluate” how our leaders are doing. Less immediately visible on the surface is the degree to which we model our own behavior after the behavior of our leaders. “Apparently this is the way to be successful around here”, is the unspoken conclusion as we emulate our leaders. Obviously, this puts enormous power and responsibility in the hands of leaders.

What happens in an organization where leaders preach honesty, meritocracy, diversity, and excellence while employees watch them fudge on earnings calls, promote their yes-men, hire like it’s 1951, and churn out mediocre products? No lip service, company manuals, policies and monetary incentives can truly overcome the inevitable emulation of this behavior throughout the entire organization. Disengagement and high turnover are inevitably next.

Strong PEP amplifies your formal influence

In contrast, inspiring and impeccable leadership that manages to communicate and embody high values inspire and effortlessly evoke a devotion, work ethic and creativity that can completely transform an organization.

This “automatic”, formal leadership influence, derived from your position on the org chart, is greatly amplified by the strength of your PEP. A leader with PEP can set company culture in a way a leader with the same title, but less PEP, cannot. This influence is not formal, not dependent on company policies or incentives, and derives directly from the way you are being, relating and acting. A good example of the impact a leader with a highly developed PEP can have on an entire organization is the turnaround of Ford by Alan Mulally.

An example of PEP in action: Ford in trouble

Alan Mulally was asked in 2006 by then-CEO Bill Ford to move from a 37-year storied career at Boeing to the Ford motor company to take over as CEO and pull Ford from the brink of bankruptcy. The company’s debt was “junk”, its stock had lost half its value over 4 years, and projected loss that year was $17 billion. Mulally instituted many structural business changes based on his experience as a corporate leader. However, the most important changes were cultural, and he exemplified them in his own behavior.

Ford’s senior leadership culture was notorious for fiefdoms, silos, sharp elbows, and a lack of accountability. When asked, each leader maintained their division was performing great! Mulally confronted: We will lose $17 billion this year – how can everything be OK? If we planned last year to lose $17 billion this year, then we are performing great. Otherwise, we are not!

Eventually, one leader admitted that he was in the red. Mulally immediately applauded him, then and there, and thanked him for his courage and his truth-telling.

Unprecedented candor

His next move was a brilliant act of PEP. He said, I am Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford. I know very little about making and selling cars. Much less than you guys. And it’s OK for me to admit that! And it’s OK for you to admit not everything in your divisions is going great! We all have to be completely honest, face reality, and act on what’s true. Then we’ll be back in no time making the best cars in the world.

Such a dose of authentic, radical candor and transparency demonstrates well-developed PEP. A leader who is innerly conflicted about his sense of value, self-esteem or credibility will find himself unable to confidently reveal his lack of knowledge to very knowledgeable others. That takes a leader who knows who he is and who doesn’t need the approval of others to know his value. A leader who can embody humility, truth-telling, confidence and action, all at once because none of those qualities are in conflict inside him. When Mulally embodied and expressed these qualities in front of his leadership, he instantly instituted a new normal.

Through his admission Mulally also did not pretend to have a solution about how to make better cars. Instead, he redirected calls for brilliant ideas to where they belonged: with his most senior subject matter experts. His unique role was to change the culture that made new solutions possible, and he chose to do it through the power of radical truth and vulnerability that was grounded in his PEP.

Now imagine that Mulally had instead followed the playbook that was so pervasive at Ford at the time. He would have postured that he had already learned a lot about building cars and would learn more in the coming months. He would have provided ideas, roadmaps and ostensible solutions. His leadership would have read that standard behavior as permission to likewise continue business as usual, pretending they were in full control and things were going great, all the way up to “sudden” bankruptcy. It took a personal, unconventional confession to break the pattern, and that personal confession was an example of Mulally’s PEP.

Uncompromising values

In addition to embodying and inspiring this new cultural model of radical honesty, transparency and accountability, Mulally also instituted many concrete changes in business meetings, project management and finance. He was famously unapologetic about his zero-tolerance policy for bad behavior, to the point that two board members who could not convince him to compromise on it chose to leave Ford altogether. It was a price he was willing to pay, and it made crystal-clear to everyone that a non-toxic work culture at Ford was non-negotiable.

Radical leadership leads to radical turnaround

As a result of Mulally’s powerful leadership, Ford revamped its auto lineup, sold off extraneous parts of the business, and rapidly returned to financial health. It was the only large US automaker that did not need a government bailout after the 2008 financial collapse. By 2010, Ford had delivered 16 consecutive quarters of profitability, and in a company driven by labor unions, Alan Mulally’s approval rating was unbelievable at 97%. That is the power of true leadership.

What's remarkable is that Mulally did not do any of this by firing “bad” board members and replacing them with “good” ones. Instead, he turned Ford around with the same 14 of the 16 board members who had taken it to a $17 billion loss. He had not needed to fire a single one of them. Such is the impact of organizational cultural change, driven by a leader who has developed his PEP and knows how to embody and transmit it.

The story of Ford’s turnaround illustrates how a leader’s PEP can both set and amplify a business culture. Mulally turned around a giant company not through superior knowledge of the car business. Instead, he embodied, demonstrated and inspired an unprecedented culture of transparency and accountability to replace the deeply entrenched culture of silos, secrecy and stonewalling. By personally modeling a radically different business culture he inspired a matching shift in his leadership, which then flowed throughout the company – with compelling results.

Your Personal Executive Presence is what makes you remark-able

Organizational influence based in your PEP gives you, the leader, a unique opportunity to advance positive values into the workplace and beyond. It is what others often remark on before they talk about your “measurable accomplishments”. They have noticed your way of being, your values, your ethics, your uniqueness, your personableness, and it positively sets you apart from other leaders they know. This influence is what creates a company culture that’s notably different, truly remarkable, a source of healthy pride, and magnetic. And since the company culture is what carries and sustains each employee in their work, a strong company culture inevitably brings strong results.