Leadership Presence

(Excerpt from ch 15, Leadership as Relation: the art of science of heart-led leadership)

Leadership presence is much more than the ability to immediately capture people's attention with your presence when you enter a room. This is charisma, one of the individual characteristics we mentioned in Chapter 1. The Vantage Leadership website states, “From our experience with coaching and developing leaders from all walks of life and a variety of different backgrounds, one of the most difficult leadership presence skills to develop is the balance between talking/leading and listening/observing.” (Vantage Leadership blog)

Here you see one of the great problems with individualist approaches: because presence is an individual characteristic, possessed (or not) by an individual, leadership presence stands on the opposite side of a balancing act from listening. Attention is on the individual’s “ability to take command of a room,” and not on the audience’s needs, reception, or goals. Relational leadership-presence needs to be the fulcrum on which leading and listening are balanced...or rather, integrated.

I once worked with a tech executive who was morbidly shy. When Lucinda came to me for coaching, she thought of herself as ugly, offensive, and socially awkward; but she believed so strongly in the benefits of the product she’d invented, that she was committed to overcoming her self-abnegation and leading a small company to successfully market her innovation. I asked her to forget about being charismatic altogether, and focus solely on listening deeply, understanding what her team members needed to do their jobs well, and on what would empower the future they were creating for themselves.

To ween her from negative self-absorption around others, I asked Lucinda to focus on giving her attention to her team, which she did enthusiastically; after all, it was pain-relieving. In the same way our attention is grabbed by watching a kitten play with a ball of yarn or a pianist’s total concentration on the music he’s making, Lucinda’s team responded to her laser-focus on listening, understanding, and empowering them with equally wrapped attention. Her looks and social skills only improved once she’d established a relational presence (as compared with a preoccupation with herself). By then she was already well connected to the team.  

"When you are present, when your attention is fully in the Now, that Presence will flow into and transform what you do. There will be quality and power in it." --Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p 210

 Sincerely, Martin Kettelhut, PhD

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