Why it Matters

This month’s webinar on executive presence drew record breaking participation.

Why are so many people interested in this topic?

Recognition & Respect

People want to be more recognized and respected.

They want access to bigger and better opportunities. They want an advantage.

Having a strong, credible presence is important. You need it in your current job and you need it to open doors. You need it to get access to higher level networks and to win bigger opportunities.

Download the podcast of the webinar.

We talked about how to build your executive presence…

How You Feel

Be yourself. You need to feel comfortable and confident. The best way to do that consistently is to be who you really are. Putting on an executive-like facade does not work nearly as well as simply being comfortable in your own skin and projecting confidence.

Confidence. You don’t need to have a big, showy personality to have exeutive presence. Having a strong presence is about confidence, not personality. Even if you are a quiet, humble person it’s about putting your best self out there consistently, not changing your personality.

Fearlessness

If you can’t be confident, be fearless. Don’t back off when you are not confident. You’ll come off much worse if you are tentative and worried about what you are presenting. We talked about ways to achieve a more fearless approach, and build your confidence along the way.

Practice and prepare. If you are not comfortable in the moment, then prepare. Don’t feel bad about practicing ahead of time. The worksheets for this webinar help you plan for situations when you need to exert your presence. Script what you will say and rehearse it. You will be more confident in the moment, and you will get more confident over time, with practice.

Never mind the details. Don’t wait until you feel like know everything. Disconnect “knowing everything” from having executive presence. If you spend all your time learning the details, you will not gain executive presence. You won’t be stepping up and putting yourself out there, and to make matters worse, people will always see you in the weeds.

How You Look

Quality matters. It’s not about fashion, it’s about looking like you care. No one ever felt more confident by wearing a cheap suit. Put some effort in.

Remove distractions. Make sure nothing about your appearance distracts from your competence. Take stock, get feedback. Make changes.

How You Behave

Lead the room. Don’t just be in room. Lead the room. We talked about various rooms and types of gatherings and how to portray leadership and confidence in each situation.

Be fast on your feet. Part of executive presence is being able to actively listen and respond, and not become defensive under attack. You also have more presence if you can be flexible and don’t always need to stick to the script.

Be Present! Part of executive presence, is “presence”. You need to put yourself out there. Don’t stay in the shadows. Speak up. Have something to contribute. Be personable. Be the one to ask key questions or put forth recommendations. Don’t talk just to talk, but don’t be silent just to avoid risk. Step up.

Fit in Socially. You need to be able to fit in to higher level networks. Get over being awe-struck, and find a way to personally connect with people as higher levels. If you can’t fit in socially, you will appear junior. You need to make others comfortable that you belong there.

Never Appear Overwhelmed

Ease and grace. Although this is part of how you behave, it’s worth emphasizing because appearing overwhelmed is inversely proportional to executive presence. You need to find a way to deal with overwhelm privately, and have others see you as calm and in control. If you are appear overwhelmed, no one will see you as ready for more.

Download the podcast for Executive Presence
Download the complete webinar (includes podcast, presentation and worksheets)

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This month our member webinar was on
the topic: Relevance & Personal Brand.

                           TOP 10 IDEAS
          ON RELEVANCE & PERSONAL BRAND

What you do

1. The reality is that you won’t be respected and appreciated automatically.  You need to increase your awareness and sensitivity to others, and tune your communications and behaviors to align with what people already care about, if you want them to care about you.

2. Relevance is about credibility plus value.  Relevance gets to “what have you done for me lately?”.  Credibility is necessary, but you have to show you are adding value to the business if you want to be relevant.  You don’t want to be one of those people who is always really busy, but no one knows what value you are adding.

3. Do a bigger job, find your place to add additional value over and above your job description.  Getting your work done well does not make you relevant.  That keeps you from getting fired. Think about how you can personally impact revenue, efficiency, quality, customer care, or people development.

How you communicate

4. If you need to explain what you are doing it is by definition not relevant.  Stop spending lots of energy explaining and educating, which is frustrating for you and them, and start mapping what you do to things that are already important to others.

5. Ask your stakeholders what they care about and look for two things, 1- their list of business drivers and  2 -the specific vocabulary they use to describe them.  This becomes your roadmap for how you communicate with them to be relevant – use their list and their words.

6. Be a translator – keep the jargon of your department within your department, use the business language to explain what your team does and show the value your team adds.  Presenting our internal success measures with your internal jargon is not relevant.

How you behave

7. Use your personal brand to help you act consistently in support of what you want to be known for.  Once you decide on what “extra value” you are going to add to the business, make sure you are supporting that with consistent behaviors.

8. Use your brand to negotiate work with your boss and your team.  The more you understand your brand, and what you are naturally good at, the more you can tune your job description to put yourself in a position to add the most value.

How you interact

9. People don’t wake up in the morning worried about you and what you are doing.  They are fighting their own “dragons”.  Their dragons define what is relevant to them.  You need to help them fight their dragons before they will have any energy to even think about yours.

10. Stepping outside your job description can be politically challenging if you want to add value in an area someone else owns.  Start with a long term desired outcome that is relevant to both of you, and then show how you can help by doing a part what is required to get to the agreed outcome alongside whatever the person is doing.

The Coaching Hour:  We had a great member conversation during the coaching hour that followed the webinar.  You can look for a transcript of that discussion later on the Azzarello Group website.

Download the Podcast of this webinar
Download the presentation & worksheets

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Related BLOG Posts:
Be More Relevant
Do a Bigger Job
Are you a Work-horse?

If you want to increase your
relevance there are a few key
realities to consider:

 1. No one cares what you do. 
The sooner you accept that reality, the faster you can be more relevant.  Relevance is about being relevant to the things that others care about, not making others care about what you are doing.

2. Everybody is fighting dragons.  If you are finding that no one is embracing whatever it is you are talking about  (which is you fighting your dragons), step back and consider what dragons they are fighting. 

You need to either help them fight their dragons first, or show them why they can stop for a minute without getting killed. 

Say you are a program manager.  You go into a team to propose something strategic – a change of course that is much better for the business.  No one listens to you.  The reason is that they are already working hard to deliver commitments they are on the hook for (their own dragons).  They simply can’t care about your dragons while they are currently engaged in battle with theirs.

Your only choices are to either help them fight their dragons first , or make sure their boss calls off the current dragons. If you do neither, your strategic mission will not be relevant to them.

If you are the boss, and it’s your team that you need to change course, remember to explicitly show them that you have made the world safe from the old dragons so they can stop fighting them, and that they need to start fighting the new ones.  People do not naturally or easily give up their dragons, once they are in battle.

If you are selling your idea upwards, make sure you understand what dragons your management is fighting, and show how your proposal helps that particular fight.  You can’t be relevant unless they think it’s important. 

To make them think it’s important you are much better off to start with something they already think is important, than to try and educate them on something new.  To the next point…

3. Don’t try to educate people about your function – remember point #1. they don’t care.  Instead find out what is important to them and translate everything you say into THEIR vocabulary — not yours. 

For example:  If you are trying to educate a business unit about your brand campaign or data center investment, or vertical market program, remember they only really care about their business unit.

Trying to educate them to the value of what you are doing in your terms will waste time and annoy both of you.  Instead learn about their business and translate everything you say about what you do into their language and the specific benefits for them.  Your “data center investment” becomes “improve customer service for your specific products”.

4. Put the business in the center of your thinking and conversations.  If you always talk to the CEO only about your function, you will not be building credibility and relevance to the business.  If you are only ever advocating about your plans, your budget, your functional objectives, you are not being relevant to the business.  You are being relevant only to your function. 

Your conversations should be centered on business initiatives like quality improvement, customer loyalty, geographic expansion, channel optimization, etc.  If what you are really talking about is needing more computers, investing in a partnership, doing demand generation, etc.  keep those terms within your function and translate your language to the vocabulary of business initiatives when you communicate external to your function.

5. Be the voice from outside the company.  You must keep educating yourself, watching for examples of how others do things, and learning from customers.   Bringing the external voice of the real world back into your business sets you up as highly relevant.  But make sure there is a point to it.  It’s not just about sounding smart.  It’s about bringing high value, real world input into the business that causes positive action – so connect it with what the business cares about before you talk about it.

6. Deliver your work AND Do more.  Deliver excellent results — that is a must.  But don’t expect that alone to make you relevant.  Doing your job keeps you from getting fired.  What makes you stand out, and makes you highly relevant is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description.  Otherwise you are just one more person doing what is expected of them.  

I will be writing more on why you need to do a bigger job and how to do it in my next blog post. 

Also you can join this month’s member webinar/podcast on Relevance and Personal Brand

Now more than ever it is time to stand out build your value and increase your relevance.  There is no better way than to keep the business in the center of your thinking, stay focused on what other people care about, and help them with their dragons.

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