Executive Anti-Gravity

Suzanne Kirkendall + Elizabeth Malson

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She bought the lie.

If she improved her posture, fixed her eye contact, and updated her wardrobe, her executive presence would carry her to the next promotion. Maybe even to CEO of the year. Executive presence was a performance, and she bought a ticket.

The moment came at an annual sales meeting. A world class hotel bar, where she was told that she lacked the charisma needed for the sales team to believe her. That's it. That's how the Chairman of the Board viewed her. In one comment, one he likely doesn't remember, he erased the hours she'd spent alongside that same sales team in client meetings. The market research she'd done with lost customers. The message testing across multiple channels. She wished she had a great reply but she didn't. She just left. Because life is ironic, her team won an award the following night at the banquet, but even with that acknowledgement, she knew she wouldn't be promoted.

So she abandoned executive presence. And the further she got from it, the better leadership got for her, for her team, and for the business.

It's time to retire the term. Here’s what we'd build in its place.

What executive presence was supposed to do

The phrase started honestly enough. It pointed at something real. Some people walk into a room and everything bends toward them. Decisions move faster. People defer, not out of fear, but because they lean in. The model assumes a leader is a center of gravity, and that the job is to become massive enough to pull the room into orbit.

The instinct to study that, name it, and teach it is a good one. Leadership is partly visible behavior, and visible behavior can be developed. If we can describe what an effective leader does in a room, we can help more people do it.

But somewhere along the way, the description hardened into a costume. Posture. Voice. Suit. A particular cadence of speaking. A particular way of standing at the head of the table. The behavior got conflated with the body it usually showed up in. And once that happened, "executive presence" stopped describing leadership and started gatekeeping it.

The list of people who somehow lacked the right presence is long and predictable. Women. People of color. Anyone whose accent or affect or body didn't match the template. Anyone who led by listening instead of declaring. The construct did exactly what bias does: it reproduced the existing room and limited diversity of thought, expression, and results.

Early in her career, at a bar with work colleagues, someone raised a glass. "To large profits and short skirts." Everyone laughed. These were the future business leaders. And they were expected to conform. And yet, even then, it felt wrong. She just didn't have the words for it.

Presence is a verdict, not a skill

When we say someone "has executive presence," it feels like we're observing a property they possess. We're not. We're describing our own response to what we perceive as their status.

There is ample behavioral science to explain this. Status characteristics theory shows that we extend authority faster to people whose demographic profile matches our prior beliefs about who leaders are. Role congruity research shows that the same assertive behavior reads as "decisive" from one person and "abrasive" from another, based on whether the behavior fits our expectations for that person's gender. Warmth-and-competence research shows that the trade-offs we make between liking someone and respecting them start to be shaped before they ever say a word.

Put those together and you get an important finding: presence isn't something the leader has. It's something the room gives them. And the room confers it according to rules the leader didn't write and often can't see.

It’s why presence coaching so often fails the people who need it most. You can coach posture. You can coach the pause before a sentence. You cannot coach the perceiver. And when the perceiver's defaults are doing most of the work, no amount of refinement in the performer will fully close the gap.

She politely clapped and then went to the ladies room and cried. He won the highest award and a huge bonus. She led the team, pulled all nighters, named the risks, found the path forward when it wasn't clear, crunched the numbers and made the trade off decisions. But she didn't manage up. Her boss did. He came in and left on time, took five weeks off for his wedding, and got the promotion. She got a trophy for being part of the team and learned that hard work doesn't speak for itself.

Pitfall in anti-bias training

The same problem shows up in the one intervention companies do aim at the perceiver. Anti-bias training is supposed to reach the room, not the performer, and it still tends to miss. A meaningful body of research finds that these programs often produce no lasting change in behavior, and some can backfire: people attend a session, feel they've handled the problem, and stop watching for it in themselves. The training becomes the finish line instead of the starting one. Bias is mostly running below awareness, so a few hours of workshop leaves it intact while lowering everyone's guard against it. When the company also declines to build the systems, review structures, and accountability that would actually constrain the bias, the workshop is theater. The lesson isn't that the perceiver can't change. It's that the work required to do so is structural, and structural work is much harder than running a session and handing out a certificate.

There's a related pattern worth naming. The "presence" label often gets applied retroactively. Someone gets promoted, and the people around them start describing them as having had presence all along. The halo effect is doing some of that work: once we've decided someone is a leader, we look for evidence that supports the decision and stop looking for evidence that complicates it. This is also why "executive presence" is so resistant to honest critique. By the time anyone is using the phrase about a person, they've already been typecast.

What we'd build instead

If presence is partly conferred and partly post-hoc, the question isn't how do I project more of it. The question is what do I want to be true in the room, and what behaviors actually produce that?

The behaviors that actually make a leader effective turn out to be smaller and quieter than the executive presence playbook suggests. Less performance, more follow-through. Less pulling the room toward you, more lifting the people in it.These are the behaviors that will define the next generation of leaders, and are already defining the best of the current one.

1. Relational, not transactional. People know whether you actually care about them or whether you're managing them. The signal is in the small things. Whether you follow up on what they told you last month. Whether you ask about the project you said you'd watch out for. Whether you make time the company doesn't require you to make.

At Medtronic, when you hit a milestone, you got a token. Not mailed, not dropped in a Slack channel. The company CEO or division president handed it to you in person, and someone took a photo of you both. The whole thing was staged to happen at the annual sales meeting, in front of the commercial team, so the recognition was public by design. Years later, she still remembers the moment Omar Ishrak handed her hers, and what he said. It was theatrical, and that was the point. The theater wasn't for the executive handing out the token. It was so that each person getting one was seen doing it, by the people whose seeing mattered to them.

2. Calm and grounded. Self-regulation is contagious. So is dysregulation. Whatever the leader is feeling, the team is feeling it within the hour, whether anyone has consciously realized it or not. The leaders who feel most in command of a room are almost never the loudest people in it. They're the ones who have done enough internal work to not need the room to validate them, which is precisely why the room ends up aligning around them.

3. Kind, not nice. Kind is honest and constructive. Nice avoids conflict and calls it harmony. Niceness produces meetings where everyone agrees in the room and disagrees in the parking lot. Kindness produces teams that say the real thing while it can still be acted on. The leaders we follow longest are almost never the most agreeable ones we've worked for. 

She had a direct report who had a strong working relationship with her own manager and who missed their goal by more than 30 percent for two quarters. She could be nice and reassure them, and herself, that they'd turn it around since they'd been successful in the past. Wait and see what happens, and if needed, let the performance review process activate. Or she could be kind. Address it, offer tools and support, and risk them getting upset and going over her head. These are the types of decisions that define your leadership.

4. Present, not performing. People are talking 28% less in meetings than they used to. The reason isn't that they ran out of ideas. The reason is that they have learned, slowly and clearly, that contributing doesn't change anything. A leader who can make a room feel that contributing is worth it - that disagreement is welcome, that uncertainty is allowed, that updating your position in public is a sign of strength - leads to far higher quality work from the same people. This is the part executive presence coaching has never been able to teach, because it isn't about the performer. It's a condition the performer creates.

5. Believable. The aspirational has gotten so aspirational that it no longer lands. Every leader on stage has overcome adversity. Every keynote ends in triumph. The grind-and-persist narrative reads as wisdom to one generation and as exploitation to another, and the generation that finds it exploitative is increasingly the one doing the work.

During Covid, a CEO pulled the leadership team into a room and showed them the numbers, then mandated a pay cut for everyone over a salary threshold. They knew to the dollar how many jobs their pay cut was saving. The CEO wasn't taking a salary at all. He was a leader worth following. Too often, executives earn a bonus by hitting the profit goal after 10 to 20% of employees are laid off.

Leaders who can name what they got wrong, what they're still figuring out, and what the business actually looks like from inside earn the trust that polished narrators don't.

6. Range. Most senior careers now look like portfolios. You might be an employee, a hands-on founder, an advisor, a board member, and a small business owner, sometimes in the same quarter. The advice to "just be authentic" collapses on contact with this reality, because the authentic version of you in each of those rooms is different. The leaders who navigate it well know their values clearly enough to choose, in each room, when to play the game and when not to.

She had a board prep call at 9am and a first client pitch at 2pm. The board call required precision, deference on some things, and knowing exactly which battles to pick. The pitch required her to be direct about what she'd seen go wrong at companies just like theirs and why she thought it could be fixed. She didn't change who she was between those two calls. But she made very deliberate choices about what to lead with and what to hold back, and leaned in on her strongest skillset: finding and communicating the biggest bottleneck to growth and how to fix it. That's range.

Anti-gravity

Instead of pulling people toward you, use your title and experience to lift the people around you. Away from charisma and presence, toward trust, psychological safety, and attention to the people who aren't always easy to see. The marketing analyst whose only touchpoint with leadership is a weekly report out. The social media manager who got an email from the CEO about a typo. These are the moments a team needs anti-gravity. Not a quick thank-you at the end of the meeting or a Slack note saying it's okay, we all make mistakes. What lands is a follow-up in the form of an opportunity. A new room, and a chance to shine.

For this to work, you have to be ruthless about your environment. The CFO who's dismissive, and not because he's stressed. The CEO whose time is more valuable than yours and who reschedules for the third time. The client who wants free consulting versus the one who genuinely wants help building something. Those behaviors used to be worth tolerating. They're warnings, and they're worth acting on early.

What to do on Monday

If you're a leader who has been told you need more executive presence, here's the honest translation. Someone in the room doesn't trust you, doesn't know how to read you, or doesn't think of you as “one of them.” At least not yet. None of these things are fixed by posture. They are fixed by behaviors, applied repeatedly, in front of the people whose perception matters.

If you're a leader who has been telling someone else they need more executive presence, it's worth stopping and asking what you actually mean. The phrase without context isn't helpful. Do they need to speak up more in meetings? Say that. Do they need to push back on senior people more directly? Say that. Do they need to slow their pace, or take up more space, or interrupt less, or interrupt more? Say that. Naming the behavior is the start of teaching it. Naming the costume is the start of excluding people from it.

If you're working with an executive ghostwriter, a speechwriter, or a brand coach, this is the test: are they helping you communicate something true, or are they helping you perform something safe? The first builds trust over years. The shine on the second one wears off quickly.

If you're a CEO, the question is whether your team would tell you the truth about the business. If the answer is no, no amount of presence work is going to fix the company because in that case, the presence is actually the problem. Focus outward, on your relationships, instead of inward, on your performance, and see how you all become more successful as a result.

Actions over words

We could call this something. Connected leadership. Earned authority. Quiet authority. Bearing. Resonance. Credible warmth. Executive anti-gravity. Pick your favorite. 

But the honest answer is that we don't need a new name for executive presence. We need to retire the old one. What we've been describing isn't a new skill. It's just good leadership, finally separated from the costume it used to require.

In a world where AI can write the speech, summarize the strategy memo, and draft the board update, what AI can’t do is be the human someone chooses to follow. The work now is to become someone worth following.  

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About the authors

Suzanne Kirkendall is the founder of Verelon, a behavioral science consultancy. She was previously CEO, North America at BVA Nudge Consulting and co-founded the Social Science division at McCann Health. She is a certified executive coach and works with leaders and teams on the behavioral side of how organizations actually function, with clients including Chanel, McDonalds, and PepsiCo. She frequently publishes peer-reviewed and industry articles on applied behavioral science and guest lectures for graduate programs including Columbia Business School.

Get in touch: Suzanne@VerelonGroup.com

Elizabeth Malson is the founder of Executive Echo, where she works as a fractional commercial executive for medtech and life sciences companies. She has spent more than 15 years in senior commercial roles across pharmaceuticals, biologics, medical devices, diagnostics and CDMO, leading teams and strategy at Medtronic, Roche, Dentsply and Curia. She works directly with CEOs, boards and commercial leadership. She knows how executives think because she is one.

Get in touch: Liz@ExecEcho.com