If you’re an executive or someone in a leadership position, you have an executive presence. Your executive image is your reputation. It’s what people think when you walk into a room, and what they say about you when you’re not in the room.
Actively maintaining an executive image as a leader builds credibility, trust, and ultimately followers. It gives you a competitive advantage over other job seekers, giving you better career opportunities.
Every executive needs to consider his own existence. But before you can effectively develop a strategy to enhance your executive presence and create the tools to support it, you need to understand what your executive presence is. First, every leader should understand the three components of executive presence…
1. Solemn
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Grace is the first and foremost component of executive demeanor. This is the value you choose. This is how you want to create value in the world and how you can save or make money for the organization to justify the cost of hiring you.
One of the elements of executive presence that corresponds to gravitas is the depth of your knowledge. As an executive, you got where you are today because you considered a lot of situations. A sense of gravitas will naturally develop throughout your career as you gain more experience and move up the corporate ladder.
Some of the qualities associated with gravitas include practical knowledge, poise, confidence, empathy, and foresight.
2. Communication
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The second (and most important) component of executive presence is communication. How do you realize your value? Communication also includes things like your personality and approach. These are the things that will communicate your executive demeanor.
One element of executive demeanor as opposed to communication is that you pass on knowledge. After thinking about many situations in your career, you have been able to communicate the evolution of your thoughts. You have taken those experiences and learned and grown from them. This is the most important component of executive presence, as communication accounts for 51 percent of it for leaders with effective executive presence. In other words, the effectiveness of your executive performance depends on the knowledge you pass on.
Some of the traits associated with communication include authenticity, restraint, integrity, caring, and humility.
3. Appearance
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The final component of executive image is your appearance. This is how your value is interpreted. It can be physical appearance (your attire), but also body language, such as facial expressions and gestures.
The final element of executive image that corresponds to appearance is your presentation style. As an executive, you have thought about many situations in your career and communicated the evolution of your thinking, and now, your appearance is the form you choose to convey that information.
Some of the traits related to appearance include personal style, intentionality, tolerance, interactivity, and confidence.
As a leader in your industry, you have executive positions. When others evaluate your leadership (your reputation), they consider your gravitas, communication, and appearance. Understanding the three components of executive presence is the first step in developing an effective executive presence strategy that will lead to better career opportunities.
To learn more about how to create an executive presence, download our eBook, The 4-step process for creating an online executive presenceby JT O’Donnell, Founder and CEO, Work It DAILY.
Want to build your executive image?
If you’re an executive looking to advance in your career, you need to prioritize your executive image. This includes your online executive presence. Without being able to consistently contribute in a meaningful way online, you will quickly become irrelevant and forgotten.
It’s time to take charge of your professional reputation.we invite you to Sign up for a free seminar and JT O’Donnell, LinkedIn’s Top Spokesperson. In this 45-minute webinar, JT will share five things all executives should be doing on LinkedIn right now to ensure they remain at the top of their field.
JT will explain:
- How LinkedIn has evolved and what you need to know to stay relevant and in demand.
- Simple changes to your LinkedIn profile settings can have immediate results.
- How to get more of the right people to ask to connect with you on the platform.
- The secret sauce for making sure you take full advantage of LinkedIn’s recent algorithm changes.
- there are more!
Can’t join the live stream? Don’t worry.
Sign up We will send you the recording after the event.
We hope to see you there!
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