Most conversations about executive presence for women are saturated with clichés. Stand tall. Speak confidently. Make eye contact. Project calm. Believe in yourself. The advice is aspirational, vague, and oddly disconnected from the realities of how power, status, and credibility actually operate inside institutions. If confidence alone were the answer, women would already be running most organizations.
Executive presence is not a posture or a performance. It is a set of observable, learnable skills that shape how influence moves through a system—especially under scrutiny. For women in senior and high-stakes roles, presence is less about how you appear in isolation and more about how you read dynamics, make deliberate choices, and hold authority in environments that were rarely designed with you in mind.
At our firm, we study executive presence not as an abstract ideal but as a practical capability. Across peace negotiations, statehouses, and higher education institutions, we’ve seen the same pattern repeat: women are often evaluated through pre-loaded assumptions, their behavior interpreted differently than their peers, and their authority tested earlier and more visibly. Presence, in that context, becomes something you have to build, not claim.
In this piece, three leaders reflect on what executive presence actually looks like when the stakes are real. Each voice approaches the question from a different system and role, but together they surface a shared truth: presence is cultivated through understanding how perception, pressure, and authority operate—and practicing how to work with those forces intentionally.
As you read, notice what repeats across these perspectives: how expectations are set before a word is spoken, how steadiness is learned under challenge, and how authority must sometimes be claimed, not assumed.
Kirsti Samuels, Peacebuilding & Leadership Training
I’ve spent years teaching leadership and coaching executives, and one comment surfaces repeatedly from women I work with: they notice that I project authority without losing warmth.
Some students at Columbia have told me I seemed “scary” at first. But last week, as we wrapped up the semester, a student approached me, and as she explained that seeing a woman lead with strength mattered to her, she choked up with tears. She said it gave the women in our class, who came from many different cultural backgrounds, permission to take up space in the conversation.
When I am asked to explain how to achieve a comparable executive presence, I hesitate. Executive presence is hard to define, but it’s easy to recognize when it is missing. You see it when someone seems to shrink, to soften their statements, to physically or verbally make themselves smaller. Or conversely to try too hard to take up space, and appear insensitive or insecure instead.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that three things matter far more than posture tips or power poses.
Status is assigned before you speak
People interpret the same behavior very differently depending on what they already believe about your status. The same tone, the same clothes, the same physical presence can read as confident and authoritative when someone has been framed as powerful, and as quiet or tentative when they have not.
This is why introductions matter. The first few minutes of an interaction shape expectations that are surprisingly hard to undo. When status is established early, you have more freedom in how you lead. You can be measured without being dismissed. Direct without dominating.
Do not leave that framing to chance. Shape it.
Steadiness under pressure is a skill
The ability to stay grounded when challenged, questioned, or pushed is central to how presence is perceived. And it is learned.
When someone challenges you and you respond without defensiveness, people notice. They experience you as someone who can handle pressure. That is one of the core signals we look for when we assess leadership presence.
This is not about suppressing emotion. It is about developing enough internal capacity to stay present when things get uncomfortable.
Authority and service are closely linked, but gender complicates this
Certain behaviors reliably trigger our perception of authority. For example, providing direction, creating order, offering protection. These patterns are deeply ingrained.
For women, this can create tension. In many cultures, mothers do all three, yet that same behavior might not be read as authority outside the home. Offering protection for example can easily be coded as support rather than leadership, and support is often assigned lower status.
This means women have to be deliberate. We need to provide these key services to have authority, but it is worth paying attention to the cultural norms and context so that you provide them in a way that supports rather than undermines your authority.
Executive presence is not about performing confidence you do not feel. It is about understanding the forces that shape perception and working with them intentionally. Set expectations early. Practice steadiness. Be thoughtful about how your instincts to care are interpreted.
You belong in the room. If you are there, lead like you are hosting the party, and act like it.
Cristina Stasia, Higher Education
Here is what executive presence isn’t: it’s not believing in yourself harder, striking a power pose in a bathroom stall, or whatever confidence ritual is trending on social media. If that actually shifted systems, we’d also be giving this advice to men.
In higher ed, and in every leadership room I’ve worked in as a global educator and consultant, executive presence is not mystical, but concrete and practical. It’s the ability to read a room, understand what’s actually driving the system, and make well-timed intervention that shifts the conversation in the room.
I’ve seen extraordinary women get sidelined not for lack of brilliance, but because no one taught them how to make their influence unmistakable in systems never designed to amplify them. The shift happens the moment a woman realizes she doesn’t need to perform confidence: she needs to direct it. Presence requires knowing the dynamics, spotting the leverage points, and acting with clarity and intention.
When I stepped into a leadership role at a new institution, building it from the ground up, I had to develop a presence that created clarity, steadiness, and forward motion in a landscape full of tension, competing pressures, and shifting priorities. Learning that presence is a skill—a muscle to be developed, not a personality trait—was liberating. It meant I could study it, practice it, and improve deliberately. I applied the same discipline I brought to my PhD and to mastering Schubert’s Impromptu in C minor to learn this field. I practiced in peer cohorts, in a structured leadership program, and with an executive coach. I applied what I learned, reflected on the results, brought those insights back into the work, and practiced again. Over time, presence became a strategic capability, not a personality trait.
Executive presence is something women can train, refine, and sharpen. That’s the work I care about: helping women build their presence that doesn’t just earn them a seat at the table, but changes what the table does once they’re there.
Mitzi Johnson, Speaker of the House
I didn’t look like the 230+ years of executives whose portraits lined the halls of the Vermont Statehouse: Governors, Speakers, figures that history—written by men—deemed important.
Stepping into the role of Vermont’s 3rd woman Speaker of the House was exhilarating and a bit overwhelming. “Stepping into” sounds so graceful, so presumed. In reality it was 14 years of earning trust and credibility drop by drop, and then, when the opportunity opened, it was two hectic months of strategy and campaigning, carefully crafted emails, follow-up phone calls, weekly team strategy meetings, and hundreds of miles criss-crossing the Green Mountains to meet every caucus member in their district, securing the necessary votes to win the 4-way race for the caucus nomination and House election.
The steadiness, competence, patience, and relationship-building that positioned me as a candidate for an executive role was not the same skill set that landed me the role. I had to layer on a skill set of strategy, competitiveness, and ambition to get to the corner office, without losing the qualities that people had come to know from me.
I underestimated how much being elected Speaker would shift my decade-long relationships in the statehouse. Along with the leader of the Senate, I was the co-CEO of a branch of government, but did not immediately embrace the authority, specifically the gravitas, areas of sole decision-making, and the separation from others, that came with the role. Truth be told, I was uncomfortable with it. I invited colleagues to continue to call me by my first name, until a long-time lobbyist, who insisted on using my titles “Madam Speaker” or “Speaker Johnson,” pulled me aside and said, “This building needs a Speaker, and the members chose you. You can’t be ‘Mitzi.’ We all need you to be the Speaker.”
Shouldering that title, and the executive presence that came with it, felt at first like a borrowed suit. My tendency was to process challenges out loud, explaining constraints and my thoughts out loud, along the way building collaborative alignment. In this new role, I needed to cultivate a small trusted group to process or test thought experiments more privately, so that my public voice held the clarity and decisiveness needed from the role. Another important function of any executive role is to play judge and referee for the conflicts that aren’t resolved further down the food chain. Embracing that responsibility meant having difficult conversations with people whose support I would need on the next close vote. Executive presence there meant respect, honesty, and orienting my audience to the purpose and the problem. The role demanded disappointing people in a way that kept that at the table with me, and it meant being the bad guy knowing that the way I handled a sticky situation could, and often did, wind up on the front page of the paper. Executive presence meant demonstrating my commitment to a professional tone and culture for the building, and not doing anything that would jeopardize the integrity of the office.
I had to shift my own self narrative and learn new behaviors to be able to fully BE the Speaker. When I did, leaning on that title, with its centuries of history and what it demanded of me, became an important tool in leading from a place of authority.
Where Executive Presence Is Actually Built
Across these experiences, executive presence emerges not from confidence rituals or isolated self-work, but from repeated exposure to real systems and deliberate practice inside them. It is built in context, under pressure, and in relationship to others.
Presence develops when leaders rehearse consequential moments before the stakes are irreversible. Practicing how ideas land, how challenges are met, and how authority is asserted is most effective when done in environments that mirror the complexity of one’s actual system, allowing for experimentation, reflection, and adjustment.
It is also shaped through the accumulation of micro-decisions. Small choices, like when to pause, invite input, decide, or hold the line, quietly train both the leader and the system. Over time, these moments establish patterns of influence and credibility that are far more powerful than any single performance.
Executive presence becomes visible when communication is precise and adaptive to context. Leaders with presence do not simply speak clearly; they shape understanding, manage tension, and orient others to purpose and priorities. This requires attention not just to message, but to timing, framing, and audience.
Finally, presence is strengthened through feedback and relationships. Trusted peers, coaches, and networks provide the external perspective necessary to see how one’s authority is experienced, not just intended. These relationships function as living laboratories, accelerating learning that cannot happen in isolation.
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