Quote for the Week

"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow."

- Commonly attributed to Winston Churchill

1. A key distinction → leader vs. individual contributor

Gif by @drawify

Hi !

It's graduation season in the U.S..

My nephew graduated on Saturday, and I'm just back from a weekend celebrating his hard work and personal development.

If you attended a graduation recently, you may have noticed something that stood out to me during all the speeches, ceremonies, and choir performances:

It's the influence of speakers who have executive presence compared with those who don't.

The influence of speakers who engage you, make you smile or tear up, deliver a message you know you'll remember long after all the diplomas have been handed out

Here's how it unfolded for me on Friday, when I was in the audience as my nephew was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society.

During the ceremony, several faculty members spoke followed by the university provost. The faculty members are brilliant people. They're credentialed, accomplished, deeply expert in their fields.

And they delivered their remarks exactly the way you'd expect a brilliant, credentialed expert to deliver remarks: head down, reading carefully, making sure to get every fact right.

The provost did something different.

She opened with a joke. She's Greek. She came to the United States to study and was genuinely astonished (delighted!) to discover American universities have an entire Greek system, apparently built to serve and honor Greek students just like her!

The audience laughed. She smiled. And then she was off, making eye contact, only glancing periodically at her notes, being genuinely present in the room.

She looked like she was enjoying herself, and at the end of her remarks, she circled back to the joke from the beginning.

What I watched was not a difference in expertise. It was a difference in orientation.

The faculty were oriented toward their content. The provost was oriented toward her audience.

That distinction is one that separates individual contributors from executives. It shows up everywhere once you know how to see it.

And this week, we're going to cover how you can demonstrate it.

Let's dig in.

2. Three ways to present like a leader

Pavel Danilyuk

Lesson 1: Individual Contributors Perfect the Content. Leaders Perform for the Room.

THE PRINCIPLE:

When technically accomplished professionals speak, they typically organize their preparation around getting the information right.

When effective leaders speak, they organize their preparation around producing a specific effect in the audience.

WHY IT WORKS:

Psychologist Heidi Grant, Ph.D., whose research on goal motivation at Columbia Business School draws on decades of achievement science, distinguishes between be-good goals (demonstrating competence) and get-better goals (creating a result).

Most scientists and engineers in public settings are running a be-good goal: don't get it wrong, don't look uninformed, don't embarrass yourself.

That orientation is fundamentally self-directed. It consumes cognitive bandwidth that could be used to read the room, adjust pacing, or land a joke.

Leaders in high-stakes communication settings flip the goal. The question isn't am I getting this right? It's are they with me?

EXAMPLE:

The faculty members at this ceremony were reading from prepared remarks carefully, accurately, and with evident effort.

The content was solid. The history of Phi Beta Kappa, the meaning of the honor, the criteria for selection. All correct. All forgettable. Because the audience wasn't being invited to experience anything — they were being informed.

The provost, by contrast, wasn't just delivering information. She was creating a memory.

The opening joke set an emotional tone. The substance followed. The callback closed the loop. The audience left with a feeling about what Phi Beta Kappa means, not just a set of facts about it.

YOUR APPLICATION:

Before your next presentation, meeting, or high-stakes conversation, ask yourself one question:

What do I want the people in this room to feel when it's over? Not "what do I want them to know." What do I want them to feel.

Write that answer at the top of your notes. Let it govern every choice you make about what to include, what to cut, and how to open.

Lesson 2: Reading Your Remarks Is a Signal — Just Not the One You Want To Send

THE PRINCIPLE:

Verbatim reading of prepared remarks signals to an audience that you are prioritizing precision over presence. In low-stakes technical settings, that's often the right call. In high-stakes leadership settings, it almost always costs you.

WHY IT WORKS:

Communication researchers call this the immediacy cue problem. Nonverbal immediacy — eye contact, open body posture, vocal variety, physical presence — signals psychological closeness to an audience.

When a speaker's eyes are fixed on a page, immediacy cues drop sharply. The audience experiences this not as careful preparation but as distance.

In a seminal review of immediacy research, communication scholar Janis Andersen found that high immediacy speakers are consistently rated as more credible, more competent, and more persuasive, even when the content of their message is identical to a low-immediacy speaker.

The audience can't always articulate why one speaker "had it" and another didn't. But their nervous systems know. They're tracking connection, not content.

EXAMPLE:

My nephew's ceremony wasn't unique. This pattern, with an expert reading while a leader connects, plays out in every pitch meeting, every grant review, every all-hands meeting.

The researcher who spent three months preparing a flawless 12-minute presentation, eyes locked on slides, often loses the room to the team lead who spoke from three bullet points and made everyone feel understood and valued.

YOUR APPLICATION:

You don't have to memorize your remarks (and I strongly recommend you do not memorize your remarks).

Instead, try this (it's actually the final step in my prep for keynotes): Reduce your full notes to a single page of 5-7 anchor phrases. These are the key turns in your argument, not the full sentences.

Practice until you can navigate by anchor. Then, when you're in the room, use the page as a safety net, not a script.

Your eyes belong to the audience.

Lesson 3: The Primacy-Recency Principle — How the Provost's Joke Was Actually a Master Class

THE PRINCIPLE:

Audiences remember what comes first and what comes last far better than anything in between. Psychologists call this the serial position effect, and it has direct implications for how you structure any communication, from a two-minute hallway pitch to a 45-minute board presentation.

WHY IT WORKS:

The primacy effect (strong memory for early items) is driven by deeper encoding — the brain is freshest at the start and rehearses early information more. The recency effect (strong memory for final items) is driven by immediate availability in working memory.

The middle, by contrast, is where information goes to be forgotten.

Leaders who understand this don't treat their opening as a warm-up. They treat it as prime real estate.

EXAMPLE:

The provost's Greek-system joke wasn't a throwaway. It was a strategic opening that established warmth, self-awareness, and cross-cultural perspective in about 45 seconds.

More importantly, by returning to it at the end of her remarks, she closed the loop, giving listeners the satisfaction our brains get in the resolution of an idea or story.

The faculty members, by contrast, opened with admin, acknowledging the occasion and closed with predictable information I've already forgotten.

They gave away the most valuable real estate in their remarks, the beginning and the end, by conveying low-value, predictable information.

YOUR APPLICATION:

For your next presentation or formal remarks, do a deliberate primacy-recency audit:

First 60 seconds: What's actually in them? A greeting? An apology for what you're about to say? Or something that earns attention?

Last 60 seconds: Are you closing with your strongest point — or winding down with logistics?

The callback option:

Is there a thread from your opening you can return to at the conclusion? A question you can answer, a phrase you can echo, a loop you can close? If yes, use it. It creates the perception of a unified, intentional message, which is exactly what executive presence feels like from the outside.

3. My take

Photo by mali maeder

I want to say something carefully here, because I think there's a version of this week's message that lands wrong.

The faculty members at my nephew's ceremony were not bad communicators.

They were communicating in the mode their careers have rewarded: precise, accurate, content-forward. In a peer-reviewed paper, in a research presentation to colleagues, in expert testimony before a technical body, those are exactly the right instincts. Precision and accuracy matter enormously. The norms exist for good reason.

And they had a different role during the ceremony than the provost's.

For our purposes, it you want to advance from an individual contributor (the faculty member in our example) to a people manager (the provost), you need to recognize when the setting has changed, when you're no longer talking to people who share your training, your vocabulary, and your standards of evidence.

When your audience is the provost, the department chair, the board, the funder, the promotion committee, the room full of proud parents, the game has shifted. And the scientists and engineers who advance are the ones who recognize the shift and adjust.

This is not about becoming someone you're not. It's about expanding your range.

The provost wasn't more intelligent than the faculty. She wasn't more knowledgeable about Phi Beta Kappa. What she had (and what she demonstrated) was the ability to read a room, choose an appropriate register, and make an audience feel something in addition to knowing something.

That is a learnable skill. I've helped PhDs and engineers develop it over months, not years. The first step is simply noticing and feeling the difference between the two modes.

Graduation season gives you a perfect laboratory. Watch the speeches. Watch the speakers. Ask yourself: who's performing for the content, and who's performing for the room?

You'll see it everywhere now.

4. Your Monday move

🎯 Your Monday Move

This week, you have one assignment, and it takes less than 20 minutes.

Find an upcoming presentation, meeting, or conversation where you'll be doing substantive talking (e.g., a team update, a project debrief, a check-in with leadership, anything).

Then answer these three questions in writing:

1. What are my first 60 seconds? Write them out. Not your full remarks — just the opening. Is it earning attention, or is it warming up?
2. What are my last 60 seconds? Write them out. Is it a strong landing — your most important point, your clearest ask — or is it a wind-down?
3. Is a callback available? Is there a thread in your opening you can return to at the close? A question you can answer, an image you can return to, a catchy phrase or sound bite you return to at the close?

If you find a callback, use it. It will feel more deliberate than anything else you do that day.

How'd it go? Let me know — I read every response and will send you back a note.