Quote for the Week

"The best leaders have one thing in common: people follow them not because they have to, but because they want to."

- Editor's observation

1. Building executive presence before you're in an executive position

Gif by Turnstone Center

Hi !

Last Tuesday, I did a keynote on executive presence through Cornell's online platform for a few hundred professionals.

One of the first questions I asked was simple:

Is executive presence something you're born with or something you can learn?

Seventy-one percent said it can be learned. By the end of the session, that number had climbed.

I strongly believe executive presence is a skill that can be learned, mastered, and practiced authentically. I teach it, and I've seen the transformation in my students.

Here's what the research, twenty years on Capitol Hill, and every capable leader I've watched up close have taught me:

Executive presence is not a personality trait. It's not charisma, though charismatic people can have it.

It's not seniority, though senior people are expected to project it.

Executive presence is a set of learnable, repeatable behaviors that signal to the people around you that you are someone worth following.

Worth following. That's the core of it.

The word "executive" traces back to a Latin verb meaning "to follow." It's the same root found in "consecutive".

Executive presence is essentially about giving people a reason to come with you — not because the org chart requires it, but because they genuinely want to.

That distinction matters most when you don't yet have formal leadership authority that comes with a title, like when you're an individual contributor who wants to move into leadership, or even when you've just made that transition and still are figuring out who you are in the new role.

Those are the moments when presence is doing the heaviest lifting.

I want to give you 3 things I covered in the keynote — 3 moves that will help you build executive presence before the promotion and then sustain and deepen it afterwards.

Let's dig in.

2. The C.A.R.E. Model

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LESSON 1: Build with the CARE. Model — Before you have the title

The Principle

Executive presence is built through consistent human-to-human behaviors, not positional authority. The framework I use — and teach — organizes those behaviors into four components: Curiosity, Authenticity, Reciprocity, and Empathy (CARE).

Why it Works

Each element of the CARE model maps directly onto what organizational psychologists call relational credibility — the trust that accrues not from expertise alone, but from how someone makes others feel in sustained interactions.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School has spent decades documenting how psychological safety — the environment where people feel seen, heard, and respected — is the single strongest predictor of team performance.

The CARE model is, in practice, a repeatable method for creating psychological safety one interaction at a time. Leaders who do this consistently are trusted faster, followed more willingly, and recover from mistakes more quickly.

Example

During the keynote, I referenced Aron Ain, the former CEO of Kronos — a billion-dollar software company that has been consistently recognized as one of the best places to work in America.

Ain didn't achieve that through exceptional technical vision alone. He ate in the same cafeteria as his employees. He made condolence calls when team members lost a loved one. He walked the floor asking people what they were working on — genuinely curious, not performing curiosity.

Small gestures, repeated consistently. That's CARE in practice at the executive level. But none of those behaviors require a CEO title. You can start doing all of them today.

Your Application

Pick one component of CARE to focus on this week:

Curiosity — In your next team interaction, ask one question you genuinely don't know the answer to. Not a rhetorical question. A real one. Then listen without planning your response.

Authenticity — The next time you don't know something, say so. Explicitly. "I'm not sure — let me find out" is more credible than a hedged non-answer.

Reciprocity — Find one colleague who is overloaded. Offer to take one specific thing off their plate. Name the thing. Don't make them ask.

Empathy — When someone brings you a problem, acknowledge what it costs them before you move to the solution. One sentence. "That sounds genuinely frustrating" goes further than most people expect.

You don't have to do all four at once. Pick the first element that feels most comfortable to you and start with it. After you've incorporated it into your interactions so it feels like a natural part of relating to others at work, move to the next one, following the same process until you've completed all 4 of the CARE components.

LESSON 2: Humanity Over Hierarchy — The mindset shift most promotions require

The Principle

The most common mistake newly promoted leaders make is believing that their title has changed who they are to their people. It hasn't. What it has changed is what their people need from them — and that is more connection, not less.

Why it works

Leadership researchers James Kouzes and Barry Posner have tracked what followers want from their leaders across decades of global data.

The answer has been remarkably consistent: credibility, inspiration, and — above almost everything else — the sense that the leader sees them as individuals, not as subordinates.

When leaders pull back behind the authority of their position, they trigger what social psychologists call status threat in the people around them: a subtle but real sense that proximity to the leader is now dangerous rather than safe. The result is a team that withholds ideas, avoids risk, and performs to the floor of expectations rather than the ceiling.

Example

When I was a chief of staff in the U.S. Senate, we had a practice in final-round interviews that most candidates never knew about.

After the interview ended, we would call in the receptionist — the person who had sat with the candidate in the front room — and ask a simple question: How did they treat you? Were they warm? Impatient? Were they respectful towards you?

That input mattered.

Because if someone couldn't treat a receptionist with genuine respect, they weren't going to treat a junior staffer that way either. And in a Senate office, how you treat people at every level of the hierarchy is who you are. The title doesn't change that.

Your application

This week, identify one person in your organization who is several levels below your peer group — an administrative professional, a coordinator, a newer team member — and have one genuine conversation with them. Not to network. Not to manage down. Just to ask what they're working on and actually listen to the answer.

Notice how they respond. Notice how you feel. That is executive presence in its most fundamental form: choosing human-to-human connection over hierarchy.

LESSON 3: Don't Dig a Well When You're Thirsty — Start Now

The Principle

Executive presence can't be constructed in a crisis. It needs to be built in the quiet periods — the ordinary days, the unremarkable meetings, the interactions that don't seem to matter — so when you need it, the reservoir is already full.

Why It Works

Social psychologist Tali Sharot's research on influence and the brain documents what she calls the "emotional memory advantage": our brains preferentially encode and retrieve memories that are attached to emotion.

Every interaction you have with a colleague or supervisor leaves an emotional residue, positive or negative, that accumulates over time into what they believe about you.

This accumulated belief is what you will draw on in the moments that count: the high-stakes presentation, the reorg, the crisis that requires people to follow you somewhere uncomfortable. You can't conjure up that reservoir on demand. You gradually make deposits into it.

Example

I brought this up in the keynote because I see it fail in exactly the same way, again and again.

A leader faces a crisis, it could be a funding cut, a team conflict, a policy reversal, and suddenly needs their team to go above and beyond. Stay late, work weekends, hold through the uncertainty.

The team's response depends almost on all that's happened in the months (and potentially years) before the crisis.

If the leader has built genuine trust through small acts of CARE, through treating people as humans rather than org-chart boxes, through being available and curious and real, the team draws on that trust when asked.

If the leader spent that time behind closed doors, largely being transactional, not present, the ask during the crisis falls flat.

The relationship just isn't there. The well is empty.

Your Application

Before your next high-stakes moment arrives, do an honest audit:

Name 3 people in your organization whose support you would need in a crisis. These are the people whose trust matters most.

When was the last time you had a genuine conversation with each of them — not about a task, not in a meeting, but one-on-one and human? If you can't remember, that's your answer.

Put one outreach on your calendar this week — a coffee, a walk, a brief check-in. Not a performance review. Not a project update. Just a conversation. Human-to-human. Authentic.

The well gets dug in moments like that one. Not in the crisis. Now.

3. My take

Photo by mali maeder

I want to be honest about what the CARE model is — and what it isn't.

It is not a performance.

It is not a set of techniques you deploy when you want something and then put away when you don't.

The moment someone senses that your curiosity is ornamental, that your empathy is calculated, that your reciprocity is transactional, the entire framework collapses.

And it collapses harder than if you'd never tried at all, because now you've added inauthenticity to your ledger.

The model only works when the underlying intention is real.

The good news is that for most of the people I work with, the intention is real. Most scientists, engineers, and policy professionals I've coached genuinely care about the people they work with.

They're not manipulative. They're just not used to expressing care in ways that other people can actually receive and recognize. That is a very different problem, and a much more solvable one.

What I watched over 20 years on Capitol Hill and in coaching is leaders who rise and stay risen are not always the smartest, or the most credentialed, or the most strategically brilliant.

They are, almost without exception, the people who made the people around them feel like they mattered. That is executive presence. It is ethical by design, because it requires you to mean it.

You already have the raw material. These lessons are just the structure.

4. Your Monday move

🎯 Your Monday Move

This week's move is a 15-minute audit that will tell you exactly where to focus your executive presence energy.

Here's what to do:

Write down the name of someone you want to impress or influence in the next 60 days — a supervisor, a committee, a funder, a hiring panel.

Rate yourself honestly, 1-5, on each of the four CARE components as that person experiences you: How curious do I come across? How authentic? How reciprocal? How empathetic? Don't rate yourself as you intend to be. Rate yourself as they likely perceive you.

Your lowest score is your Monday Move. Pick one action from the corresponding "Your Application" section above and put it on your calendar for this week.

That's it. No overhaul required. One honest self-assessment, one action, one week.

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