In Brief: Executive presence is the quality that determines whether senior leaders command rooms, earn trust, and move organizations — and it can be developed. Enable Leaders works with executives who want to build presence as a strategic leadership competency, not just a communication style. Our coaches specialize in the habits, mindsets, and practices that create lasting influence at the highest levels.
What Actually Builds Executive Presence? Six Leaders Share the Habit That Changed Everything
Jonathan Dunnett is the CEO of Enable Leaders, a curated executive coach matching service. With decades of experience in leadership and leadership development, he’s passionate about helping emerging and senior leaders find the right executive coach for them, all at no cost for the match.
Executive presence is one of those phrases that gets used constantly in leadership development circles and defined almost never. Ask ten coaches what it means and you’ll get ten answers — all of them partially right.
So we asked instead: what’s the one habit or practice that actually moved the needle for you?
We spoke with six leaders whose careers span financial services, business strategy, organizational design, higher education, and the C-suite. Their answers don’t converge on a formula. But taken together, they reveal something more useful than a checklist: a picture of presence as something you build from the inside out — and from the outside in.
Want to skip the algorithm and embrace human? Enable Leaders matches leaders with vetted coaches — curated, free, and fast.
Start With the Signals You’re Already Sending: Amy Radin
Amy Radin has held some of the most demanding executive roles in financial services — one of the world’s first Chief Innovation Officers at Citi, Chief Marketing Officer at AXA, and senior product and growth leadership at American Express. As a Keynote Speaker and Strategic Advisor, she now helps organizations navigate change. Her take on executive presence starts with the basics: and doesn’t apologize for it.
On a basic, tactical level, posture, eye contact — being aware of body language — and personal appearance matter,” she says, adding with characteristic directness: “In my opinion, this matters more for women who are still judged by a higher standard.”
Executive presence writing tends to glide past the reality that the standards aren’t uniform: that some people in the room are being evaluated on dimensions others never have to think about.
But Amy doesn’t stop at the physical layer. The more meaningful practice, she says, is learning to ask what author Warren Berger calls “beautiful questions”: genuine, substantive questions that engage other executives rather than positioning yourself against them.
This shows you are listening, genuinely curious about your colleagues’ perspectives, and engaged with the broader business agenda, not just your own,” she says.
Trying to prove you’re the smartest person in the room is a presence killer. It signals insecurity, narrows the conversation, and puts colleagues on the defensive. A well-placed question does the opposite: it expands the room, signals confidence, and keeps the focus on what matters.
The Pause Before the Room: Dr. Phillip Ellis
Dr. Phillip Ellis, who teaches in the Chief Learning Officer program at the University of Pennsylvania, starts with something that happens before he walks through the door.
“The practice that’s shaped my presence more than any other isn’t something I do in the room,” he says. “It’s something I do before I walk in. I sit, I breathe, and I settle my own nervous system before I ask anyone else to follow me anywhere.”
Ellis draws on yoga philosophy to frame this — a tradition he describes as making a radical claim: that you can consciously govern what most people leave on autopilot, from heart rate to breath to the physical experience of fear.
“The whole tradition points at one idea: outer command starts with inner mastery,” he says.
That reframe changed how Ellis thinks about presence entirely. Where most leaders treat it as something projected outward — volume, polish, certainty — Ellis treats it as something regulated inward. And when he stands in front of executives, his goal isn’t to be the loudest signal in the room. It’s to be the steadiest one.
There’s research behind this. The concept of co-regulation, rooted in Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, suggests that people naturally attune to the calmest nervous system present. In practice, that settledness doesn’t just signal confidence — it creates space for others to think, disagree, and engage without defensiveness.
“You don’t move executives by pushing harder,” Ellis says. “You move them by staying grounded enough that they drop their guard and lean in.”
The Structural Pause: Tammie Calys
Tammie Calys, Founder and Organizational Architect at NextLvlMe, came to executive presence through a different kind of discomfort: the urge to fix things that weren’t hers to fix.
“Early in my career, I mistook executive presence for performative charisma: having the fastest answer or the loudest voice,” she says. “The practice that completely transformed my own presence was learning to deploy the ‘Structural Pause.’”
When a high-stakes boardroom gets tense or a process stalls, Calys’ instinct used to be to rush in, absorb the anxiety, and immediately resolve the friction for everyone else. Now she lets the silence hang. She uses that pause to observe the room objectively and reframe what’s actually going on.
“I’ve found that when I can look at a stalled initiative and calmly say, ‘This isn’t a failure of people; this is an architectural mismatch,’ it instantly grounds the energy of the room,” she says.
Reframing a people problem as a systems problem doesn’t just change the diagnosis, it changes the emotional temperature of the conversation. It gives the room permission to stop defending and start solving.
“For me, true presence isn’t about performing,” Calys says. “It is about staying centered enough to diagnose the foundation.”
Finding the Brilliance in Opposition: Peter Laughter
Keynote Speaker and experienced CEO Peter Laughter leads with an assumption most executives resist: that his view is incomplete.
“One practice that has served me well is the assumption that I have a limited view and need to tap into the insights and creativity of my team in order to understand the complexity of the current age,” he says.
That’s a principle easy to endorse in theory and hard to practice in the moment, especially when you’re convinced you’re right. Which is precisely when Laughter applies it most deliberately.
“This is especially critical when I think I am right in the face of someone opposed to my idea,” he says. “The approach is to try and find the brilliance behind their opposing point of view.”
The person pushing back probably sees something you don’t. Presence, in Laughter’s model, isn’t about projecting certainty, it’s about being secure enough to stay curious when challenged. That security is what separates executives who command rooms from those who merely control them.
Headline Plus Three: Kevin Ertell
Founder and CEO of Mistere Advisory and former Nike Global VP Kevin Ertell’s contribution is the most immediately actionable of the group: a structure so simple it fits in a sentence:
I’d say it’s learning to speak in what I call ‘headline plus three,’” he says. “When I’m talking to other executives, I try to get really clear on what my main point is, so clear that it could be a newspaper headline, and then I provide three supporting points to bolster that headline. Then I stop talking and start listening. That’s it.”
The discipline embedded in this is easy to underestimate (if you know, you know!). Getting to a headline-sharp main point requires knowing what you actually think, not just what you know. The three supporting points force prioritization. And stopping there, before the fourth point and the caveat and the background context, is where most executives break down.
What makes this a presence practice rather than just a communication tip is the last line: then I stop talking and start listening. The structure isn’t just about clarity, it’s about creating space for others. Presence isn’t only what you project; it’s what you make room for.
Listening as Leadership: Jonathan Becher
San Jose Sharks President Jonathan Becher has given keynotes in front of thousands. But his most impactful leadership habit isn’t about what he says, it’s about what he doesn’t.
The habit which has had the biggest impact on my career is consistent, authentic listening,” he says. “Early on in my career, I focused on preparing talking points, making me sound rehearsed and disconnected in meetings. Over time, I learned to listen first, then speak only when I had a clear, thoughtful response that added to the discussion.”
That shift became more important, not less, as Becher moved into senior roles. At the executive level, speaking first has a specific cost: it signals to the people around you that their perspective is secondary (or unnecessary).
“If I talk first, it dissuades those who report to me from responding,” he says. “When team members feel seen, heard, and valued, they are more willing to share ideas and take risks.”
Becher also credits a willingness to stay authentic under pressure: to talk about his own experiences and values rather than adopting a version of leadership that didn’t fit. It started small: honest comments in smaller groups, then larger rooms, then stages. Presence, in his experience, is built through accumulation, not transformation.
What Ties These Together
Six distinct practices. Six different entry points. But read together, a thread emerges.
None of these leaders built presence by performing harder. Radin mastered the signals she was already sending and learned to ask questions that opened the room rather than closing it. Ellis settled his nervous system before entering the door. Calys learned to let silence do the diagnostic work. Laughter stays genuinely curious when he’s most tempted to push. Ertell sharpened his ideas to a headline and then got out of the way. Becher stopped preparing his talking points and started actually listening.
In each case, the shift was from output to regulation: from projecting something at the room, to creating conditions the room could respond to.
That’s a different model than executive presence as polish. It’s presence as influence infrastructure: the ability to make a room feel safe enough to think, honest enough to surface the real problem, and calm enough to move.
Working with a Coach Who Gets This
The gap between knowing this and practicing it is where most leaders get stuck. It’s easy to nod at “listen more” or “stay grounded.” It’s harder to know what’s actually getting in the way for you specifically — and to change it in environments where the stakes are real.
That’s the kind of work executive coaches do at their best. At Enable Leaders, we match senior leaders with coaches who specialize in exactly this terrain — not presence as performance, but presence as a leadership competency that can be developed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is executive presence?
Executive presence is a leader’s ability to command trust, project confidence, and influence others — particularly in high-stakes situations. It encompasses how you communicate, how you carry yourself under pressure, and how others experience your leadership in the room.
Can executive presence be learned?
Yes. While some aspects feel natural to certain leaders, executive presence is a developable skill. The habits that build it — structured communication, active listening, emotional regulation, and intellectual humility — can all be coached and practiced deliberately.
How do I develop executive presence?
The most effective path is working with a coach who can identify what’s specifically getting in your way. Common starting points include how you structure your communication, how you show up physically in the room, and how you manage your own state under pressure. Enable Leaders matches senior leaders with coaches who specialize in exactly this work.