Leadership is not a performance. It’s how you show up.
Leadership is not a performance. It’s how you show up.
The executive committee meeting had just ended. Papers were being put away, people were already moving on to the next urgent issue, when he said quietly:
“People keep telling me I need to work on my presence. That I don’t embody the role enough. That I need to show more leadership.”
He may have expected me to diagnose the problem. To comment on his voice, his body language, the way he entered a room.
I didn’t.
Because I don’t believe leadership presence is something you manufacture. And because, like many leaders I work with, he already had far more in him than the feedback suggested.
I have heard versions of that comment many times.
Over twenty-five years serving on executive committees, I sat through countless talent reviews as an HR Director where a promising manager was described as “lacking leadership”.
It was an easy label to use.
Much harder to explain what it actually meant.
Harder still to tell the person what they could do differently.
What years around the executive table taught me
The leaders who had the greatest and most lasting impact on their teams were not always the most impressive people in the room.
Some spoke very little.
But when they made a decision, it stood. And when they said something was unacceptable, it did not quietly become acceptable again three weeks later.
I have also seen highly charismatic leaders lose credibility surprisingly quickly. Not because they lacked intelligence or energy, but because they kept postponing a decision, avoided naming a disagreement, or protected someone for too long.
Their teams noticed long before they did.
This has led me to a strong conviction.
Leadership presence is not only about what you show. It comes down to the alignment between three things: what you decide, what you say and what you tolerate.
The first two are visible.
The third is often less so.
Yet it may be the one people watch most closely, because it tells them what really matters.
Leadership rarely breaks in one dramatic moment
More often, it erodes through a series of small compromises.
You stay silent when you should speak. You postpone a decision one more time. You avoid naming the disagreement in the room. You continue to expect something from others that you have quietly stopped expecting from yourself.
None of these looks particularly serious in isolation.
That is what makes them dangerous.
I have seen this play out repeatedly during restructurings, mergers and periods of major change. When uncertainty rises, people look for something steady. If the leader cannot provide that point of reference, the organisation starts to fragment, however sound the strategy may look on paper.
I have seen strong, experienced executive teams lose momentum for a reason everyone could feel but no one named. No one was fully taking their place.
The CEO was waiting for the team’s buy-in.
The team was waiting for the CEO to make the call.
And while everyone waited, the strategy stalled.
Alignment is not the same as consensus.
A strong leadership team must be able to disagree, make decisions and remain collectively accountable afterwards.
Collaboration has never meant avoiding the decision.
Leadership is not added on. It is lived.
For more than ten years, I trained managers and senior leaders in a corporate university.
Leadership programmes can be extremely useful. They provide frameworks, language, tools and shared reference points. But no programme can do the most important part for you: fully stepping into the responsibility that comes with the role.
We often talk about “developing leadership” as if it were another capability to add to an already long list.
I think that misses something important.
Leadership is often less about acquiring something new than about how you carry what is already part of the job: responsibility, authority, doubt, difficult decisions and, sometimes, the loneliness that comes with them.
Most of the leaders I work with already have more resources than they realise.
The work is not always about adding more. Often, it is about recognising what is already there and giving yourself permission to use it.
You do not become a stronger leader by imitating someone else’s idea of leadership.
You become stronger when you stop performing a version of leadership that does not fit who you are.
That takes less charisma than consistency. Less display than judgement. And the ability to hold steady when things become uncomfortable.
Holding steady does not mean becoming harder.
It means being able to see the situation for what it is when you are tired, challenged or temporarily alone in seeing something others are not yet ready to face. And doing so without losing your connection with the people you lead.
Taking your place without playing a role.
So perhaps the most useful question is not:
How can I look more like a leader?
But:
What part of my role am I still not fully stepping into?
For one leader, that may mean making the call.
For another, it may mean listening without using listening as a way of avoiding a decision.
For someone else, it may mean saying no without spending ten minutes justifying it. Or holding the line when everyone around them would prefer to soften the message.
Taking your place is not about becoming harder or more dominant.
It is about no longer disappearing into other people’s expectations.
It also gives the people around you something they need: clarity. Clarity about where you stand. Clarity about what matters. And clarity about what is expected of them.
This work is rarely theoretical. It usually begins with a very real situation. A decision that has been hanging for too long. An executive committee that is polite but not candid. A manager whose behaviour you have stopped challenging. A conversation you are avoiding because you know you will have to take a position.
A place to think before you have to lead
I know the loneliness of senior leadership from the inside.
That is one reason I believe most leaders do not lack courage, talent or vision.
What they sometimes lack is somewhere to think. A space that is both safe and challenging. Somewhere they can think out loud without needing to defend their position.
Where doubt is not immediately mistaken for weakness. Where they can separate fear from loyalty, habit from responsibility. And where they can work through a difficult decision before they have to stand behind it in front of everyone else.
That is how I see my role as a sparring partner.
Not to give leaders a posture to perform.
But to help them step more fully into their own leadership.
With more perspective.
More consistency.
And more freedom.
One question to leave with you
The leader I mentioned at the beginning probably did not need another development plan.
He needed a better question.
This is the one I would ask him today:
What am I tolerating today that is inconsistent with the leader I want to be?
A silence.
A decision you keep postponing.
Something everyone knows but no one says.
A behaviour you no longer challenge.
A direction you no longer fully believe in yourself.
The answer may not come immediately.
But once it does, “leadership presence” suddenly becomes much less abstract.
If you are facing a difficult decision, a governance issue or an executive team dynamic that would benefit from an outside perspective, I offer a confidential 30-minute conversation to clarify what is happening and identify the most useful next step.
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