The feedback arrives secondhand and one size too vague. Someone in a calibration meeting said you need more executive presence, and by the time it reaches you it has lost whatever specifics it started with. You ask three people what that means and get three different answers. Speak up more. Be more concise. Be more strategic. None of it is something you can do on Monday.
I have been given this feedback myself, and I have watched a hundred other women get handed the exact same vague sentence. The reason it lands so badly is that it arrives as a comment about a person when it is almost always a comment about a sentence.
My translation is already published on this site, and I am keeping it exactly as it reads there. "Work on your executive presence" usually means how you communicate under pressure is undercutting how capable you clearly are. It is a communication gap, not a wardrobe note. That is the separation the rest of this piece draws.
Where the phrase comes from
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is the researcher who put a name on this. Her Center for Talent Innovation surveyed thousands of college educated professionals, senior executives among them, and sorted the answers into three pillars: gravitas, communication, and appearance. That research became her 2014 book, Executive Presence. A decade later she revisited it in Harvard Business Review, arguing that the pandemic, the reckonings around race and gender in the workplace, and work moving onto screens had changed what senior leaders were actually looking for [1]. Same three pillars named, different content inside them by her own account.
I am citing her work here because it is the source of the phrase everyone repeats without defining. I am not teaching her three pillars as my own method, and appearance is not part of what I teach when I talk about presence. My own published position on the phrase is narrower, and it is the one I want you to leave with.
A double bind has no costume that fixes it
The failure mode is reading any version of this advice as a costume. Professionals who do not match the traditional executive archetype get coached to sound more like it, dress more like it, soften or sharpen themselves into it, and it does not hold. MIT Sloan Executive Education names the trap plainly in its own research on women and executive presence: advancement at senior levels depends as much on perception as performance, and women get caught in double binds, expected to be decisive without being called forceful and collaborative without being called soft [2]. A double bind has no performance that solves it.
What it has is a substance floor, work and judgment that a skeptical reader cannot score down. That is where I put my attention, and it is where I would put yours.
What registers as presence is action, not affect
There is research pointing at what that substance actually is. Diane Bergeron and her colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership studied what makes employees feel heard, drawing on 133 qualitative incidents and 187 employee experiments [3]. What registered as listening was action, not attentiveness. People judged whether a leader had heard them by whether anything happened afterward, and that judgment shaped whether they raised the next thing.
Presence at mid-career runs the same direction. The people who read as senior are not the ones performing calm or command. They are the ones whose input turns up in the decision three weeks later.