Executive presence in five questions
Sometimes I hesitate to write a post because it feels too simple. This is one of those posts — I sat on it for months.
What follows is my playbook for displaying “executive presence.” Answer the following questions consistently — in a 1:1 with your boss, at a board meeting, presenting to the executive team, wherever — and you’re displaying executive presence.
What happened?
What did we learn?
What are we doing next as a result?
How will we know if it’s working?
When will you hear from me next?
That’s it.
If you’re a new CEO hired to turn around a company, these are the questions you want to answer for your team at your first company-wide all hands. If you’re a product manager reporting back on the launch of a new feature, these are the questions you want to answer at sprint planning or your next monthly business review. If you’re a CFO whose company just missed earnings, these are the questions you want to answer on the earning call.
This sounds easy; it isn’t. But it’s also not complicated. Hard, but simple: Most important stuff in life fits this description. We tend to muck it up because we prefer the excuse of “complicated” to the reality of “just plain hard.”
If you do a good job of answering questions 1 and 2 — what happened and what did we learn? — then what to do next, and how to know if it’s working, becomes much easier. In my experience many people jump to what to do next too quickly without honestly reckoning with the recent past. It probably comes as little surprise that I think an understanding of the past is the best place to figure out where to go next.
That’s it. Next time you need to tell a story about what you’re doing and why, start with these five questions and try not to stray.