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Leadership Presence, by B. Halpern and K. Lubar, 2003
Think of a leader that you worked for who really inspired you, someone who really made things happen, someone you admired and perhaps even try to emulate. Now think of a leader who, in your view, just did not have what it takes. Holding those two in your mind, reflect for a moment on what you notice about the differences between them. What strikes you most strongly? What are the most telling differences?
My experience when I ask people this question is that, more often than not, the key difference is about the ability to effortlessly command the attention of others, an ability that we most usually call presence or gravitas. All great leaders have it in some form or another, most poor leaders are notable for their lack of it.
Time and time again I work with intelligent and capable managers who are called upon to lead others, but who lack that necessary spark and expressiveness to genuinely connect with and enthuse them. Intensive coaching in the necessary skills and behaviours makes a huge difference to their leadership abilities and their feelings of self worth. It is surprising, therefore, how little this subject has been treated to date in “serious” management literature, until, that is, the appearance of this book.
The authors of Leadership Presence are both actresses who have spent 10 years coaching, consulting and training managers and senior executives. Their work combines leadership theory, psychology and philosophy with theatre skills. The in depth understanding and application of theatre skills and techniques is, however, what makes this book special. Indeed, they define presence as: “What actors have that leaders need”, that is, “The ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire them towards a desired goal”.
At first sight the book gives the appearance of being just another leadership self help book. This is reinforced by the use of the standard and predictable device of numbered prescriptions, three in each section, that the novice reader is expected to follow. However, despite its unpromising format, this book is the only one I know of to pull together such a richness of insights and practical guidelines within one volume. This book is based on solid and proven experience.
The first chapter present an overall model of Leadership Presence, which they call the P.R.E.S. model, and each subsequent chapters is devoted to one of the eight elements of the model. P.R.E.S. stands for: being present, reaching out, expressiveness and self knowledge. Each of these elements is then broken down into interior and exterior aspects, which thereby gives us our eight chapter titles:
o Being present in the moment
o Being present in action – flexibility
o Reaching out and empathy
o Reaching out and making connections
o Emotion drives expressiveness
o Expressiveness using voice, body and story
o Self-knowing, self-reflection and explicit values
o Self knowing and authenticity
At the end of each chapter are a set of invaluable practices and exercises, mostly taken from theatre skills training, which turn the book into a rich manual and toolkit of tried and tested techniques.
Being present in the moment
This is about full and visceral attention to what is going on right now. At its best this is a non-verbal sensing or knowing what is happening here and now. Being present means feeling fully alive, exquisitely aware of being in the moment, with a sense of connection, spontaneity and freedom. A young child, for example, often seems to inhabit a world of boundless awareness and enthusiasm, and has an aliveness and spontaneity that is too often lost in adulthood. Blockage of awareness often manifests itself as lack of energy and vitality, or rigidity of responsiveness.
According to the authors, lack of presence is often caused by fear: fear of failure, fear of what others will think or fear of being hurt. This leads to a fight or flight response accompanied, for most of us, with the constant self talk of our inner critic. Fear, however, is not the real problem. The experience of fear connects us to the moment, it is an often overpowering but, thankfully, transitory emotion. What causes us problems are the thoughts that attach to the fear and take us into ourselves. The advice is rather to concentrate on being present with the physical sensation of fear, treating it as a friend who is trying to take care of us.
The three guidelines in this section are:
o Focus on the physical
o Change your perspective
o Let thoughts go, let the feelings be.
To illustrate the importance of focussing on physical sensations as a way of grounding yourself, they tell the story of Laurence Olivier dealing with stage-fright by focussing on the sensations in his feet. What most actors and sportsmen know, but few managers are aware of, is that a conscious awareness of the physical sensations in the whole of your body, when combined with diaphragmatic breathing, is a highly effective way of increasing your presence and state of calmness. Body scan and breathing exercises used by actors are provided at the end of the chapter.
Changing your perspective is an example of the NLP technique of reframing. Pure experience has no meaning. It just is. We give it meaning according to our beliefs, values and preoccupations. Reframing is changing the way we perceive an event and so changing the meaning. When the meaning changes, responses and behaviours will also change. Most important here is how we respond to that ever present inner critic, which is most usually an amalgam of voices from our past. Suggestions here include humour (give your inner critic a silly voice), focusing on your intention and focusing on others.
Letting thoughts go and feelings be is the eastern art of acceptance. The book tells the story of the Buddhist saint Milarepa who invited her demons in for tea. Negative thoughts are only damaging if we hang on to them rather than let them pass through us. Advice like: “Just experience the experience” and “what’s going on is going on” may seem to come from the Woodstock generation, but it works.
Associated with the self talk there is always a related feeling, so focus on that feeling instead, but with detached curiosity. Where in the body is it? Just notice it and continue to breathe slowly, diaphragmatically and deeply. It is a skill that actors learned decades ago.
Being present in action – flexibility
A lot of the ideas in this section are based on theatrical improvisation techniques. For those of you that wish to study this fascinating and highly pertinent field further, I would also highly recommend “Impro”, by Keith Johnstone.
The three guidelines in this action are:
o Be open to unexpected outcomes – “Yes … and”
o Adapt your role to the reality
o Be generous towards others
The skill of improvisation is grounded in the freedom that comes from being present. The book tells the story of an audience been distracted by a leaky roof that was creating a puddle on the stage. The situation was defused by an actor spontaneously catching a drop on his palm and licking his hand. With this simple unscripted action, he pulled the audiences attention back to the play by acknowledging and incorporating what was distracting them.
Flexibility is the willingness and ability to move and adapt freely as circumstances prescribe, right now. It requires inventiveness, quickness of attention and the incorporation of new ideas from moment to moment. The rules of improvisation are that you work with a completely clear mind, accept whatever is offered by others and build on it with a “yes … and” logic.
Adaptability means being open to unexpected outcomes and absorbing information without preconception or bias. Leaders who demand unnecessarily rigid outcomes often prevent something better from emerging.
Finally, a spirit of generosity towards others is what animates improvisation. Working on the edge in such a state of interdependence with others demands it. So does leadership when it is at its best.
Reaching out and empathy
Towards the end of King Lear, the blinded Gloucester tells Lear that he sees the truth “feelingly”. Quoting this story, the authors comment: “We don’t know a better definition of empathy.”
The advice given here is:
o Know what makes your people tick
o Make the links to your own feelings
o You can empathise with anyone
The simple qualities of being approachable, listening carefully, and genuinely wanting to know what people have to say go a long way here.
Experienced and effective leaders take the trouble to find out the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others and to know what they care about. Many executives are locked up in their own feelings or, worse, leave them at home; the best, however, are able to connect the feelings of others with their own feelings and interior life.
This is simple enough advice for those you like and can relate to, the real trick though is to find and relate to the humanity of the people you dislike or are in conflict with.
Reaching out and making connections
Empathy is not just about passive understanding, it is also about reaching out to others and shining the spotlight on them in small day to day ways. If the ideas in this section interest you, another good book on this subject is: “Living Leadership”, by Binney, Wilke and Williams.
This chapter recommends:
o Listening to build relationships
o Acknowledging the person
o Sharing yourself
Quite simply, you have to fully connect with people before you can lead them. Building effective working relationships comes before running operations or shaping the future. It is the necessary foundation for delivering results.
Leaders are told to listen in the moment to build up relationships. Followers will not reach out to leaders because of their role and position, so the energy and the responsibility needs to run in the other direction. Active and engaged listening involves listening for subtext, for what moved and touched you, and paying attention to feelings, values and strengths. It also means actively making links and connections.
Hearing is not enough, even if this is at a deep level, the other needs to know that they have been fully heard. The leader needs to express what he / she has heard in and beneath the words. Once again, this must cover feelings, values and strengths.
Equally, if personal information only goes one way, however well meant, it feels like violation. In exploring what moves and touches others, the leader must also share this with regard to him / herself.
Emotion drives expressiveness
Leaders need to find and express their passionate purpose. Great leaders move us, their influence works through the emotions. By expressing excitement, and other emotions they are feeling in the moment, they considerably raise the level of energy and sense of purpose.
In highlighting the link between excitement, commitment and results, the authors are very critical of the widespread notion of the effective leader as an aloof authority. The cool, calm, dispassionate leader, carefully reasoning through hard data, always in control, is more likely to sap than to generate energy.
To put it simply, as most of us are probably only too aware if we think about it for a moment, the leader’s mood matters desperately. The emotional maturity of the leader is critical, in that they must positively engage people’s emotions. Emotions are intimately wrapped around every significant human activity. Without emotion, it is not worth doing.
Continuing to give their counsel in threes, the authors recommend:
o Generating excitement by expressing emotion
o Expressing only authentic emotions
o Investing passionate purpose into your words and actions
For most of us, it feels odd to project ourselves with energy and passion in a work setting. Initially, therefore, we must be prepared to move outside our comfort-zone.
Although they are adamant that it is the expression of emotions that deepen bonds, the authors are careful to warn against the expression of destructive emotions. Your moods have an enormous impact on those you lead, for better and for worse. The expression of appropriate emotions deepens bonds, but the key word here is appropriate.
The emotions you express must be authentic, it is about expressing the feelings you are feeling in the moment, or digging to find within you the emotion you are looking to express. Good actors always make sure that they can personally feel the emotions they are trying to portray. As the great Stanislavski constantly repeated, you have to experience the emotions you are acting, they must be real.
Investing passionate purpose in your words and actions means that you also need a vision and a clear sense of direction. You then communicate this with specific, emotive verbs, not with cold report-speak.
Expressiveness using voice, body and story
Here we really do move fully into the actor’s territory. The voice and body work, along with the story telling techniques set out in this chapter, may seem to be the least relevant to the role of a hard nosed business leader. In our experience, however, the difference that a little studious attention and practice of these techniques can give is remarkable. Margaret Thatcher is a long way from most people’s archetype of a “luvvy”, but one of the first things she did on becoming Prime Minister was to hire a voice coach and to meticulously follow their advice. The change to her authority was there for all to see.
With this in mind, the advice here is:
o Tell stories to unleash your expressiveness
o Use your voice and body congruently
o Conquer your fear of over expressiveness
Respected leaders paint verbal pictures of a better future. They do not do this in a cold and logical manner, they connect with their audience through stories.
A good actor, like a good leader, fills the space when they walk into a room. Their presence is imposing. This is to do with how they move around and hold themselves. They are grounded, solid and centred. As they walk around the room they imagine themselves taking up space, making solid eye contact and connecting with all those around them.
Vocal variety is important. This includes using a lower pitch to convey gravitas and confidence, and letting your voice drop rather than rise at the end of sentences. Increased volume, variation in pitch and speed, combined with a slower overall delivery will engage people’s attention, as will the use of pauses. All of this is intimately linked to the advice on breathing in an earlier section. A piece of advice to be used with caution is to practice adding warmth to your voice by yawning whilst talking, as this opens up the soft palate, thereby improving the quality of your voice. This should be done in privacy, as the drawbacks of yawning whilst trying to convey enthusiasm are obvious.
Finally, you need to be your normal self, but more so. You need to turn up the volume, the colour and the contrast dials from 3 to 7. Letting go of your habitual patterns and levels of expression will feel odd at first, so you need to stick with it.
Self-knowing, self-reflection and explicit values
Moving from the earlier quoted King Lear to Hamlet, Polonius oft quoted line: “To thine own self be true” perfectly expresses the sentiment of this and the following section.
Self knowledge, it is argued, is achieved through personal reflection combined with the seeking and open acceptance of feedback.
This requires:
o Perusing some form of regular reflection
o Writing down your personal leadership values
o Expressing your leadership values through words and deeds
Leaders need to be strongly values led. Many of us have not taken the time to think seriously and deeply about what is important to us or why we do what we do, but it is our values that give us meaning and purpose. Values act as both permissions and prohibitions on how we act. Being clear about what they are, and guided by them, projects a sense of consistency and congruency.
Having identified explicit values, you then need to actively use them to make both large and small choices. Clarifying your values requires you to reflect on your own experiences, the choices you have made and the difficulties you have faced and overcome. If you take the time and trouble to listen to it, when you act contrary to your values there is normally a little voice at the back of your mind telling you so. Although we have counselled the silencing of your inner critic, this is one friend you should pay attention to.
In the cut and thrust of corporate life, reflection can be difficult. The ability to find such time is, however, frequently cited as a key distinguishing factor of a good leader. Advice given in the book includes: take notes, find private time or take a retreat, study others and clear the mind.
Self knowing and change
People feel you are authentic when they know what you are about, they see that you act congruently with what you say, you admit mistakes in context and you do not try to be something you are not. In other words, you are not faking it, you are willing to learn from difficult challenges and you are comfortable in your own skin.
The advice in this section is:
o Accept yourself
o Live your values
o Create an authentic connection to your work
Self acceptance is closely linked to the idea of the paradoxical theory of change (Beisser 1970), according to which we become more effective through fully becoming and accepting what we are, not through trying to become what we are not. You have all the resources you need, provided you can stop getting in your own way.
The book ends with the advice that leadership is about generosity and forgetting yourself. Being more interested in the “we” than the “me”.
| Related stories: |
 | New leaders: We don’t need another hero | | Power Delegating | | The power of attraction | | Political Skills for Business Leaders | | Goal setting for personal and business success | | Success | | Leadership with impact | | Leading in a complex and changing world | | Getting to yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, 1981 | | Learning for peak performance | | Good to great: Why some companies make the leap and others don't, by Jim Collins, Random House, 2001 | | Change, Watzlawick et al, W. W. Norton and Company, 1974 | | The Leadership Pipeline, By R. Charan, S. Drotter and J. Noel, Josey-Bass, 2001 | | Relationship Marketing, by Regis McKenna, Century Hutchinson, 1992 | | Simply Strategy: The shortest route to the best strategy, by R Koch and P Nieuwenhuizen, Prentice Hall, 2006 | | Living Leadership: A practical guide for ordinary heroes, by G Binney, G Wilke and C Williams, FT Prentice Hall, 2005 |
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