For a long stretch of my career, I thought I was pretty self-aware. I was in a senior leadership role, the results were good, and by every measure I could see, I was doing well.
Then I completed a leadership 360 assessment.
The feedback said I was arrogant and critical of others, and this was a complete blind spot for me. My first instinct was to explain it away, but the more I sat with it, the more it explained. I had a lot of shallow relationships at work and very few strong ones. It explained why i’d carried a loneliness for years, in my work and in my life. I just never connected it all to how I was showing up.
The 360 connected it for me.
After that, I had to do some serious inner work, and I was happy to do so because I didn’t like what I was putting out there.
I wanted to show up in a way that felt closer to my intentions.
Leadership presence is mostly invisible to us.
I’ve worked with thousands of leaders since then, and I find that 95% of what I do is helping people with their leadership presence. How we show up is sometimes more important than the substance we bring to the table.
But how we show up is usually invisible to us.
There’s a saying I love:
You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
I find that this statement is very true!
Dr. Tasha Eurich made the same point in her book Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think. Her research found that nearly all of us believe we’re self-aware, but only a small fraction actually are.
I think about that book constantly, because it describes exactly where I was before that 360, and where many of us are still today.
Unfortunately, when people realize this and decide to work on their leadership presence, they treat it as a performance. They try to act their way into a different state of being by focusing on things like their posture, vocabulary, or attire. And time and time again, it comes across as awkward. People sense that something’s off, even if they can’t name it. The performance reads as inauthentic because it is.
Presence isn’t a performance.
It is something much deeper.
It comes from confidence and conviction, alignment with our values, and understanding who we are, what we stand for, what we believe in, and what we’re trying to achieve.
When those are clear, you stop trying to be present, and you settle into just being so.
When they aren’t, no amount of technique covers the gap.
Here’s the subtle shift:
Instead of managing how you come across, clarify what you stand for.
- Ask three people you trust how you actually come across. Then listen without explaining or jumping in.
- Write down what you stand for in a few sentences. If that’s hard, you’ve found the work.
- Before your next high-stakes meeting, skip rehearsing how you’ll look and settle on what you believe about the topic.
The inner work I did after that 360 changed my relationships more than anything else in my career, and years later, my own leadership presence is still the thing I work on most. It’s an ongoing challenge for all of us, but it is worth the effort!
Keep going.
