Leadership Presence Beyond the Boardroom: Why One Room Isn't Enough

There's a kind of leader who has her work presence completely sorted. The boardroom is figured out, the executive meetings run cleanly, she knows what to wear, what to say, how to hold the room. And then she walks into a school event, a client dinner, a networking room she hasn't been in before, and something doesn't quite line up. She doesn't recognise herself in the same way she does at work.

That gap shows up for a lot of women in leadership, and it's almost always read as the wrong problem.

The assumption is that adjusting how she presents across different contexts is code-switching, that calibrating to a room somehow erodes authenticity. So she either locks into one register for every context and feels disconnected in most of them, or adjusts but feels inauthentic about it the whole time.

What she's actually navigating is something different. Not different versions of herself for different rooms. The same self, tuned for the room she's walking into.

The full article on Substack works through it: the difference between code-switching and frequency tuning, why the wardrobe is often where this disconnect first becomes visible, and the practical work of identifying which facets of leadership to bring forward in which rooms.

Read the full article on Substack→ Leadership Presence Beyond the Boardroom: Why One Room Isn't Enough