Leadership Presence and the Outfit You Save for Special Occasions
There is an outfit in your wardrobe that makes you feel completely like yourself. You have worn it three times.
It waits at the end of the rail for a room important enough to justify it. Everything else in your week runs on what is appropriate.
Leaders who have been promoted for their judgement tend to hear that as a wardrobe problem. It is not a wardrobe problem. It is a rationing decision, and the same decision is running somewhere far more expensive.
Reading a room is an executive skill. You walk in, take the temperature, work out what this particular table needs from you, and deliver exactly that. You have been rewarded for it for two decades, and you are better at it than most people in the building.
The difficulty is that the same instinct which tells you what a room needs also tells you how much of you the room warrants. Nobody sits down and writes that ranking out. It operates anyway, and it decides which meetings get the whole of you and which ones get the proportionate version.
The rooms that make the ranking happen a handful of times a year. The rooms where a view of what you are capable of holding gets formed are the standing meetings, the corridor conversations, the calls nobody prepared for.
Those are the ones running on the appropriate version, and they are the ones people draw on when a name comes up.
Nothing dramatic follows from this, which is why it can run for years without anyone naming it. The role gets filled and it is not you, and the case against you was never made. The case for you was assembled from a hundred ordinary rooms you had already decided were not worth spending yourself on.
The full article looks at what the outfit in the garment bag has been telling you for years, why the research on enclothed cognition points inward rather than outward, and what to ask about a room before you walk into it.
Read the full article on Substack:
https://sonyachoilarosa.substack.com/p/outfit-you-only-wear-three-times-a-year
