What is leadership presence?

You're ready for more than where you're at. Maybe it's a bigger role, a new one after time away, or a business of your own. Leadership presence is how all of you gets there with you.

Free. Fifteen questions, under three minutes, with a score for Identity, Expression and Impact.

Leadership presence, in one paragraph

Leadership presence is leadership that comes from who you are, rather than from a version of yourself you've built for the room. It starts with your identity, it carries through in how you express it, in what you say, how you decide and what you wear, and it lands as impact. When it's working, you walk into the room and focus on the conversation instead of on yourself, whether that room is a board meeting or the first pitch for your own business. Leading costs you less than it used to.

I've been working with this idea for years, and I said it plainly on my podcast in February 2026: "leadership presence is the way forward, and it starts with who you are, not what tactics do I need to deploy."

Where executive presence came from, and where it stops

If you've been told to work on your executive presence, you know the brief. Project authority, dominate the room, wear the power suit. The model grew up in command-and-control hierarchies, where the job was to direct people and keep order, and for a long time it made sense. Much of how it's taught rests on Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research. In a 2012 survey for the Center for Talent Innovation, 67 per cent of the 268 business executives asked said gravitas was the core of executive presence, 28 per cent pointed to communication, and 5 per cent to appearance.¹ Her book Executive Presence (2014) was built on that work.²

What it asks of you is harder to see. It asks you to project confidence when you're uncertain, hold back emotion while you're working through something complex, and look the part even when it doesn't feel like you. As I said on the podcast, "The thing is you can't sustain performance. It's exhausting." For women it comes with a double bind as well: lean into assertiveness and you're called abrasive, lean into warmth and you're dismissed. The old model doesn't account for that.

Hewlett has since updated her own research. She surveyed executives again in 2022 and published what changed in Executive Presence 2.0 (2023) and in Harvard Business Review (2024).^{3, 4} Gravitas still carries the most weight and appearance the least, but inclusiveness, listening to learn and authenticity have all moved up. Authenticity barely registered with the executives she surveyed in 2012, and now leaders are expected to "reveal who they fundamentally are". I think that's a real step. The field is moving towards what I've been saying for years, that this starts with who you are. Where I part ways is the method. The advice is still to work on the traits that are rising, so authenticity becomes one more thing to project, on top of everything else you're already carrying.

Executive presence taught you to perform. Leadership presence lets you stop.

Why the work starts with you, not a new skill

Self-determination theory, from the psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, is about what keeps people motivated.⁷ They describe three needs. Autonomy is the sense that what you do is your own choice. Competence is the sense that you're good at it. Relatedness is the sense that you belong with the people around you. When those needs are met, motivation holds. When they're blocked, it drains.

They also separate where your motivation comes from. Some of it is yours: you value the thing, and you'd choose it again. Some of it is controlled, by pressure from outside or by pressure you now apply to yourself. That second kind has a name, introjection, which they describe as taking in a rule without fully accepting it as your own. It runs on guilt, anxiety or the need to prove your worth, and even though it feels like it comes from you, it still pushes from the outside.

You can see it in the recommendation you tone down before you send it. The read was yours. The edit came from a rule you took in somewhere along the way about how a leader in your position should sound, and you've followed it for so long it feels like good judgement. The same rule can follow you out the door when you leave to start your own thing, and tell you how a business like yours is meant to sound. A new skill sits on top of a rule like that. So the work starts with you: you find the rules you're still following, and you keep only the ones you'd choose again.

Inside out and outside in, at the same time

You're ready for more already, so the work isn't an overhaul. It runs on two tracks at once, and they meet.

The first track runs inside out. You get clear on who you are as a leader and what you want to be known for, and then you let it show, in how you lead and in what you wear. That's the order I've always taught: you do the work on the inside, and then you put the clothes on the outside.

The second track runs outside in. You don't wait until it feels comfortable. You send the recommendation as you first wrote it. You pitch your own business or take the seat in the bigger room before you feel ready for it. The inside catches up with what you've already done. Herminia Ibarra makes this case for leaders in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015)⁸: you act your way into new leadership thinking rather than thinking your way into it, and the view you only get by doing, which she calls "outsight", slowly changes how you think about your work. She made it first for people changing direction, in Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business School Press, 2003).⁹ Her research with people in career transitions found that you don't work out who you want to be next and then move. You find out by testing new work on a small scale and spending time with new people, and you make sense of it as you go.

You'll spend longer on one track than the other at times, depending on what's already clear to you and what you're heading into next. Either way, the two have to meet. When they do, what you know about yourself and what you do in the room line up. It stops being something you work at and becomes habit.

Robert Kegan, the Harvard developmental psychologist, describes the shift both tracks move you along: from a mind shaped by what the people around you expect, to one guided by your own internal compass.^{5, 6}

What changes when it's working

The morning gets simpler. You get dressed more easily, because you're working from a clear sense of who you are as a leader today rather than a question about who you need to be. Preparing for a meeting or a pitch becomes about the context instead of a character you have to rehearse. And in each room you choose which parts of your leadership to bring forward, strategic thinking in one, warmth or analytical precision in another, so the boardroom, the client pitch and the industry dinner all get you, at the volume each one needs.

Which of those would you notice first?

About Sonya

I'm Sonya Choi La Rosa, a Leadership Presence Coach in Sydney. Women who lead work with me at the edge of their next, to bring more of who they are into the rooms that matter, so their presence is as intentional as their leadership.

I spent 25 years in corporate leadership, much of it at executive level in financial services, often the only woman at the table. I'm an ICF-credentialed coach (ACC) and a certified DISC practitioner, and I host the Style & Strategy podcast, where a lot of the thinking on this page started.

More about Sonya

Sources

1. Center for Talent Innovation (now Coqual), Executive Presence: Key Findings, Center for Talent Innovation, 2013. Source
2. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, Harper Business, 2014. Source
3. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Executive Presence 2.0: Leadership in an Age of Inclusion, Harper Business, 2023. Source
4. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, "The New Rules of Executive Presence", Harvard Business Review, January to February 2024. Source
5. Nick Petrie, Future Trends in Leadership Development, Center for Creative Leadership, 2011. Source
6. Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard University Press, 1994; and Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business School Press, 2009. Source
7. Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, "Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being", American Psychologist, 55(1), 68 to 78, 2000. Source
8. Herminia Ibarra, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, 2015 (ISBN 9781422184127). Source; and INSEAD, "Act like a leader, think like a leader", 10 February 2015. Source
9. Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Harvard Business School Press, 2003 (ISBN 1578517788). Source