Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success

You’ve got to reach inside yourself to that place where you believe, you absolutely know, you’re eminently qualified to do the job at hand.

a twenty-nine-year-old father wanted Jobs to know about his undying gratitude—his iPad was transforming the life prospects of his three-year-old autistic son.

So ask for feedback. A sponsor or mentor should be able to give you a good sense of what you need to work on. Then get to work—because a lot is at stake.

“If I am participating in a meeting, my first communication cannot be meek,” she explains. “I do not speak up unless I have a really good point to make or insight to add. I usually wait to speak until I am prepared to make a counterpoint, or ask an insightful question.” The opposite applies, she stresses, if she’s leading the meeting. “I take charg

He then went on to explain that he’d long understood the connection between looking good and looking capable.

Executive presence is not what you do with your presence, it’s also what you do with other people’s presence.”

Sponsors are not mentors. Sponsors are powerful leaders who see potential in you and, provided you give them 110 percent, will go out on a limb to make things happen for you.

I now understand that my early struggles to command attention and respect in lecture halls and faculty meetings did not center on content or delivery (I was a clear, crisp speaker and knew my material cold), but rather centered on the way I presented myself.

In the film The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg, slumped at the deposition table, telegraphs volumes to the attorneys assembled around him. “It’s hard to root for someone who makes you feel as though you don’t warrant his attention,” a young law firm associate told me.