Executive Presence
The value hidden in this otherwise inscrutable phrase
You’ve probably heard of ‘executive presence’.
You might, like me, have initially written it off as BS.
But hidden inside this phrase is an important concept every ambitious person should master:
Finding the right altitude.
Altitude
What it is: deciding what to spend time on and what to ignore. Not just by picking different things, but by considering higher-order things.
Why ‘altitude’?
Decisions in a startup aren’t randomly dispersed. Some topics entirely subsume others. Nearly every decision is downstream of some other decision.
Those with strong executive presence know that time is precious, so if there’s an upstream decision to make that would speed things up, they drive aggressively towards it.
We’ve all suffered through conversations at the wrong altitude.
Your team brainstorms how to source engineers in SF, when the real debate is whether to hire remote. Marketing costs get scrutinized one-by-one, when we should really create a marketing budget. And so on.
Excellent leaders know picking the right altitude maximizes impact.
Reframing around altitude shrinks focus on performative skills typically associated with ‘executive presence’, like diction, gravitas, and body language.
The skills that make the concept seem so BS.
Those skills are incredibly hard to change. Some are a lifetime of habits, taking years to unwind.
But any motivated person can get better at finding the right altitude.
The map
Picking the right altitude means having a map of how company decisions connect.
Which decisions sit on top of others? What is a sub-question of something bigger?
You can’t pick the right altitude if you don’t have this.
So how do you build the map?
It’s obvious but underrated: Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Watch the map get built in real-time. Voraciously consume this information, even if no one is pushing it directly to you.
Every person I’ve ever worked with who had executive presence did this by default, as they got on with their work.
Their habits are always the same.
They’re on as many email lists as they can manage. They’re in all the Slack channels. They read every Notion page.1
Admittedly, this used to be overwhelming; something only autodidact speed-readers could manage.
Now AI can help with a fraction of the effort. Building the map is much more accessible.
Shifting
When you have the map, you have to actually shift the altitude.
Most people shy away from this because they literally don’t know how, and if they try, it somehow feels disruptive.
At Superhuman I saw bad and good versions of real-time altitude shifts.
Bad: we instituted the concept of an ‘altitude check’ in our weekly exec meetings. Anyone could say or type that exact phrase — “altitude check” — during the meeting.
It failed 90% of the time.
The reason is the mechanism didn’t do enough to clarify which decisions had to happen before which others. So it reduced into something as disruptive as it sounds, annoying both the speaker and interrupter.
Good: our President for several years, Paul, pushed altitude shifts all the time.
“Can we zoom out first? Some decisions come before this one”, “This feels too low altitude for the time we have left, can you decide in the team meeting?”, and so on.
He used these specific words, so the whole room could follow — each time revealing the map2 used to drive progress.
It never felt heavy-handed; there was no point-scoring or one-upping.
Just usefully getting everyone to the right level.
Zooming out vs. in
Picking the correct altitude usually means zooming out.
This is because most people in most startups are too close to the problem. Companies end up full of people locally optimizing.
Zooming out combats this.
But the correct altitude is not always the highest one.
Sometimes finding the right altitude requires zooming in: scrutinizing the details when everyone else gives up.
Consider a typical product roadmap, marketing campaign, or ops plan. There are usually devil-in-the-detail nuances, only clear if you deeply understand what the work entails.
Someone has to zoom in and reveal those.
Don’t be the smug smart-ass who constantly asserts ‘the 30,000-foot view’.
Sometimes a zoom-in commands just as much exec presence as a zoom-out.
Beyond meetings
Meetings are where the altitude problem is most visible, and the most swiftly correctable. But being at the wrong altitude exists throughout companies.
Useful leaders don’t just push for the right altitude in meetings.
They do it all the time. It’s on-by-default, in all their work, and all work they influence.
They won’t work on something at the wrong altitude.
And they’ll tirelessly persuade everybody around them to do the same.
Picking the right altitude is the most important part of executive presence.
Anyone can do it, not just executives.
Ironically, if everyone focused on picking the right altitude, we’d need far fewer executives.
It helps enormously if you work somewhere with good startup communication, in particular, high information access
or, at least, his map