Why Executive Presence Is More Than Charisma
Charisma can get you noticed. It may even help you get selected.
But executive presence has to survive what happens next.
The difficult meeting. The unexpected challenge. The decision made with incomplete information. The moment somebody senior says:
“I’m not convinced.”
A compelling leader can command attention in a room and still leave people questioning their judgement. Another may be quieter and less obviously charismatic, yet become the person others look to when the stakes rise.
That is why charisma and executive presence are not the same thing.
Charisma can be a real leadership asset. It can help a leader communicate a compelling message, create emotional engagement and mobilise people around an idea.
But executive presence is broader.
It is less about whether people notice you and more about what they infer about your leadership once they do.
Do they trust your judgement?
Can you make complexity clearer?
Do you remain credible when challenged?
Can you read the people and politics around a decision?
Are your words and behaviour congruent over time?
For leaders who have been told they need “more presence”, the distinction matters. If the development goal is framed simply as becoming more charismatic, more extroverted or more polished, the wrong problem may be getting solved.
Why charisma and executive presence get confused
In everyday language, charisma often means personal magnetism. We think of someone engaging, confident and compelling who can hold attention easily.
Organisational psychology has tried to define it more precisely.
Antonakis and colleagues describe charisma as values-based, symbolic and emotion-laden leader signalling. In practice, charismatic behaviours can include using stories and metaphors, expressing moral conviction, setting ambitious goals, making contrasts and communicating confidence that those goals can be achieved.
There is good reason not to dismiss this as surface-level theatre.
Charismatic communication can matter.
A meta-analysis by Banks and colleagues examined 76 independent studies involving more than 36,000 people. Dimensions of charismatic leadership were associated with outcomes including supervisor-rated task performance, citizenship behaviour and group or organisational performance, although the authors also identified important conceptual and methodological limitations in the evidence base.
Experimental work by Antonakis, Fenley and Liechti also suggests that at least some charismatic communication behaviours can be developed. In field and laboratory studies, training changed ratings of leader charisma and related leadership perceptions.
So the argument is not that charisma is superficial, manipulative or irrelevant.
The argument is narrower and more useful:
Charisma is one possible contributor to how a leader is experienced. It is not a complete account of executive presence.
Why charisma can matter at the doorway
There is another reason charisma and executive presence become entangled.
Selection and promotion depend partly on how other people interpret observable signals.
Before someone has extensive evidence of your leadership, they have to make judgements from what they can see and hear.
Recent research makes this particularly interesting.
Wilms, Oostrom and van Garderen examined charisma signalling in female leader selection across three preregistered experiments involving 2,408 participants. Charisma signalling generally increased perceptions of hirability, although the effect was not statistically significant in one of the three studies. Effects on perceived competence and warmth were more mixed.
This does not show that charisma reliably gets people promoted. It was experimental research into selection perceptions in a particular context.
But it demonstrates something important:
charismatic signals can influence judgements about who appears suitable for leadership.
Older research on overconfidence points in a similar direction.
Across five studies, Ronay and colleagues found that overconfidence increased perceived leadership suitability. Their first study involved HR consultants assessing applicants for a leadership position, where overconfidence positively predicted hiring recommendations. Another experiment found that greater confidence increased perceived leadership potential even when competence was manipulated separately.
Confidence is not the same as charisma.
Neither is the same as executive presence.
But together these findings expose an important problem in leadership selection:
The qualities that make somebody look leader-like can influence selection before we have strong evidence of how well they will actually lead.
Confidence is a signal. It is not proof.
Charisma is a signal. It is not proof either.
Research on CEO selection adds another layer.
Kaplan and Sørensen analysed 2,603 executive assessments. Among CEO candidates already being considered, greater general ability and interpersonal skills were associated with being hired. The authors argued that boards may overweight interpersonal capabilities relative to some characteristics associated with subsequent performance.
The point is not that interpersonal skill is unimportant.
It is that selection and effectiveness are different psychological and organisational questions.
Looking like a leader is not the same as leading effectively
That distinction is well established in leadership research.
A major 2024 review by Gardner and colleagues describes leadership emergence as a dynamic process through which some individuals come to be seen as leaders by others.
Crucially, the authors argue that emergence depends not simply on fixed individual characteristics but on the people involved, their interactions and the context in which leadership develops.
This distinction matters enormously for executive presence.
Meta-analytic research has consistently found extraversion to be associated with leadership.
Judge and colleagues reviewed 73 samples and 222 correlations and found extraversion to be the most consistent Big Five correlate of leadership across the studies they analysed.
Research specifically examining who emerges as a leader has similarly found advantages for characteristics including extraversion in situations where groups are deciding, explicitly or implicitly, who looks like a leader.
That can create an advantage for people whose leadership is easy to notice.
But it does not follow that more extraversion always produces better leadership.
Grant, Gino and Hofmann found that the effectiveness of more extraverted versus less extraverted leadership depended partly on the people being led.
In their studies, extraverted leaders performed better with relatively passive employees, while less extraverted leaders achieved better outcomes with proactive employees. One explanation was that quieter leaders were more receptive to employees’ ideas and initiative.
A 2024 longitudinal study provides another useful complication.
Kordsmeyer and colleagues examined promotion outcomes among 1,774 employees in a multinational organisation, 343 of whom were promoted.
Personality was associated with promotion, but those relationships differed according to the target job level. Importantly, personality-promotion relationships were generally stronger for lower-level than higher-level promotions.
We should not turn that into:
“Introverts win at senior level.”
The study does not show that.
What it does show is that the relationship between personality, appearing leader-like and progressing into leadership is not a simple straight line.
And there is an even more provocative piece of evidence from senior executive selection.
Decressin, Kaplan and Sørensen analysed more than 4,900 assessments of CEO candidates and top executives spanning roughly two decades. In later cohorts, CEO candidates were on average less charismatic and more analytical than earlier cohorts, and some of those differences also appeared among hired CEOs.
Again, this does not tell us that charisma is becoming unimportant.
But it challenges the assumption that progression towards the most senior leadership positions simply rewards ever-greater charisma and interpersonal flair.
The wider point is:
Selection rewards signals. Sustained leadership requires those signals to be backed by judgement, behaviour and results.
Executive presence is broader, and more relational
Unlike charisma, executive presence does not have a single, universally accepted psychological definition.
That is worth being explicit about.
Executive presence is better regarded as a practitioner concept with a developing evidence base, rather than a neatly bounded personality construct or psychometric trait.
One of the most useful academic studies remains Dagley and Gaskin’s research with 34 professionals experienced in assessing executive effectiveness.
They identified ten characteristics that influenced perceptions of executive presence.
Some contributed to early impressions, including:
projected confidence
communication ability
engagement skills
Others became clearer through experience over time, including:
interpersonal integrity
values in action
intellect and expertise
the ability to deliver outcomes
That is a much richer picture than charisma alone.
It also suggests something psychologically important:
Executive presence is not simply something you possess inside yourself. It is partly an attribution made by other people.
People observe signals and make judgements.
What does this person understand?
Can they handle this?
Can I trust their judgement?
Do their intentions feel sound?
Will they act consistently?
Do they know when to speak and when to listen?
Can they move us forward?
The answer can change as people gather more evidence.
Dagley and Gaskin identified positive, unexpected, unsustainable and dark forms of presence. An initially impressive impression is therefore not necessarily a sustainable one.
A leader can arrive with tremendous impact and lose credibility over time.
Another can initially appear understated and grow in stature as colleagues experience the quality of their judgement, integrity and delivery.
Charisma can help create an impression. Executive presence has to survive experience.
What sustains executive presence?
There is no single formula.
And I would be wary of any list claiming to contain the scientifically validated components of executive presence.
But several strands of research help explain why some forms of presence endure while others do not.
1. Credibility and judgement
At senior levels, expertise still matters, but the question changes.
Earlier in a career, credibility may come from knowing more about the subject than almost anyone else in the room.
As leadership scope increases, people are increasingly evaluating whether you can use that expertise to make sound judgements across ambiguity, competing priorities and incomplete information.
The question becomes less:
“Does this person know their subject?”
and more:
“Do I trust this person’s judgement?”
Organisational trust research is useful here.
Mayer, Davis and Schoorman’s influential model distinguishes perceived ability, benevolence and integrity as important foundations of trustworthiness.
That is not a model of executive presence.
But it helps explain why competence or charisma alone cannot sustain confidence in a leader.
People care about whether you can do the job.
They also make judgements about your intentions and your integrity.
2. Clarity and communication
Charismatic communication can capture attention.
Senior communication often has a more mundane but equally important job:
helping other people think.
Can you reduce complexity without oversimplifying it?
Can you state the point before disappearing into detail?
Can you frame a decision, trade-off or risk clearly enough for others to act?
Can you challenge without creating unnecessary threat?
This is why a thirty-second contribution can sometimes demonstrate more executive presence than a polished ten-minute speech.
At senior level, communication is not merely display.
It is an instrument of judgement.
3. Composure and behavioural flexibility
Pressure changes behaviour.
Some leaders accelerate and over-explain.
Some become forceful.
Some soften everything.
Some withdraw.
Some become so focused on defending their answer that they stop noticing what is happening around them.
Executive presence becomes particularly visible in moments that were not rehearsed.
Composure does not mean emotional suppression or acting invulnerable.
It means retaining enough awareness and flexibility to make a deliberate choice about what the situation requires.
This is one point at which executive presence overlaps with emotional intelligence, particularly self-awareness, social awareness and regulation.
4. Relational awareness
Presence is not transmitted into a vacuum.
The same behaviour can be interpreted differently depending on the audience, culture, hierarchy, history and stakes.
Social perception research also reminds us that people rapidly judge both capability and intent.
Work by Cuddy, Fiske and colleagues has demonstrated the centrality of competence and warmth in social perception.
Again, this is not an executive presence model.
But it helps challenge the idea that looking highly competent is sufficient.
A leader can be experienced as formidable but untrustworthy.
Warm but lacking authority.
Confident but politically tone-deaf.
Decisive but unwilling to listen.
Executive presence is partly about navigating those tensions rather than maximising one characteristic.
5. Consistency over time
This is the dimension that “command the room” advice often misses.
Presence is cumulative.
The presentation matters.
So does the decision a week later.
The difficult conversation matters.
So does whether you follow through.
The confident recommendation matters.
So does whether you acknowledge when the evidence changes.
Hewlett’s more recent practitioner research similarly suggests that expectations around executive presence continue to evolve. Confidence and decisiveness remain important, while characteristics including inclusiveness, respect, listening and authenticity have gained greater prominence.
Presence therefore has both a short game and a long game.
The short game is how you show up.
The long game is whether experience confirms the impression.
Is charisma really the issue?
Executive presence can be affected by clarity, gravitas, strategic voice, stakeholder influence and interpersonal impact, not simply by how charismatic you appear.
The Executive Presence Assessment gives you a short, structured way to identify where your presence may already be helping you and where small behavioural changes could have the greatest impact.
Can quieter leaders have executive presence?
Absolutely.
But the useful answer is more nuanced than:
“Introverts make great leaders too.”
Extraversion can confer genuine advantages.
More extraverted people are often more likely to speak, assert themselves, participate visibly and be recognised as leaders. Those behaviours can matter, particularly when leadership roles are still being negotiated.
A quieter leader should not use authenticity as an excuse to remain invisible.
If a role requires you to contribute earlier, state a recommendation more clearly, challenge a senior stakeholder or take authority in an ambiguous situation, those behaviours may need to be developed.
But that is very different from trying to manufacture a charismatic personality.
The development question is not:
“How do I become more extroverted?”
It is:
“What would make the quality of my leadership easier for other people to experience?”
For one leader, the answer may be speaking more.
For another, it may be speaking less.
One may need greater conviction.
Another may need more curiosity.
One may need to stop hedging.
Another may need to stop treating every disagreement as something to win.
The objective is behavioural range, not personality replacement.
The danger of performing executive presence
This is where some executive presence advice goes badly wrong.
It starts with the assumption that there is a correct way to look and sound senior.
Lower your voice.
Slow down.
Take up more space.
Use fewer gestures.
Speak in shorter sentences.
Never show uncertainty.
Each of those suggestions might be useful in a particular situation.
None is a universal prescription for leadership presence.
Applied mechanically, they can create a polished shell that becomes difficult to sustain.
They may also reinforce narrow assumptions about gender, culture, accent, personality and what senior leadership is supposed to look like.
Even charisma itself is more contextual than the “gifted speaker” mythology implies.
In three preregistered experiments published in 2025, Wilms and colleagues found evidence that charismatic effects can depend partly on congruence between the values signalled by a leader and the values held by followers. The effects were not identical across all three studies, which is itself a useful reminder that charismatic signalling does not operate independently of context and audience.
This is another reason to move away from executive presence as performance.
A more useful question is:
What is getting in the way of this leader’s capability being fully experienced?
Sometimes the answer is communication.
Sometimes it is over-reliance on expertise.
Sometimes it is self-doubt.
Sometimes it is emotional reactivity.
Sometimes it is weak stakeholder awareness.
Sometimes it is cultural miscalibration.
Sometimes it is a strong desire to be liked.
Sometimes it is an unwillingness to take up the authority the role now requires.
Those are different problems.
They need different developmental responses.
Can executive presence be developed without becoming someone else?
Yes, if development focuses on behaviour and impact rather than manufacturing a persona.
There is evidence that specific charismatic behaviours can be learnt.
But executive presence development is most useful when it starts with observable situations rather than labels.
“Needs more executive presence” is rarely specific enough to act on.
Instead ask:
What happens when this leader is challenged?
How do they communicate when they know far more than the audience?
What happens to their pace and structure under pressure?
How do they disagree?
How quickly do they read shifts in the room?
Can they move between detail and strategic consequence?
Do they take enough authority?
Do they make it safe enough for other people to challenge them?
What happens when they do not know?
These questions turn an ambiguous concept into behaviour that can be examined, practised and changed.
That is also why executive presence development should not be reduced to presentation coaching.
Voice, posture and communication technique can matter.
But if the real issue is judgement, defensiveness, stakeholder politics, authority, self-concept or behavioural rigidity, polishing presentation skills may simply make the surface more convincing while leaving the underlying pattern intact.
Five questions if you have been told to develop more executive presence
If “more presence” appears in your feedback, resist the temptation to solve the label.
Start by interrogating it.
1. When people question my judgement, what happens to my behaviour?
Do you become clearer or simply more forceful?
Do you slow down or accelerate?
Do you become curious or start defending?
2. Does my communication create clarity or merely display expertise?
Senior audiences rarely need everything you know.
They need what matters for the decision in front of them.
3. What do people experience when I disagree with them?
Conviction and curiosity can coexist.
So can authority and listening.
4. Where does my natural style become too narrow?
A preference is not a problem until the situation requires something you cannot comfortably access.
The goal is not to abandon your style.
It is to expand your range.
5. What evidence are people using to decide whether I am credible at the next level?
This question is particularly important.
The behaviours that made you successful in one role may not provide enough evidence for the next.
That does not mean becoming someone else.
It may mean making different aspects of your leadership more visible.
Executive presence is not charisma with a better suit
Charisma can be valuable.
It can attract attention, create emotional connection and make a message memorable.
It may influence who is seen as leader-like and, in some contexts, who is viewed as suitable for selection.
But executive presence asks more.
It has to survive challenge.
It has to survive ambiguity.
It has to survive relationships.
And eventually:
it has to survive experience.
A highly charismatic leader can still lack judgement, trust or credibility.
A quieter leader can possess considerable presence without ever becoming the most magnetic person in the room.
The most useful development question is therefore not:
“How can I become more charismatic?”
It is:
“What would help other people experience the quality of my leadership more fully?”
That opens up a much richer conversation about credibility, judgement, communication, composure, relationships and behavioural range.
And importantly, it does not require performing a more senior version of somebody else.
It requires becoming more deliberate about how the leader you already are is experienced when the stakes, visibility and scrutiny increase.
Executive presence and charisma: common questions
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No. Charisma can contribute to how a leader is perceived, but executive presence also depends on credibility, judgement, communication, composure and how others experience the leader over time.
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Yes. Executive presence does not require being highly extroverted or naturally charismatic. Quieter leaders may need to make their thinking, authority and leadership more visible, but that is different from changing their personality.
-
Yes. Specific behaviours that affect how leadership is experienced can be developed, including communication, composure, stakeholder awareness and behavioural flexibility. The goal is not to manufacture a persona, but to strengthen how effectively your leadership is experienced.
Be credible where the stakes, visibility and scrutiny are higher
Executive presence coaching focuses on the real situations in which your judgement, communication, composure and influence are being tested.
The aim is not to manufacture a polished persona. It is to understand what is affecting how you are experienced and strengthen the behaviours that help others place confidence in your leadership.
📚References
Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 293–319.
Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10, 374–396.
Banks, G. C., Engemann, K. N., Williams, C. E., Gooty, J., Davis McCauley, K., & Medaugh, M. R. (2017). A meta-analytic review and future research agenda of charismatic leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(4), 508–529.
Cuddy, A. J. C., Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (2008). Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The stereotype content model and the BIAS map. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 61–149.
Dagley, G. R., & Gaskin, C. J. (2014). Understanding executive presence: Perspectives of business professionals. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 66(3), 197–211.
Decressin, Y., Kaplan, S. N., & Sørensen, M. (2025). Have CEOs changed? Journal of Financial Economics, 173.
Gardner, W. L., Hanna, A. A., Noghani, F., & Cogliser, C. C. (2024). Leadership emergence: Answering the “how” and “why” questions by considering levels of analysis and form of emergence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 11, 139–164.
Grant, A. M., Gino, F., & Hofmann, D. A. (2011). Reversing the extraverted leadership advantage: The role of employee proactivity. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 528–550.
Hewlett, S. A. (2024). The new rules of executive presence. Harvard Business Review, January–February 2024.
Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765–780.
Kaplan, S. N., & Sørensen, M. (2021). Are CEOs different? The Journal of Finance, 76(4), 1773–1811.
Kordsmeyer, T. L., Speer, A. B., Wilms, R., & Kurz, R. (2024). Longitudinal effects of employees’ Big Five personality traits on internal promotions differentiated by job level in a multinational company. Journal of Business and Psychology, 39, 1049–1065.
Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734.
Ronay, R., Oostrom, J. K., Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., Mayoral, S., & Rusch, H. (2019). Playing the trump card: Why we select overconfident leaders and why it matters. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(6).
Wilms, R., Oostrom, J. K., & van Garderen, E. (2025). The effects of the charisma signal and voice pitch in female leader selection. The Leadership Quarterly, 36(3).
Wilms, R., Bastardoz, N., Seif el Dahan, C., & Jacquart, P. (2025). Are we on the same page? Leader-follower value congruence as a boundary condition in the emergence of charismatic effects. The Leadership Quarterly, 36(2).
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