The Power of Presence

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Christy Hedges. She's a senior leadership coach with a specialty in executive communications. She's also the author of the Power Presents, fabulous book, by the way Christy and the Inspiration Code. Her clients range from the fortune ten to the US government to nonprofits.

She writes for Forbes and is regularly featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and CNBC. Christy holds a B.A. from Virginia Tech and an MSC from Purdue University in Communications, and she is a teaching faculty member at the Georgetown University Institute for Transformational Leadership. Christy. So glad that we had the opportunity to chat today and there were a lot of questions. I know that there's a great deal of interest in the power of presence.

Kristi Hedges: Well, thank you so much, Anita. I'm just delighted to be here and anxious to jump into the questions. I love to hear that people are passionate about this topic because I surely am. It's a little bit.

Anita Brick: Of a mystery. I have people contact me and say on my development plan, I can't get promoted until I have greater executive presence. No one will tell me what that is. So maybe at a basic level, you and I can start with defining for me what is presence.

Kristi Hedges: So you just summed up something that I see all the time, where I will hear from someone that, you know, one of the reasons they chose me as their coach was because they've heard that they need to work on their presence or their executive presence or leadership presence or whatever you want to call it. And when I dig a little bit deeper, they don't really know what that means.

And often when I dig deeper with the person who gave them the feedback, they're not even quite sure what that means. You know, mystery abounds. One of those things where we want more of it, but we're not quite sure what it is, and we hear it's good and we certainly don't want to be without it. Part of the work that I do is really breaking down what presence is for us.

So my definition of presence is a little bit different. They define presence as the ability to connect with and inspire others. Connect and inspire are the keywords here. It's really not about how you look. Not even really about how you communicate, but rather the impact of how you communicate with a lot of different ways to have presence.

When we think about who's had influence over us, who's really been a mentor for us or someone we have admired, my guess is this for me, there's plenty of variation in that for everybody listening here in terms of what presence really looks like.

Anita Brick: I had a conversation with an alum recently who was a little concerned that executive presence is specific to a gender, as an example. And so her question was would it be helpful to hear your thoughts and how to develop an executive persona that is a reflection of my authentic self. Where do I start? It has to be authentic for me.

Kristi Hedges: Many women have taken this issue on. There are kind of these environmental cues that we get as women that we have to have a strong alpha male presence, and that's just simply not the case. And maybe anchor back to that, connect with and inspire others. Definition. There are a lot of ways to have it, and it really does need to start with who we are the best way we can express our own presence is as a way to externalize our values, so we're able to really know who we want to be in the world, and then show up in alignment with those values.

And there's an exercise in the book called a Personal Presence brand that I encourage people to start with, because it really values exercise. And there's a lot of ways to do this. Start with your, you know, most desired values. You know who you really want to be in the world, and then narrow that down to your top values so that you can hold those in your mind and really anchor to them in times of stress or uncertainty.

Anita Brick: It's very interesting. An evening student, it's very related to what the first question was and what you just said. She said, I have a hard time finding the seed of confidence. You talk about in the book. When I feel out of my element for a bit of context, I have ten years of experience on the tech side and want to pivot into general management. How do you find that kernel of confidence that you speak about so well in the book?

Kristi Hedges: You know, first of all, I think it is important to know that most of us feel that way when we're trying something new and we're on unsteady ground. I mean, that's a very relatable question. We can all sense. So yeah, it's kind of hard to find it, to be able to anchor ourselves around this, this confidence that can grow.

Right. If we were able to just take a leap and do it. You know, I tell the story sometimes of when I first became a coach, I had a marketing business for ten years. It was just a big part of my identity at the time, and I sold my company when I wanted to shift and become a coach.

I was having dinner with a dear friend of mine who I had known for years. I was tentatively talking about, you know, this thing that I wanted to do next. And I was telling her, but I'm just not sure people will take me seriously in this role. You know, they've known me as one thing, and then now I'm going to be another.

And, you know, the beauty of great friends is that she just laughed in my face. You know, you just didn't fall off a truck yesterday. You have all these experiences that you bring to bear. I mean, are you kidding me? Go back to this example. I mean, we may be trying something new, but we have these years of experiences that we bring, and that's really where the kernel of confidence can often come from.

I mean, we're really an accumulation of our experiences rather than, you know, apologizing for what we don't have. If we can reframe what we bring, that's unique. We have so much more to bear, it really becomes our greatest strength. For example, going into a new management is, as we're talking about here, we have all kinds of management experiences way before we have a certain title, how we manage projects.

We manage people informally. So it's not like we don't have the experience. We have a unique set of experiences, and we need to anchor to those, because that's really where a great source of strength comes from.

Anita Brick: Struggling with that, one person said. Oftentimes I've observed in meetings and in teams, people who express a strong opinion and sound confident draw more respect and attention. How do I develop the authority so that my voice gets heard as well?

Kristi Hedges: That comes up a lot. There's something about team dynamics that are just difficult anyway. It's also a lot of different personality types of meetings. Some people who are very extroverted, some people who are rather introverted in the same meeting and trying to get our voice in. A couple things that I have recommended to people. I mean, one is to really try to get your voice in the meeting in the first 5 to 10 minutes.

And that does a couple of things. Number one, it pushes us to push ourselves to do that. There is a natural inclination to sit back when other people are talking for whatever reason, and put a line in the sand for us just to go ahead and get our voice into the room. The other thing that it does is that, you know, the tone is usually set in the beginning of meetings for the president, dominate the meeting.

Who's going to talk the most? And so by putting our voice in, we helped to shape that dynamic. Another thing that happens is often you'll find in meetings, people refer back to what other people said, sometimes just piling on and just repeating it, and other times it's adding to it. So if we have something that we're getting on the table early, we're more likely to be brought back into the meeting by somebody recounting what we've shared or, you know, even eye contact, subtly looking at people.

I mean, you know, these meetings kind of start to work where you figure out who's actually going to be in this meeting talking. And, those folks tend to reach out to each other the most. It's, you know, getting yourself into that mix early. Another strategy that I advise for folks who have a hard time with that is to learn to do the things that need to be done in meetings that other people don't do.

I'm one of those who ask great questions, be curious. And I mean particularly for folks who are more introverted. And I'm one of those folks, we tend to be good observers. And so we notice when five people have said the same thing. So to be able to pull those connections together and just stop and say, listen, I've, I've heard three people now say that this is the biggest problem.

How are we going to address it? Taking that role is a really important role asking questions, connecting threads and being almost a facilitator. The person who moves the meeting along, really adapting those kinds of roles for yourselves can help us to not feel pigeonholed, as we are the one who kind of sits back and watches us while other people do the talking.

Anita Brick: It's interesting, and I think it changes a bit if it is in a small group in one on one, or if it's one to many. An evening student, he asked, how can someone effectively communicate and motivate in a one to many situation through leadership presence?

Kristi Hedges: I often think that when people talk about leadership presence, they're talking about there's one to many situations really. I take it up a level and say, we know our presence is everywhere. It's the same us that's talking one on one, that's talking to five people, that's talking to 500 people. A challenge for folks sometimes is to get their presence to scale.

So to be the person that they are one on one, assuming that's an environment very comfortable with Steve to bring that to 500 people. And some people have the opposite issue, right? They're great in front of 500 people. There's a detachment there, a performance aspect that they enjoy, but one on one they're not quite as comfortable. So we need to be able to make that presence the same and to show up wherever we are, to really have the clarity of our presence that we want to communicate.

You know, I think about meetings as a platform, if you will. People see a lot of our leadership skills on display there. They see how we manage conflict, bring ideas to the table, how we challenge or collaborate, eat or handle disagreements. You know, any of those being able to really focus on how we want to show up in a meeting can be a really important thing.

You know, a lot of times we focus most on what we want to say, get our points down, and we want to make sure we get our points in whether those are bullet points or power points. And we focus less on how we want to show up. You know what feeling we want to put into the room? I have a tool called the intentionality frame that's in the power presence that I use all the time with clients.

I use it with myself to where, you know, I have people draw essentially a rectangle on a piece of paper, and in the middle of that rectangle, put the emotion that we want to convey through our communication and then think about around the frame, the point that we want to make so that we're really focusing on both of those, you know, people really do pick up on us on energetic terms.

If we want to get people excited, we have to show excitement. You know, if we want people to feel something serious, we have to show a sense of seriousness. So starting at that point is one way we can make sure that our presence scales to a larger group. Not about the content, but it's about the connection. Well, I think it's.

Anita Brick: A really good point. I've noticed that sometimes people can go through a training, and I think sometimes the training can be the presence or the values of the person getting the training rather than the individual, and people come in really confused and then they try something. It's really not them. They look kind of clunky and it dilutes their effectiveness.

What do you recommend if someone is going through a class, going through a training to take the pieces that will help them be more of who they are? Back to our very first question about having presence from authentic selves, rather than feeling clunky and awkward because they don't fit the mold that someone else is saying or this is how you should be.

Kristi Hedges: Yeah, that's such a common issue. I love that question. I have a love-hate relationship with training, so let me just start there. And I do a lot of this kind of work. And so I kind of say that with a little bit of irony, you know, I love the training and that they expand our perspective. It exposes the things we haven't thought about.

They help us to find new ways of doing things. But at the end of those training sessions, we have to make those ideas our own and determine what's going to work for us and what we're going to carry through. And I think a lot of times, what we learn feels so foreign to us that we don't ever really carry those ideas through, especially with communication training.

I think that's just a classic. You know, we are taught a certain right way to do things, and it feels very unnatural to us. And you get to decide, right, what feels great to you. You know, if you look at Ted talks, for example, you know, the most watched Ted talks will you could watch them and look at all the things that people do wrong.

And yet they're incredibly impactful. And millions of people have been inspired by them. Right. There's, you know, the capital R right way. And then there's the little old right way about what's right for us. I think that's important for us to take what works for us and then incorporate it. There's a great phrase that I love called adaptive authenticity.

It's the idea that we can find behaviors that we might want to try. We can go to a training session and think of a couple of things we might want to take away, and then try them for ourselves, and then decide how we might want to adapt them. And then once they become natural and they become very authentic to us. But there's a little period in the middle where we're adapting them for us, and we need to give ourselves the space to do that.

Anita Brick: That's a very good point.

Kristi Hedges: Throughout your career, how did you present in meetings? Right. You might have started out when you were younger. You know, being very formulaic. Have your PowerPoint slides talked? Your PowerPoint slides will fast forward. You don't really even use slides. You've decided it's better to have a discussion. You've learned over the years new behaviors. You've observed how other people have done it, and tried a few things that are new.

Some things work, some things don't, and you get to the style that you have now and then by the way, in ten years you're going to have a different style, but it's all still you. But you have to give yourself permission to shift.

Anita Brick: Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, two questions related to MBA students. And it was all about how do you improve? And then how do you measure to know that you're actually making progress? Part one is how do you practice? And then how do you know that you have enough feedback from that practice to develop your leadership presence development plan?

Kristi Hedges: Let me start with the feedback piece first, because I'm just such a big believer in this idea, which is to get feedback on your present. So that's different from getting feedback on your functional competency, which most of us get says really the idea of asking people, how do I show up? I call it a presence audit where you find five people who see you in different circumstances and just ask them how you show up, and then what you could do to be even stronger.

And you get great feedback from those questions and are questions that we don't generally ask. Again, we more likely would ask about functional competency and those types of things. But to get this kind of feedback is key. Now it doesn't take that much to get the feedback. So I recommend five people. You can do whatever you want so you really don't need that much.

Because people know our presence. They're around us, they see how we show up and we can get a lot of great feedback for ourselves. I just encourage people that it might feel a little awkward, but it really doesn't take that much time and you get some really good, you know, stuff there. What you're really looking for is alignment between if you have a personal brand, you've gone to that work to figure out how you want to show up versus how people are perceiving you. And that gap in the middle is really where your work is. Am I showing up with clarity across situations where I might need to do some work, and then how can I focus on doing that?

Anita Brick: I think you're absolutely right. I think it's a great idea. I think it can take a lot of courage to ask for that feedback. In fact, an alum asked that very question. He said, when you're talking about your experience with the negativity loop, I felt like you were talking to me. I get completely stuck. What are a couple of things I can do to gain the courage to even ask for constructive feedback?

Kristi Hedges: Anything that we talk about here requires a little bit of bravery. I mean, the safest thing is to not ask and just sit there and hope for the best. But we're all in this discussion because, you know, we want to grow and improve. So it does require a little bravery because we're doing something that's different and that's new.

You know, the negativity loop can kick in. Why? You know, why would they want to do this for me? The way we can switch that negativity loop is to reframe it to somebody else. For example, if someone came up to you and asked for some feedback about that person, we are more than happy to give it right. We love when our feedback is asked.

We're actually a lot of people who feel like it's a compliment. There's great research out of Harvard that says when people ask for advice, the person whose advice they're seeking actually views them as more competent and credible. Thinking about it that way, you know, when I go and ask people for feedback, instead of assuming they're going to think it's a burden, they're a little flattered that I would ask that they would think their opinion was so important, but I've gone and asked them for it.

It's also how we set it up. If we go and look for feedback and, you know, make it heavy and onerous, then it's going to feel heavy and onerous. We go and say, this is just for me, and even throw a little vulnerability on the table to say, I feel a little awkward asking, but I think it's going to be really helpful for my development. I've always appreciated the feedback you've given me in the past. It's really just for my own development, you know? What do you think? Once we do one of those conversations it goes pretty well. The next one is easier.

Anita Brick: Speaking of that, there was an alum who said, I've been told that while I am super confident, I lack the warmth to be a leader that others would want to follow in support. If my basic nature isn't warm, how can I develop it?

Kristi Hedges: Yeah, with confidence and warmth. It's just such an important balance. Decades of research around the fact that that's the magic mix. Now, being able to bring both of those, if we're two vulnerable, then we're kind of a puddle of mush. And if we're too competent, we're intimidating. Just having that competency blended with humanity is really what creates that opening the crack for other people to step through and get closer to us.

To the question about warmth, I love that question is near and dear to my heart because I think for a lot of us who are, you know, type A's or recovering perfectionists, as I call myself, we can often just be so focused on whatever we're trying to accomplish that the vulnerability or the connection piece, it can be left behind a little bit in the dust.

The ability to communicate that warmth is, first of all, we make it a priority to have some self-awareness. This question is, you know, I need to display more of this already. Then this is what we focus on, to get stronger. So if we know we need to communicate it more, we will focus on it more and it will come out more.

But also just knowing what it looks like for you doesn't necessarily have to be what it looks like for other people. So I talk about in the book like the different ways of communicating empathy, you know, to be a coach, for example. So if you think about it, a coach can be very empathetic. There's also a part of the coach that's tough.

Love to know. Get out there and fight and, you know, win the game, but also can take you aside and find the greatness in you and make you feel like you can do more. That's different from someone who's more of a buddy. Who is the person who always wants to go out for drinks after work, and loves to talk about all of your personal life and your family, and asks who you're dating.

And you know that's a different model. That's a different model than a mentor who maybe holds themselves a little bit above, but is the first one that they're to give advice and to help you focus on purpose. And some of those higher order thinking. So just use it as an example, because I want people to realize that there's a lot of different ways to be warm and show empathy, figuring out what your style is going to be and focusing on that can be a helpful way to sort of give ourselves a little permission to be warm in our own way.

But the last thing I'll say about that is, I do find that having a healthy curiosity about other people is the door to a lot of that connection. Peace. Finding commonalities with other people. I often hear people who are told that are not warm, for example, will say, well, I love people. You know, when I get together with my friends or they're people that I've worked with for a long time and they know me.

We have such a great connection. I just don't have time to do it at work because I'm so busy. It's not as if they don't have the skills, they just have to make time to put their own unique brand of skills to work in that kind of situation.

Anita Brick: It's kind of fascinating because there's a weekend student who has a hard time finding common threads, and he said, I've been trained as a research analyst and I've been rewarded for finding exceptions or differences. What advice would you have for me so that I can get better at finding common threads?

Kristi Hedges: I think it's important that you already know that about yourself. So Bravo, right? You really figured out that the way you're trained isn't necessarily how you want to show up. Students want to show up in a different way where they're really about commonalities. For something like that, I would say one of the best things you can do is really start to challenge yourself in certain situations to build that muscle.

So, for example, in meetings we talked about, you know, observing and bringing together common threads and things that people have said to really fulfill that role in a meeting. That might be a great place to start to challenge yourself going into meetings to say, well, you know, normally my role would be to shoot down things that don't make sense because I'm really good at that. Instead, I'm going to challenge myself in this meeting to sit back and observe and find at least two common threads that I hear that I'm going to put back on the table. You find that you focus on it, it will get stronger because you're building that muscle. You're adaptively becoming authentic with that new behavior, and you're more likely to do it in the future.

Anita Brick: I would agree it doesn't always have to be work related to find those common threads either. Here's someone who's having a little bit of a struggle. Weekend students said, I'm a natural optimist for others and the opposite for myself, especially since I've had a series of unsuccessful job interviews. How do I break the idea that my situation isn't permanent when I don't have any recent experiences telling me otherwise?

Kristi Hedges: I feel for that. Failure hurts, right? Failure stinks. Nobody wants that to happen. You know, when we're looking for data, the human mind is just trained to focus on the negative. You really beat ourselves up at something pretty bad if we want to. You know, I've heard experts talk about, you know, one of the best things you can do is to talk to yourself like you would a friend.

So if a friend came to you and said, you know, I've interviewed for a bunch of jobs, here's my background. You know, you would never talk to that person or even think about the person the way you think about yourself. Right? You would say, oh gosh, well, you're just having a run of bad luck. The industry that you work in is really competitive right now.

You bring so much to the table. So all those things you would say to them and sincerely believe we don't give the same courtesy back to ourselves. Thinking about reframing your self-talk can be helpful. Some people, that's just not their thing. But I also, I believe strongly and just the value of role modeling and the inspiration coach. As I talk about the importance of role modeling and I, you know, dug into the research around it, now we know that role models are nice to have.

They're actually much more than that because they are a huge source of our inspiration. We don't run into them in our hallway. You know, as we walk down to the water cooler, we have to find them. We have to create a community of role models around us when we're in front of role models, and they talk about things that are similar to what we've gone through.

you know, the challenges they had finding a right job or the challenges they had finding their first job, or when they'd had to persevere around something. What we're really doing is borrowing their confidence. We're having a vicarious experience through them. And we need those. We need those vicarious experiences when we're, you know, sitting back on our heels a little bit because it really fuels us to have that inspiration to keep going. The more we can find those people. And again, it takes some effort because they don't usually fall in our laps by asking questions of folks around us, by, you know, going to events and meetings and asking for introductions and all of those things we might not want to do, but think about how important it is to keep your own optimism up. And role models are a great way to do it.

Anita Brick: Really good point. I never thought about borrowing someone else's confidence. I love that we're sharing that here about sharing with others as well. I've never heard that before. A very nice way to say it. Do you have time for a couple more questions? Sure. Okay, so an executive MBA student has a question about making not an elevator pitch, but a pitch for funding in the technology space, she said, I am about to make a pitch for, round a funding, and my team thinks I should be one way.

The professors who are coaching us think I should be another way. Funders that I've spoken to so far, they want me to be a certain way as well. How do I project who I am so I can really convey a powerful message? Because I feel very strongly about what we're doing without getting pulled in all these directions by everybody else's priorities.

Kristi Hedges: Oh, gosh. Well, you know, and my past life, I have a lot of experience with that particular situation. The stakes are high where you have a lot of people who have a strong opinion about how you should show up, and a lot of times they have a lot of experience behind those opinions. So it can be really difficult to play the right role.

And, you know, I have our own presence, but also communicate all sorts of ways to check all those boxes that make people want to invest in you. Your job is really to show who you are. They can read the PowerPoint, can give them the data, and of course, communicating some of that data is key, but they're going to dig in and find the data they want anyway.

And they're going to follow up after you go. They're going to read, you know, whatever you give them before you, you know, walk through the door. You know what I think about those situations? What's most important is that we show passion. We show the potential investors what we're all about. They're investing in you. You know, I hear this all the time from VCs.

You know, we're investing in the person. So we want to see that they have the chops, that they have agility, that they're good listeners, that they feel confident in their idea while still remaining open to shifts that might happen, that they're not overly invested in their own data. You know, they want to see those kinds of behaviors.

I would anchor back to that brand we talked about. What brand do you want to be showing? What emotion do you want to be putting into the room when you come in, and then let the points flow from that versus going in with a deck of data? So you look like the ten other people that came before you with similar decks of data. There's something different about you that stands out.

Anita Brick: It is so crucial because no one wants to buy our fund, something that they've seen a million times before. The differentiator often is the team and who is driving it, both in terms of vision and execution.

Kristi Hedges: This company is the founder going in, and then you might have some technologists and some engineers, and you have a lot of different levels of training. You have to balance all of those to hold the center as the person who's going in and presenting, to really show the personality of the company and energy matters a lot to, in those situations, manage your own energy and figure out what you want to put into the room, but also calibrated against the other people.

If you have a high energy, this is what you're pitching with, you can go higher energy with them if they're very subdued and lower energy. You want to Dallas down a little bit. Think about the average between the two. You don't want to be so far ahead of their skis that they're sort of like, whoa. You also want to be able to bring enough energy in the room that your presence is really felt. You know, when you're in their calibrate, that's important.

Anita Brick: Very good point. You've given us a lot of really good things to think about, to do.

Kristi Hedges: As we wrap up, what are three.

Anita Brick: Things that someone can do to both understand and then leverage the power of presence?

Kristi Hedges: If I had to distill it down to what makes the most impact with, you know, kind of the least amount of time, like the most discernible things, understand what brand you're trying to convey. So do the work to know what values you want to be representing with your presence. I work with very senior leaders up through CEO at very large companies.

And I'll tell you, a lot of people just don't do this work. Not that it even takes all that much time. It just takes some thoughtful time. It's hard to say what your presence should be if you don't know what the target is. So you have to figure out that target first. The next one, I would say, is just to get feedback.

It's hard. It's a little bit embarrassing. It's awkward. And all that being said, once you do it once it gets a lot easier making the commitment that you're going to get feedback is so helpful because it's really it's your GPS. It's your ability to figure out, am I in alignment with my brand or am I not? And then to know where your work needs to happen.

Otherwise we can be flying kind of blind on something like our presence. Again, you're not asking that much of people because they already know what your presence is. You're just asking them to tell you, you're the one that might not know. And then finally, I would say that we started this conversation with connection and the importance of focusing on the connection over everything else.

A little bit can go a long way, right? We can focus on the connection and try our best not to be so focused on having everything exactly right that we lose our personality and our presence in the process.

Anita Brick: Well, that's what makes us who we are. And clearly this is a passion of yours and of many others. We had a lot, a lot of interest. Thank you for decoding some of this for us and for making the time today.

Kristi Hedges: Oh, thank you so much. Anita this was fun.

Anita Brick: Christy has lots of really good information on her site which is the Hedges company.com. Thanks again Christy.

Kristi Hedges: Thanks Anita. Have a great day.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.