Want to Lead? Be Well Spoken and Well Dressed
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Sylvia Ann Hewlett discusses the importance of personal presentation -- executive presence, as she calls it -- if you're aiming for leadership roles. Hewlett is an economist and the author of Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success.
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SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT:

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy where she directs the “Hidden Brain Drain”—a task force of 35 global companies committed to fully realize female and minority talent over the lifespan. She also heads up the Gender and Policy Program at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is the author of six critically acclaimed nonfiction books and her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Hewlett has taught at Cambridge, Columbia and Princeton Universities and held fellowships at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard. A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, she earned her Ph.D. degree in economics at London University.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Sylvia Hewlett: Executive presence or EP is simply what you signal to the world, what you telegraph to the world. In terms of first, your gravitas. Do you really know your stuff cold? Do you give the impression that you're three questions deep in your field of expertise? Perhaps do you have intellectual horsepower? How do you signal that? That's the gravitas piece. Secondly, do you have really serious communication skills? Can you get your ideas across? I mean can you be heard, because no matter how profound your gravitas, if you can't somehow get it across it becomes dead in the water. And then finally presentation of self; the way you dress; your body movement; the way you stand and walk. All of this is incredibly critical in allowing your gravitas again to get across.

So the great thing about this piece of work, we went out to 4000 professionals around the U.S. in all kinds of different sectors and 300 leaders. It was a representative sample so we do know what our colleagues and what our bosses are really looking for on this front. And it's fascinating because it turns out there really is almost a check list out there that we can work with and much of it is very learnable.

There were two reasons why I wrote this book. First off at my think tank we had discovered three years ago that the main reason that women aren't making it into top jobs is that they don't get sponsors. They have a ton of mentors but they don't have this senior advocate who really goes out on a limb for them. So why are they not chosen as potential protégés and groomed for leadership? And we found that many, many male leaders around the country saw women as lacking executive presence. Somehow they weren't signaling that they were leadership material or they weren't ready for the big opportunity. So, we wanted to look at executive presence to see what in fact this was and how we can all crack it.

But I think the other root of this book is much more personal. I grew up in the South Wales coal mining valleys. I was one of six girls in an industrial valley which was really rather neglected in the 1960s and 1970s. The unemployment rate was 38 percent and I remember really understanding how bleak, how few opportunities this environment really was. And so when I was 13 my father, who was trying to do something with his girls despite the fact that he was very much a working-class bloke, took me by bus to Cambridge University and kind of fired me up about the possibilities of perhaps going to this amazingly beautiful campus, which was one of the best universities in Europe.

And he was a very audacious. He turned around to me and said, "girl," he tended to get our names mixed up so he called a lot of us girl. He said, "If you work hard you can go here." And I went back to Wales to my really rather mediocre school and did work incredibly hard and did get in. But when I got to Cambridge at age 18 I was really like a fish out of water. And the main thing that got in the way, I mean I was a good student; I was good at passing exams. But every time I opened my mouth I let myself down. It was so hard...

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