Gravitas, it's a little bit of a new word to me too. It's the word when you hear it, you can guess what it means. It seems to be related to gravity. To some people, it might be the diagram on the left which is a really heavy weight, like a £50 weight. It has heft authority, this confidence that it's not going anywhere. Some people might even call it intellectual horsepower. Have you met those people where you're in a meeting and frankly she's the smartest person in the room? You're not going to ask a question that she doesn't know. There are those people. But there's also a sense of maybe centeredness where he doesn't have all the answers, but he's super wise and a good decision-maker and very calm under pressure, just happy to be himself and happy to be there. There are many potential facets of this thing called gravitas and I would invite you to think of your own. But from the research and they interviewed a thousand people, Sylvia and Hewlett, in a book called Executive Presence. This is what they came up with, three different groups, gravitas, communication and appearance. The other two I shaded out. You can't see them because we're going to talk about them later. We're going to really focus right now on gravitas. The six elements that they had there were confidence and also grace under fire, grace under pressure, being very calm. Number 2, decisiveness and showing teeth, which means willing to make the tough decision and bite when you need a bite. Number 3, speaking truth to power, being authentic, delivering difficult news, pushing back on the client or somebody who might potentially even have more authority than you. The last three, I think very related emotional intelligence, reputation, great standing, vision, and charisma. I think none of us would probably argue with that list. It doesn't sound like a bad list. If you are introducing your girlfriend or boyfriend to your parents or your meeting your child's future spouse, most of those are good things, being authentic, being calm, being confident. Those are all beautiful things. I would say, and maybe it's because I'm being a troublemaker. I would say there's one thing that's not on the list that I think comes first. It's even more important, so something's missing. What's missing is, how do you become confident? Do we like people who are confident but don't deserve to be confident? I don't. I find that to be faking it. How can you become confident without faking it? For me, I would say, the way you do that is that you become very competent. One of my favorite books and one that I've shared many times with students is this book by Cal Newport, who is a Georgetown computer science professor. He wrote this book called Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. The idea is, is quite simple. That for you to really enjoy and be passionate about your work, you need to be good at it. In order for you to really design the life that you want, to be able to negotiate the terms that you want, to be rewarded for that, frankly, you need to be good at something. It seems like a very old faction value, but it makes tons of sense. If you're good at something, you have more negotiating leverage. If you're good at something, customers and clients come and find you. If you're good at something, people want to work with you and around you in for you. Basically, the first domino, the very first domino that you want to tip over is do the work. Become wicked good at something. Then once you become good at something, the confidence and all the other things follow. The very first criteria that they came up with, looking at executive presence was the idea of grace under pressure, which is, we're in a very tough situation, yet I'm remaining very calm and very human. That's hard to do. We've been around people where bad situation and somebody completely keeps their cool. Love it. Very awesome. You see that. Emotionally, they stay very grounded and calm, and they start making some really smart decisions. Here's the bad situation that we're in and we know that we definitely need to do A, B, and C. Here are the choices that we have. Let me hear what you have to think and then let's decide. They're actively listening, they're offering options, and frankly, they're acting and getting it done. Two thoughts. One, we know people who are the exact opposite. That when things get bad, they start freaking out and they just start getting very emotional and they stop making sense and they start lashing out, making it very difficult, nervous, and crazy for everybody else. We don't want to be those people. The second thought is, how do you actually get good at this? If being graceful under pressure is a form of gravitas and gravitas is the biggest ingredient to executive presence, how do you do this? I don't necessarily have an answer for this, but it sounds like you need to put yourself in difficult situations and do a good job. Be willing to try new things, be willing to take more visible leadership opportunities, be willing to potentially fail a little bit because it's really through that kind of practice that you get better. The second factor that they mentioned was being decisive. It's very common for organizations, especially big ones, especially ones that have been around and they've been successful for a long time, especially ones that have many layers of administration, they tend to not want to make decisions. There's this thing called analysis paralysis. Well, why don't we get more data? I don t know. Shouldn't we look at best practices? What's the competition doing? Let's wait till next year. Being indecisive. Part of executive presence is, when the time is right, making decisions. For us as consultants, one kind of skill set that we need to develop is to trust the process. We know that in an eight-week project, we can't figure everything out. We need to use hypotheses, get as much useful data as possible within the time allowed, within the resources allowed, to the point where we can actually make smart bets because we are not going to know with 100 percent certainty the future or even the client's ability to do this. With that one expression that I use a lot is we should have strong opinions. Do the work, have a point of view. But they should be very loosely held too where if we find new data that's not exactly right, we're going to be able to pivot and move to the next one. Number 3, integrity and speaking truth to power. This is a tough one, actually, a very tough for me even personally. There are times in a long history, in a long career, where you're going to have to deliver bad news. It's not good news all the time. Also, there are times when you need to push back and you need to disagree with people. That's tough to do with your peers, tough to do with your direct reports, who report up to you. It's even harder to do that to your boss or your boss's boss. Of course, you're going to do it in a respectful way. You're not going to try to cause a fight. That's not the point. But there are times where you may be reporting up to a Senior VP and there are times where, Senior VP, we did the research, we looked at the data, we validated as much as we could, but there is a very good chance that this thing that we started six months ago is going to be a failure, and therefore, our recommendation is to stop funding it. It's possible this project was the Senior VP's pet project. They loved it. They wanted this to be successful, but frankly, you need to speak truth. That really has to do with demonstrating integrity. You're not paid just to say yes all the time and agree with people. The second area, in my opinion, where speaking truth to power becomes very important and having integrity is protecting your people. What does that mean? I'm of the belief that managers should give away more of the credit. If I have a team of five people and things go well, my bias should be great job, Sandy. Thank you, Paul. Great job. I really want to acknowledge them, they did 90 percent of the work. The flip side of it is, I think, and I believe that managers protecting their people should take more of the blame. If it doesn't go right, you shouldn't be the manager that says, Paul, Sandy, it's their fault. That is such an immature and frankly, a not very genuine manager. You wouldn't want to work with that person. You need to protect your people and that is also a form of integrity. Being a manager, owning up to the responsibility of it. The last one before we go to key takeaways is this topic of emotional intelligence. Very famous book written by Daniel Goleman many years ago. You can read these things for yourself. But what is your ability to read a room? When you walk into a room can you tell what the atmosphere is? Is it a tense, mood or is it a fun mood? Are they trying to make a decision or are they just chit-chatting? Your ability to sense what other people are thinking and feeling so incredibly important. A couple of other potentially leading indicators that you're good at this or you need to improve at this is number 2, are you good at talking with people different from you? Different class, different geography, different language, different education, different upbringing, different situation, different title, different age. Are you good? Can you pivot? Can you start a conversation with that person? Do you know how to politely end the conversation and move on? Do you know when you're talking with people, when do you push a little bit and push their thinking and try to take the conversation a little deeper and further and when do you wait and listen and let people talk? Here, the quote at the bottom is a fun one. It's from Will Rogers and one thing he said, he's talking about good judgment. How do you get good judgment? Because some of this emotional intelligence is just having good judgment. Being a very aware human. He says that good judgment mostly comes from experience. So far, so good. But then here's the funny part, experience usually comes from poor judgment. In other words, this is really about you putting yourself out there, meeting people, interacting, learning, being open to feedback, forgiving yourself. Because some of this emotional intelligence stuff is, you're going to say the wrong thing. You're going to do the dumb thing at a party and being aware of that and getting better over time. For key takeaways. I think this applies to all of us, not just in a consulting environment, but anything that involves a client is about people. You, as a consultant, you are the product. That's deep. Your integrity matters, your value. How you hold yourself, the way that you act, the way you interact completely matters and no client wants a robot consultant. They are not hiring the firm and paying $300,000 for you just to say yes all day. Nobody really wants a yes man. Say yes when that's what you believe and you feel is right and be willing to say, maybe/no when it's not. The final thought is the idea of being a trusted advisor. You're not a salesperson, you're not a marketer or a project manager, or a contractor, or a subject matter expert, or a trainer, or any of those things. Our goal at the end of the day is to find executives who have real problems, who we like working with, who are willing to listen to us when we have good ideas and willing to pay us to do great work. The goal of all of this, when you think about gravitas and executive presence, I don't think we need to over-complicate it. It's really around building relational equity. Consistently doing a great job, earning the trust so that when the client has expectations, we all want to do a great job. We manage those expectations, but we do even better than that. For me and in conclusion, gravitas, it means different things to different people. Find out what it means to you. Like what person do you want to be and how do you behave so that when your clients and people that you respect and people that you love, they see you, they trust you, they have confidence in you, they want to learn from you.
