044 | Mastering Executive Presence: 5 Essential Traits of Magnetic Leaders

Are you ready to step up your leadership game and truly inspire your team? Together we will learn the art of magnetic leadership that makes leaders irresistibly compelling.

Let’s unpack the five pivotal elements of charismatic leadership, from the allure of executive presence to the genuine connection of authentic leadership. Discover actionable strategies and insights that have boosted team engagement and productivity by over 50%.

In this episode:

• You'll discover the 5 crucial elements of magnetic leadership that can transform your business, including how to identify your unique strengths and build a supportive network.
• You'll uncover the secrets to executive presence and impactful communication, essential for scaling your business and improving employee engagement by up to 50%.
• You'll learn 3 key strategies for authentic leadership and vulnerability that will enhance trust and retention within your team in today's hybrid work environment.

This episode at a glance:

[02:08] Most people when they are in leadership, think that they have a pretty strong understanding of themselves or how they're leading,   but it's always through our own personal lens

[04:09] We have an advantage that we're still not fully leaning into, and that is using vulnerability to engage and lead our teams. 

[05:49] So being an authentic leader means being able to share your true, real self with your team.

[07:31] The art of communication is the language of leadership.  Everybody communicates just a little bit differently.

 [11:10] Your job as a leader is to get the team over the goal line to reach all those goals. And then a secondary goal is to mentor them into greatness, to help them improve, grow and promote

Resources and Links mentioned in this episode:

• Free Range Thinking
• Dawn Andrews
• Team Action Plan

You might also like:

• Business Goals Workbook
• How Ambitious Women Get What They Deserve
• Why Having Women in Leadership Is The Best Business Strategy 

More about the “My Good Woman” podcast

My Good Woman is a podcast for bold female leaders hosted by me, Dawn Andrews! Grab a seat at the table for candid conversations with culture-shifting, glass-ceiling-busting, trailblazing women, and leading enterprises that are changing the world.
 
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Transcript

My Good Woman
Ep. 44 |  Mastering Executive Presence: 5 Essential Traits of Magnetic Leaders

Dawn Andrews:

Are you ready to discover why some leaders naturally draw us in while others really struggled to make an impact? Well, let's get into it. I'm going to break down the five crucial elements that define a charismatic leader including executive presence and the power of authentic leadership. Let's go.

Welcome to the My Good Woman podcast where we help female founders break past plateaus and get to the next level of business growth by refining their strategy building systems and streamlining operations. 

I'm Dawn Andrews, the founder and CEO of  Free Range Thinking Business Strategy Consulting. Join me each week for candid conversations, with culture shifting, glass ceiling busting trailblazing women who are leading impactful enterprises and grab their strategies to help your business reach extraordinary levels of growth.

In this episode, you'll discover the five essential steps to mastering executive presence and transforming your leadership effectiveness to scale your business faster. You'll also learn how to leverage authentic leadership to boost team engagement, how awesome is that? And you'll also discover three powerful communication techniques that ensure your vision and goals are clearly understood dramatically increasing the speed of your business growth.

 Is it charisma? Is it authority? Or is it something deeper? 

You've heard the term executive presence. What does that even mean? Well, let's talk about what makes some leaders charismatic people follow them effortlessly they seem to have great influence and then some leaders don't. Let's explore how embracing your unique strengths can not only transform your leadership, but can also help you make a lasting impact both within your company and in your community and in the world at large. I'm going to run down the five things that make someone have extraordinary executive presence or make them a great leader. 

• One identifying your strengths. 
• Two knowing the power of authentic leadership. 
• Three using impactful communication. 
• Four building a supportive network. 
• And five creating an action plan. 

So we're going to run through those five steps.
 

First let's talk about identifying your strengths. Now most people when they are in leadership, think that they have a pretty strong understanding of themselves or how they're leading, but it's always through our own personal lens. It's not through the lens of the people that we lead, unless we've done a 360 review where you get feedback from the people that you're leading or if you've asked really pointed clarifying questions of the people that you lead. 

And sometimes that second version is really difficult to do because most people are not going to give really clear feedback to the people that lead them, because they're always concerned that their jobs are on the line. No matter how well you set it up and how much you want them to tell you the truth, there's always going to be a bit of a barrier there. So self-awareness in leadership is super important and yet it's kind of difficult to get ahold of. Because to lead others, you must first fully understand yourself. 

So, how do you begin to do that? The biggest thing that I can recommend, if you don't have access to a 360 or can't create an anonymous survey is to use the disc work of leaders profile. It's what I use with my business strategy consulting clients. And that profile gives you your tendencies and preferences as a leader. What your strengths and weaknesses are, and gives you a little bit more insight into how you can effectively lead the different types of people that are part of your team or part of your community. 

In fact, Gallup research poll shows that leaders who focus on their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. And I can't even begin to tell you what that means for engagement with the people that work for you. Don't make a guess at it. Get feedback or use a third-party tool through a consultant to help you determine what your strengths and your challenges are, so that you can better relate to your team, engage them and be more impactful with them. 

The second thing that helps create a magnetic and charismatic leader is understanding the power of trust, authenticity, and vulnerability. 

Authenticity in leadership is the genuine heart of influence. And as we've come out of COVID and started to rebuild the world of business and particularly as women in business, we have an advantage that we're still not fully leaning into, and that is using vulnerability to engage and lead our teams. 

Being able to share the moments when you're unsure, being able to model what it looks like to work out questions that you don't have answers to. Including your team as collaborators, instead of being the person that dictates or tells everybody how it goes make a big difference in moving a team along together. 

A recent article in Forbes shares that 92% of employees, 92% would be more likely to stay with an honest, transparent boss and given the amount of checking out that people are doing on the job, especially in this hybrid environment. It's important that you are honest and transparent with your team. 

When I hear the words, authentic leadership, I think to myself, what does being an authentic leader mean? You're a leader and you're you, therefore, aren't you authentic? But what I really mean by that is that you're willing to show the more vulnerable and unsure or parts of yourself, the more insecure parts of yourself. 

Now it's a delicate balance because you don't want to show so much insecurity in your choices, in your leadership that you lose the confidence of your team. But sharing a little bit of the difficulties that you and or the whole company might be facing can make a big difference in the investment that people make back in you as their leader. And when they're invested in you they follow, they feel connected, responsible, and they follow through on the work that you're asking them to do. 

And honestly when you're hiding all of that, you just show up as weird, people know that there's something going on with you, but they fill in the gaps of your story. So being an authentic leader means being able to share your true, real self with your team. So, what does that look like in real life? 

This is a personal example that I'll share with you. I recently had some big stuff going on with my family members, that was causing me to be away from the office more than I might normally have been and sometimes unexpectedly. While still protecting the details of what was going on with my family, I still shared with my team that there were some big things a foot that I needed to handle and that I would do my best to let them know in advance when I was available or not then to tell them how they could find me if I wasn't available on Slack or wasn't showing up. 

It's an embarrassing thing to admit sometimes that you don't have it all under control, but we're all living full lives with other people in them. And especially if you're a female founder, you may have younger children, older parents, like I do. You're part of the sandwich generation and there's a lot that you need to take care of. And sometimes you have very little choice ultimately about the timing of those things, because you're being called upon without seeing it coming.  So being able to be vulnerable and legit with your team can make a huge difference then being able to track and follow with you, also being able to step up and ask where you need more support. 

 Let's talk about number three, impactful communication. 

I'm going to tell you all right now, because I know this from hundreds of coaching conversations, and from my own embarrassing experience. That we are not the communicators that we think we are and the reason I say that is because there is our style of communication and then there's the style of every individual person that we're collaborating with or that's on our team. 

The art of communication is the language of leadership. Everybody communicates just a little bit differently. And just because you're pushing information out; requirements, our goals, our KPIs doesn't mean it's landing the way that you think. You need to be a strong communicator. So here are a couple things that you can do to make your communication just a little bit better. 

I have some sort of cadence. Are there certain times of the week, the month or the year that you share certain types of information? I'm calling this out because larger corporations have already codified this, but smaller business owners, especially founders that are on their way up in a growth and scale place. There are so many plates that you're spinning at the same time that you often don't codify your communication. 

For instance, yes you have a weekly meeting, but what is that meeting for? Is there a set agenda with certain bullet points that people can count on each week? So that they can be prepared in advance. Is there a certain time each quarter that you update specific teams? Or your company as a whole as to how the company is doing and what information is shared at that time. And then the same annually, are there certain things that you do to set goals or plan for the new year, set the budget. Whatever the cycle of your businesses, there should be cycles of communication that match up along with it, to take some of the heavy lifting off your plate. 

And then in the second part, the more on the fly communication. It's always good to ask back from the person that you've just spoken with, what did you take away from our conversation? What do you feel like your next steps are? Play it back to me so that you can hear if what you intended was actually received. And if it's not being received and it takes a few more rounds of sharing it, find your patience. Because if your communication lands clearly on the person that you're working with, it builds confidence and trust between the two of you. 

That what you intended for them to go and do, and the responsibilities of their job will come back closer to the way that you wanted it. If you blaze past it, if you expect people to read your minds, if you expect people to guess at what you mean, or to be already prepared, you are bound for failure. Not only that you could be bound for pushing people out of your company. 

There's a Harvard business review highlight which is those little nuggets, right at the top of those great articles in the HBR. It shared that communication can increase employee retention rates by 50%. Just put yourself in the shoes of your employees, imagine if you are on the other side of receiving your communication. And it's not really clear and you're not entirely sure how to get an assignment right, how to deliver a report correctly. It can be really demoralizing when you bring something back and your boss is constantly correcting you. And you don't want to be the boss that does that and they don't want to be the person delivering that work. 

So take the time to really think through your communication. Codify, what things need to happen over the course of the year that people can count on, on the regular. Get feedback in the moment as to whether or not what you said is actually landing the way you meant it. 

 So let's talk about a supportive network. 

As a leader, you definitely need one. And to be a charismatic and magnetic leader. You need one because there have to be times when your charisma is turned off and the magnetism is super low. Leadership is a lonely place to be and you need to have friends, mentors, peers, where you can let your hair down, really share what you're frustrated by and get some insight without necessarily sharing it all with your team, oftentimes not with your team at all. 

So grab a coach, get a mentor. Build a network of friends, but you need to have people that you can trust that you can just be fully yourself with. So that you can lead and mentor with strength and consistency. Because your job as a leader is to get the team over the goal line to reach all those goals. And then a secondary goal is to mentor them into greatness, to help them improve, grow and promote. And that takes a lot of energy and sometimes you need a lot of support to be able to deliver that energy. Get yourself a network. 

Let's talk about the last part, your action plan as a leader, to improve as a leader, to build your charisma and your magnetism.

Because planning is good, but execution is way better.  So let's talk about how to build your action plan. You may find in looking into your strengths in looking into your network, your communication into how vulnerable or authentic you are, that you got some areas that could stand to be improved. You're not going to be able to improve all of them and you're not going to be able to improve them all at once. 

And in fact, behavior change takes place over time. It's not like you go to sleep one day behaving one way and wake up the next day, behaving completely differently and it's just settled and fixed. There is no fixed. There's a progression. Because in changing your behaviors, changing your communication style for instance, you've trained your team to see you and understand you a particular way. And it takes a little time for them to adjust to your new way of doing things. 

But a fast way to make that change and make it stick quickly is to be authentic about it. For instance, in the past, I have been somebody that just expected everybody to do their jobs. But didn't necessarily feel the need to thank you or, or give you appreciation for having done them. But I now see that that's something that's really important to the team and I'm actively working on making that better. So please let me know when I'm missing the mark or when I've hit the nail on the head. 

That can help behavior change happen more quickly. And perhaps you've been oversharing with your team a little bit. Maybe some of your seniors have come back to you and said, "Hey, you're giving us a little bit too much detail. And I think it's making people really nervous" And unless that's an accurate way you want your team to feel then you may need to really spend some time building your network so that you have other places to go. 

To blow off that steam to rant to share your frustrations and then to reconstitute yourself before you go share with your team. Maybe that's part of your action plan. It could be that just being more vulnerable is important, and it could be that you just haven't really identified your strengths yet. So maybe on your action plan, you have a time each year that you do a 360 so that you get some insight from your team as to how you're doing. Or you decide to do the work of leaders profile something that I can help you with here at free range thinking. 

So send me a DM on Instagram @freerangethinking if you want to get into the profile, I'd be happy to do that for you. Once you have an idea of what you actively want to improve, pick two or three things. Create a measurement for them and then set a time limit for them. Just like any other KPI you'd set for yourself. But make sure that it's a leadership KPI that, you know, will help you improve and then improve the performance of your team. 

So today we talked about being a magnetic leader and how to use your unique strengths to really create more impact. With your team and in your community at large, with your business. We talked about identifying your strengths, being authentic and vulnerable. We talked about impactful communication and building a supportive network. And then the best part building that action plan so that you actually can see the improvement over time reflected through the feedback from your team.

Now it's time to go out and put all those pieces into practice. Actually just pick two or three but you got this and I'm excited for you. 

Before we roll the credits on today's discussion about magnetic leadership. I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to you for tuning in and for sharing your time. If today's insights resonated with you, think of subscribing as securing a front row seat to the premier of the year's biggest blockbuster, our podcast. 

Each episode is like the opening scene of a cinema classic and trust me, you wouldn't want to miss it. So ensure you're in the audience, popcorn in hand for our next thrilling episode, don't let the credits roll without you. See you soon.