How To Build Executive Presence: A Message for Mission Leaders CELESTE DeSCHRYVER MUELLER, DMin Consultant for Leadership Formation, Mission and Catholic Identity
D
ear Colleague, Congratulations! You have been appointed to serve as a mission leader. Your education, formation and experience have equipped you well for this. Through your professional leadership role, you have developed important competencies in ministry, theology and spirituality, as well as expertise in Catholic identity. In your conversations with other leaders, you’ve probably heard the phrase “executive presence,” and may have even noticed articles referring to this term in online business journals and occupying a significant share of the shelf space in airport bookstores. You may have seen a post from Forbes Coaches Council, saying that executive presence is “most importantly, inspiring confidence among senior leaders that you have the potential for great achievements. … [because] Your executive presence determines whether you gain access to opportunity.”1 You want the chance to use your gifts most effectively, and you wonder if it really is about “how you control a room, the impressions you make … how you communicate verbally and through your appearance and physicality.”2 But are these tips really the path to building executive presence? What these articles, and unfortunately some leaders, miss is that executive presence cannot be simply a projection of confidence and control, but needs to be an expression of their leadership integrity. If you attempt to develop executive presence by focusing solely on the external aspects,
you risk a kind of fragmentation — what author and educator Parker Palmer famously describes as the “divided life”— which is more likely to communicate disintegration than integrity.
What these articles, and unfortunately some leaders, miss is that executive presence cannot be simply a projection of confidence and control, but needs to be an expression of their leadership integrity.
HEALTH PROGRESS
You are called to carry out a profound responsibility tied to the integrity and mission of Catholic health care. In a world sometimes skeptical of institutions and religion, you carry a message that all of our facilities — even virtual sites of care — and processes can be sacramental, that is, can be occasions to encounter the loving presence of God. In a world skeptical of and sometimes wounded by religion, you carry the message that Catholic tradition and teaching offer a professional
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