The Significance of Projecting Leadership Qualities
In the realm of senior leadership, individuals from diverse backgrounds and professions are being coached to hone their skills. These individuals are smart, skilled, and highly competent, with positive business results to show for it. However, many of them share a common problem: they don't look like leaders.
To address this, professional development in leadership presence should emphasize mastering body language, ensuring verbal-nonverbal harmony, and cultivating vocal tone—these elements reinforce credibility, foster trust, and build influence in workplace settings.
Nonverbal communication, such as posture, facial expressions, and gestures, significantly impact leadership presence and shape how messages are received. Dressing appropriately for your desired role further enhances this presence. Practicing these skills by recording yourself, seeking feedback, or working with an executive coach can accelerate improvement.
Confident body language involves maintaining good posture, consistent eye contact, and using gestures that convey authority and engagement without overpowering. Aligning verbal and nonverbal communication means that your facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice support and reinforce the message you are conveying, avoiding contradictions that can reduce credibility.
Vocal tone should be clear, warm, and assertive, modulating pitch and pace to emphasize key points and express confidence and emotional intelligence. Research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found that CEOs with deeper voices managed larger companies, made more money, and tended to be retained longer. On the other hand, under stress or excitement, vocal pitch tends to get higher, especially for women whose voices are naturally higher.
Body language that is aligned with verbal messages reinforces leadership presence. For instance, an executive from a financial institute displayed signs of stress through his body language during a question-and-answer session, specifically through his feet. Conversely, clasping hands in front of the lower body is a gesture that indicates insecurity or discomfort during a formal presentation.
When what is said and how it is looked when said are out of alignment, people may discount what they hear and believe what they see. This is supported by research showing that gestures that contradict verbal messages have a significant impact on an audience, as they can make the verbal message seem nonsensical.
Nonverbal communication, such as posture, also significantly impacts how we evaluate others. The Stereotype Content Model suggests that we evaluate others along two dimensions: warmth and competence. Lower-pitched speakers are perceived as competent, experienced, and trustworthy, while a condensed posture is a nonverbal signal of stress.
For leaders to be optimally influential, they need to display both warm and power signals without being too warm or too powerful. Warm body language includes keeping the body relaxed and open, maintaining eye contact, smiling, tilting the head to one side, using head nods in groups of three, open palm gestures, and genuine smiles. Power signals, on the other hand, include confidence, power, and authority, communicated using height, taking up space, standing tall, moving around to claim territory, uncrossing legs, placing feet firmly on the floor, bringing elbows away from the body, and widening arm position.
Our sense of hearing is stronger than our sight when it comes to accurately detecting emotion, according to a study by Michael Kraus of the Yale University School of Management. Therefore, cultivating an effective vocal tone is crucial in projecting the right image and building influence in the workplace.
- Investment in body language for leaders, including maintaining good posture, consistent eye contact, and using gestures that convey authority, can help reshape the perception of leaders in business and further enhance their careers.
- To effectively communicate and project credibility in their careers, leaders, particularly those in finance, should consider aligning verbal communication with nonverbal cues, such as adopting clear, warm, and assertive vocal tone and demonstrating confident body language, while also paying attention to their facial expressions and gestures.
