In 1784, a young naval officer named Joshua Barney stood before the Continental Congress, anticipating a promotion that felt, by all objective measures, overdue. He had recently returned from the Battle of the Delaware, where he had commanded a small, outgunned vessel to a decisive victory against the British, capturing a ship with twice his firepower.

Barney was a hero, a tactician, and a man of proven grit. Yet, when the appointments were announced, his name was missing. The delegates, men who spent their days in powdered wigs and lace cuffs, whispered that Barney lacked the “requisite dignity” of a high-ranking officer. He was too brash, too much a creature of the deck and the salt, and not enough a creature of the parlor. They couldn’t fault his mathematics or his courage, so they faulted his essence. They didn’t have a rubric for his failure; they only had a feeling.

Kwame adjusted his cufflink, a small silver square that caught the fluorescent light of the eleventh-floor conference room, as he waited for the director to finish turning the page of the performance review. Kwame, whose quarterly revenue numbers had exceeded the department average by 24%, watched the director’s pen hover over a specific line in the “Leadership Competencies” section. The air in the room was stale, smelling of old carpet and the faint, ozone tang of a nearby laser printer.

“The numbers are fantastic, Kwame. Truly. But the committee feels you’re missing that… executive presence. You know, gravitas.”

– The Director

Kwame felt a familiar, hollow weight settle in his stomach. When he asked for a definition-a roadmap to this mythical gravitas-the answers began to fragment. The director told him he needed to “command the room” more during high-stakes meetings. Later that afternoon, HR suggested that his communication style was “too transactional” and that he needed to “build a narrative.”

Finally, his mentor, a man who had spent thirty years navigating the corporate labyrinth, pulled him aside and whispered that he should try lowering the pitch of his voice and perhaps “update his wardrobe.” He left the office with three different sets of instructions and a lingering sense that he was being judged on something invisible, something he had been born without, like a specific blood type or a height requirement he’d failed to meet.

The Phonetics of Polish

For years, I believed the word “epitome” was pronounced “epi-tome,” rhyming with “home.” I said it with confidence in front of groups of people, convinced I was using a high-level vocabulary word to describe the very best version of something. It wasn’t until I was teaching a student how to navigate a complex four-way intersection-I’m a driving instructor by trade, a job that requires a certain level of immediate, unquestioned authority-that she gently corrected me. “It’s eh-pit-o-mee,” she said.

The shame wasn’t in the mistake; it was in the realization that I had been signaling a lack of “polish” every time I tried to sound polished. I was trying to perform an identity that I hadn’t fully decoded. This is exactly what happens when we tell professionals they need “executive presence” without defining what that means.

When an organization uses vague language like “gravitas” or “command,” it is essentially admitting that it doesn’t have a standard for leadership that is untethered from its own biases. If we cannot measure it, we cannot teach it; and if we cannot teach it, we are simply selecting for the people who already look and sound like the people in charge. It is a closed loop of self-replication.

The Science of Bias: Affective Heuristic

To understand why this is so damaging, you have to look at the “Affective Heuristic.” This is a mental shortcut where humans allow their likes and dislikes to color their beliefs about the world. In a professional setting, if a manager “likes” the way a candidate speaks-perhaps because it reminds them of their own speech patterns or the patterns of a successful predecessor-they will subconsciously attribute higher levels of competence, intelligence, and “presence” to that candidate.

Because it is easy to process, we assume it is “correct.” This is the invisible tax paid by anyone who doesn’t fit the default mold. The cost of this vagueness is not just emotional; it’s structural. When feedback is unactionable by design, the burden of decoding it falls entirely on the person least served by the status quo.

Breaking Down the “Unteachable”

I see this on the road all the time. I’ll tell a student, “You need to be more confident behind the wheel.” They usually respond by gripping the steering wheel tighter and driving faster-two things that actually make them less safe.

When they do those things, the confidence arrives on its own. The corporate world refuses to do this. It wants the “result” of presence without having to do the hard work of defining the “actions.” By keeping the criteria fuzzy, the organization retains the power to move the goalposts. It’s a way of saying, “I’ll know it when I see it,” which is just another way of saying, “I’ll know it when I see someone who makes me feel comfortable.”

This is where the frustration turns into a trap. If you are told you lack presence, you begin to monitor yourself. You watch your hands. You listen to the cadence of your own voice while you’re speaking.

The very act of trying to project “presence” often destroys the authentic engagement that would actually lead to real influence. The solution isn’t to ignore the reality of how people are perceived. We live in a world of first impressions and evolutionary biases. The solution is to turn these “mystical” qualities into a curriculum.

From Essence to Actions

If “commanding the room” actually means “using steady eye contact and pausing for two seconds after a key point,” then say that. If “gravitas” actually means “the ability to summarize complex data into a three-point narrative,” then teach that.

There are resources for this. People often find that when they stop trying to “be” something and start “doing” specific communication behaviors, the feedback changes. A platform like

PDS Courses

provides the kind of granular, skill-based training that is often missing from corporate HR rubrics.

Instead of being told to “have more confidence,” a learner might study the mechanics of vocal tonality or the psychology of social interaction. This moves the needle from “who you are” to “what you can do.” We have to stop treating leadership as an inherent trait that some people possess and others lack.

The radiator in Kwame’s office continued its rhythmic hiss. He looked at the review one last time and realized the word “presence” had been used four times, but the word “revenue” had only been used once. The document was a mirror of the director’s comfort, not a map of Kwame’s growth.

“We are all, in some way, pronouncing our own ‘epitomes’ incorrectly, waiting for a world that cares more about the depth of our vocabulary than the accent we use to deliver it.”

The silver square of a cufflink cannot reflect the value of a leader when the rubric used to judge them is written in disappearing ink. Until we demand that “presence” be defined as a set of teachable behaviors rather than a vague vibration of the soul, we will continue to promote the people who best mimic the past, rather than the people who are best equipped to build the future.

The “presence” feedback isn’t a critique of your potential; it’s a confession of your manager’s inability to explain why they feel the way they do. But until that world arrives, the best defense against a vague “personality” critique is a specific, technical mastery of the signals we send.