She had just been told, for the third time in two years, that she needed to “work on her executive presence.” She asked me what it meant. I told her the honest truth: it depends entirely on who’s watching.
This is one of the most complex and quietly damaging dynamics I encounter in executive coaching. And it is, in my experience, disproportionately experienced by women at senior levels.
The Tightrope
Executive presence, as a concept, carries a hidden gender assumption. The prototype most organisations reach for — decisive, commanding, self-assured — was built in a context where leadership meant a particular kind of man, in a particular kind of room.
Women who exhibit those qualities are often described using a different vocabulary. Not “decisive” — “aggressive.” Not “commanding” — “difficult.” Not “self-assured” — “arrogant.”
And women who soften their approach to avoid those labels are told they lack gravitas.
The tightrope is real. It is exhausting. And it is, ultimately, not a personal development problem — it is a systems problem wearing the costume of a personal development problem.
What Coaching Can and Cannot Do
Coaching cannot fix a biased system. What it can do is help a leader get exquisitely clear on what is hers to own — and what belongs to the room.
Not every perception is feedback. Some of it is projection. And the distinction matters enormously, because the two require completely different responses.
Feedback that reflects a real behaviour — a communication pattern, a tendency to over-explain, a habit of softening direct messages until they lose their edge — that is worth working on. Coaching can help.
Projection that reflects someone else’s discomfort with a capable woman taking up space — that is not a development need. That is a bias, and treating it as a development need only compounds the injustice.
The Work That Actually Helps
In practice, the most useful coaching in this territory doesn’t ask the leader to become someone else. It asks her to become more clearly, more deliberately, more unapologetically herself.
To identify the moments where she is adjusting her style not because it would be more effective, but because she is managing someone else’s discomfort. And to make a conscious choice about whether that adjustment serves her — or merely costs her.
Coach’s Reflection: Executive presence is not a fixed quality. It is relational, contextual, and — frequently — in the eye of a beholder with their own biases. The most useful question is not “how do I build more presence?” but “what kind of presence serves me and those I lead — in this context, at this moment?”
Call to Reflection: Have you ever adjusted how you show up, not because it would be more effective, but because you were managing someone else’s reaction to you? What did that cost you?
Yatish Chandrasekhar is an Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant at The Yogi Compass. He works with senior leaders across industries to help them discover their True North. If this resonated, he’d love to hear from you.