How to Build Executive Presence in Your Team’s Meetings

Who doesn’t love another meeting dropped on their calendar?

If you just groaned, you’re not alone. But the problem isn’t just too many meetings. The real issue is that most teams aren’t coached on how to show up with clarity, confidence, and influence. Whether they’re pitching a client, aligning cross-functionally, or presenting to leadership, how your team shows up in meetings comes down to one thing: executive presence.

And no, executive presence isn’t just for executives.

At Duarte, we define it as the ability to connect, influence, and stay composed, no matter the room or the moment. When your team, department, or entire organization has executive presence down cold, meetings stop being groan-worthy and start generating real results.

In this blog, we’ll focus on how to build that presence inside the most frequent, and most overlooked, high-stakes settings: meetings.

How Executive Presence Can Make the Most of Meetings

Whether internal or client facing, meetings are where ideas are shared and sharpened between decision-makers of all stripes. So, it should come as no surprise that how you and your team choose to show up in these crucial moments can have serious ramifications. From brainstorming new ventures, to inking new contracts, to retooling a high-level strategy, achieving a variety of outcomes requires the right balance of hard and soft skills that flow downstream of presence. At Duarte, we call them power skills because there’s nothing soft about them. To establish trust from the get-go and maintain it well into the future, how your team acts before, during, and after meetings can give shape to presence.

Let’s dive in. 

How Effective Executive Presence Sets the Table

Few things linger like a first impression. And while it’s impossible to reset relationships that are already in flight, each new meeting or collaborative moment is a chance to assert a more refined presence. This begins as soon as that request or invitation hits an audience’s, customer’s, or colleague’s inbox. Stakes should be clear from the onset, both in correspondences leading up to the meeting and in written fields in calendar settings. This will give participants a quick reminder of the topics at hand, and show respect for their time by saving them from having to dig in their email.

From there, consider what supporting documents could make this meeting most efficient. For a sales pitch, maybe it’s a quick pre-read of customer testimonials to help establish credibility before jumping into their unique pain points. Or for a new cross-promotional marketing opportunity, the speaker could share early brainstorms to kickstart creativity and demonstrate commitment. Consider too how to present the information. At Duarte, we pioneered the use of Slidedocs® to capture the intersection of documents and slide decks for a skimmable synthesis of text and visuals. However, it’s important to determine when a denser document or breezier slide deck will best serve each audience’s needs.

Given the myriad permutations meetings can take, identifying the right lead up can be highly contingent on the type of work and what you know of your audience’s preferred working style. For new relationships, it is important to garner as much information as possible to set the right tone before entering the room or turning on your camera. And for lasting relationships, building trust and authority requires ongoing respect and diligence to maintain exceptional presence.

How Presence Can Help Your Team Meet the Meeting

As you move toward meeting time, take stock of the elements that constitute executive presence. These can vary depending on if the setting is in-person or virtual. Thankfully, many of the same core principles apply. To ensure all bases are covered, here’s a few questions for your team to consider:

• Does my appearance match the meeting stakes?
• Are visual aids and leave-behinds ready?
• What tech requirements will I require and are they compatible with the environment?
• If the meeting is online, does the virtual background make the right impression?
• At what pace or cadence should the meeting progress?

From there, your team needs to consider how their posture, eye contact, and other non-verbal signs of attentiveness, respect, and confidence can help throughout the meeting.

How Presence Looks in Practice

Imagine an online retailer is waiting to hear a pitch from an innovative payments solution vendor. The vendor enters the room to the sound of laughter. Gauging the room, they launch into some light-hearted small talk to match the mood as they do a quick tech-check. As talk peters out, the online retailer exec leans forward. The vendor clocks the shift and starts the presentation. The initial slides are greeted with nods around the table. Suddenly, during a slide on product features, a sales leader leans forward and asks:

Q: How does this help with customer retention?

Not wanting lose focus, the vendor quickly unpacks product features and says:

A: Our product offers a suite of popular payment methods and frequently receives 4.5- to 5-star reviews from verified customers.

Visibly dejected, the sales leader is now looking out the window. And the exec is now down at their phone. At the conclusion of the pitch, the exec says they’ll need to think about your proposal. Ouch.

What went wrong?

Let’s examine the scenario. The payment solution vendor read the room correctly and aligned with audience cues by joining in small talk and easing into the pitch. Likewise, picking up on the execs change of posture and quickening the pace was another prudent choice. But after a smooth start, the meeting veered off course when the vendor didn’t pivot to the sales leader’s needs. The question about customer retention was crucial feedback that a chief concern was absent or unclear in the pitch. Add to that the sales leader and exec’s body language and disengagement at the response telegraphed that statistics and testimonials was not what they had in mind.

It’s situations like this where adapting listening is an essential element of presence. In short, adaptive listening offers an approach to meet audience needs with empathy that recenters their experience.

Let’s try that again.

Q: How does this help with customer retention?

Without missing a beat, the sales leader pivots to answer the concern:

A: For online retailers who use our payment services, we’ve seen a 23% uptick in repeat customers, and abandoned shopping carts decline by 30%.

Now, the online retailer clearly sees how their pain point can be addressed. And moreover, they feel seen and respected by the thoughtful response. This is how adaptive listening, preparation, and quick thinking, all key factors of presence, combine to ensure your team makes a positive impression. Plus, it helps keep the meeting moving forward to everyone’s satisfaction. By staying nimble and keeping audience needs in focus, your team stands a higher chance of walking away with a freshly inked contract.

See the difference?

Dressing the part, coming prepared, and projecting affable confidence via the right combination of respect and presentation acumen all play a role in cultivating presence. In these ways executive presence is like being cast to play the best version of yourself that the moment demands. But once it’s time to meet, preparation gives way to performance. And don’t forget it always pays to be punctual.

How Executive Presence Can Close the Loop for a Lasting Impression

At the end of the meeting, it’s time to close the loop with a few parting gestures. Follow-up with a thank you email that clearly outlines progress, action items, and key takeaways from the meeting. Coach your teams to catch personal details, such as a favorite sports team or alma mater, and make a quick callback in the follow-up email. But primarily, they must follow through on all the agreements reached in the meeting. Where face time can do wonders for building trust, it’s maintained when your team is reliable and creates value. This can include anything from sending a promised meeting recording to finishing last minute tasks.

It’s worth noting that each meeting is a stepping stone in maintaining the relationship with each partner, client, customer, executive, or colleague. Put another way, these are not one-off experiences, but sequences that require ongoing care. Maintaining the right presence every time will ensure others keep a positive impression of you, your team, and your brand.

Executive Presence in Meetings and Beyond

With the right multi-modal approach and in-meeting presence, you might even start looking forward to meetings! By taking time before, during, and after to convey attentiveness, polish, and respect, audiences will associate your team’s work with care and exceptional competence in every interaction. This can help nurture consensus, alignment, fresh prospects, and strategic breakthroughs, while laying the foundation for more fruitful working relationships. With all these upsides, why not make executive presence a key part of your team’s toolkit?

From making the most of every meeting to embodying confidence, composure, and charisma at every juncture, dialing in presence can continue to pay dividends. And the best part is, like any skill, executive presence can be gained and applied at every level of your organization. If anything, Duarte is hoping to dispel the notion that presence is something people either have or don’t. Rather, it’s a constellation of learned traits and considerations that, with proper training, can become anyone’s professional baseline.

To take the next step toward upskilling your team’s presence in meetings and beyond, contact a Duarte concierge to learn more about our offerings. Our experts can help build you an executive presence program from the ground up or recommend one of our workshops and coaching packages to advance your team’s skills. Start earning trust and cultivating a reputation for excellence that resonates every meeting, every time.

For more free resources to help you and your team build and maintain presence in every meeting, visit The Duarte Guide to Executive Presence.