The Essentials: Executive Presence

How do you know how diverse your company’s workforce is, how equitable its processes are, and how included people feel if nobody is using any metrics? DEI strategist Lily Zheng explains the power of data to track a company’s progress, fix unfairness, and hold people to their promises. They have advice for measuring and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion even when you don’t have a budget or you’re starting from scratch.

Is mid-level management a stone you’re ready to step off of? Making that move is difficult but doable, and Amy B and her three guests will direct, inspire, and reassure you. An executive coach validates the challenges of scoring a position that’s scarce. Then, two COOs whose careers stagnated in mid-level management before accelerating again, recount the conversations, decisions, and networking that jump-started them.

As a mid-level manager, when you spot an opportunity for the business to adopt a new technology, enter a different market, or improve a process, how should you approach the people above you so that they listen to your idea and act on it? Executives have a reputation for dismissing suggestions that aren’t theirs. Amy B and her two guests, Sue Ashford and Ellen Bailey, suggest ways to frame the issue, involve others, and manage emotions so that your idea comes to fruition.

Strategist Andrea Belk Olson spells out how to make the most of the latest corporate master plan that’s now your job to put into action. She suggests important questions to ask yourself before hitting the ground running, ways to handle resistance from team members, what to do when the plan isn’t working well, and points to include in progress updates.

What’s the happy middle between micromanaging and being too hands off? Amy B and three other experienced mid-level managers describe how they think about when to intervene and when not to so that they are empowering their teams and freeing up their own minds to do more of their most strategic work.

Register for a lively four hours with the Amys, their guest experts, and fellow fans of the show. Dorie Clark will talk about working with the ambition you’ve got right now; Ruchi Sinha building teams’ trust in you as a leader and in one another; and Lily Zheng, on where we are now with DEI and where they’d like to see organizations go from here. We’ll end with an advice hour, where Amy B and Amy G answer audience questions about leading a team, dealing with conflict, negotiating, or whatever else comes through the chat.

If you’re in a leadership role, or any role where you are outspoken and visible, chances are that at some point people are going to criticize you, sometimes fiercely, sometimes publicly. Are you ready for that? Two women who’ve felt the heat because of decisions they’ve made or arguments they’ve put forward—or simply because of who they are—reflect on the ways they’ve steeled themselves and dealt with the fallout. Listening to them recount how they responded to fierce criticism will hopefully help you think about how you might respond, both when you see it coming and when you don’t.

We all need to set boundaries, even in the most structured jobs, because work has its way of encroaching on the rest of our life. Ashley, a senior analyst for the federal government, recently shifted to a schedule that helps her do her most important work and have some alone time before her family gets home. Now she’s trying to figure out how to further minimize interruptions, deal with slow and busy stretches, and get out of unproductive meetings. Amy G and executive coach Melody Wilding talk through adjustments Ashley can make and things she can say to achieve those goals. They also offer strategies for how to communicate your new limits with colleagues and how to hold the line when your boundaries inevitably get tested.

Trust smooths the way for collaboration, conflict resolution, and influencing. But how do you build this asset? And how do you repair it when you’ve missed a series of important deadlines or otherwise messed up? Organizational psychologist Ruchi Sinha talks with a listener who’s struggling to restore skeptics’ confidence in her and her team. Ruchi shares the three elements of trust and how to convey each one. She also offers advice on what to do if you’ve failed to acknowledge a broken promise and how to communicate practically when confidentiality prevents you from being totally transparent.

Executive presence is a mix of gravitas, communication skills, and appearance. But what does that look and sound like in practice? To help a fully remote insurance underwriter think through ways she can act like a leader, we bring in a role model of hers and an expert in strategic communication.