Executives considering engaging an executive coach often do so because they are top performers in their particular area of functional expertise but have found themselves plateauing in an organization because, as they start to realize, functional expertise — no matter how talented and intelligent you are — only gets you so far. As Marshal Goldsmith famously once said, “what got you here won’t get you there.”
So what actually does help you influence increasingly more people and bigger issues in an organization? Usually it’s not what you’re doing but how you are doing it. How are you building followership? To what extent do others want to work with you — or do they engage with you only begrudgingly? Influencing and achieving results through others requires taking the time to engage and inspire them. General Eisenhower once said “leadership is the art of getting others to do what you want because they want to do it.” Some have referred to that quality as executive presence. That term can be a bit cryptic, overused, and non-specific. Stick with me.
Early in our consulting practice, CHROs and Learning and Development professionals would call and tell us they had a senior executive who needed coaching and help with their “executive presence.” We would invariably ask for specifics — what did they mean by that, exactly? To a person, nearly all of them said some version of the same thing: “Well, I can’t really describe it, but I know it when I see it.”
Supreme Court rulings aside, that’s not a coaching plan. Senior executives and the organizations that support them needed a way to articulate — and manage to — the specific behaviors that both helped and hurt their organizational effectiveness. Since our clients couldn’t define it, let alone measure it, the first thing we did was define it.
What we came up with: the attributes of a leader that engage, align, and inspire others to act. Then we built a construct to identify and organize 90 specific behaviors across three dimensions — Character, Substance, and Style — each containing five facets, with six specific behaviors in each facet. The measurement of those behaviors through a multi-rater process became the Executive Presence Index. The only behavior-based assessment in the executive coaching space, and the only one to actually demystify and measure executive presence.
Being the Smartest Person in the Room Is Not the Key to Success
Damon Bates·
Executive presence. The term is cryptic, overused, and non-specific. Here's how the ExPI demystifies it — and why behaviors, not personality, are the lever that actually moves the needle.
Why Behavior
So why all this focus on behavior? Because behavior is something you can actually measure and manage.
Think back to when you first started managing and leading teams. You learned quickly that you couldn’t manage what your people thought, felt, meant, or wanted to do — you could only manage what they actually did. How they behaved and channeled that behavior into a work product. The same principle applies to you. Your behaviors are manageable — if you know what they are.
To illustrate, consider other assessments you’ve probably used. Take Myers-Briggs. You go through the process and learn you’re an ENTJ. The description sounds like you. But what Myers-Briggs does not tell you is what to do to get better. What should you do more of? What should you do less of to improve your organizational effectiveness? It tells you who you are. It doesn’t tell you how you’re landing.
A behavioral assessment in a multi-rater format gives you that insight. It tells you how your behaviors are being perceived by others — and whether those perceptions are helping your cause or holding you back.
Let’s hover on that word: perceptions.
Some of the best feedback I ever received came from my boss in the early 2000s. I was running a multi-product marketing team at one of the largest life insurance companies in the world — building content, sales tools, and programs for consumers and financial advisors. Our team was deep in a debate about a program we were developing, and I said something like “I’ve been through this with my team multiple times and we really feel...” He stopped me cold. “Batesy — who cares what you think? What matters is what your customers and partners think.”
It stung. But he was right. What mattered wasn’t what I thought about the program — it was how others perceived it, and how they perceived my efforts to socialize it. We are accountable not just for our actions, but for the perceptions we create in others through our behaviors.
Think back to when you first started managing and leading teams. You learned quickly that you couldn’t manage what your people thought, felt, meant, or wanted to do — you could only manage what they actually did. How they behaved and channeled that behavior into a work product. The same principle applies to you. Your behaviors are manageable — if you know what they are.
To illustrate, consider other assessments you’ve probably used. Take Myers-Briggs. You go through the process and learn you’re an ENTJ. The description sounds like you. But what Myers-Briggs does not tell you is what to do to get better. What should you do more of? What should you do less of to improve your organizational effectiveness? It tells you who you are. It doesn’t tell you how you’re landing.
A behavioral assessment in a multi-rater format gives you that insight. It tells you how your behaviors are being perceived by others — and whether those perceptions are helping your cause or holding you back.
Let’s hover on that word: perceptions.
Some of the best feedback I ever received came from my boss in the early 2000s. I was running a multi-product marketing team at one of the largest life insurance companies in the world — building content, sales tools, and programs for consumers and financial advisors. Our team was deep in a debate about a program we were developing, and I said something like “I’ve been through this with my team multiple times and we really feel...” He stopped me cold. “Batesy — who cares what you think? What matters is what your customers and partners think.”
It stung. But he was right. What mattered wasn’t what I thought about the program — it was how others perceived it, and how they perceived my efforts to socialize it. We are accountable not just for our actions, but for the perceptions we create in others through our behaviors.
What the ExPI Measures
The ExPI organizes executive presence across three dimensions, fifteen facets, and ninety specific observable behaviors — six behaviors per facet. That specificity is the point.
A standard 360 aggregates perceptions of outcomes and intent. It tells you what people think of you. The ExPI tells you which specific behaviors are driving those perceptions — and whether the gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you is helping your cause or holding you back. That gap is almost always where the work lives.
| CHARACTER Trust | SUBSTANCE Credibility | STYLE Execution |
|---|---|---|
| Authenticity Being real, genuine, transparent and sincere in one’s relations and interactions with others | Practical Wisdom Displaying highly honed qualities of insight and judgement that get to the heart of issues and produce prudent decisions | Demeanor Looking and acting like an able executive, adapting dress and demeanor to the situation, and handling social situations with tact |
| Integrity Acting with fidelity to one’s actions and beliefs, living up to high standards of morality, veracity, and promise-keeping | Confidence Being self-assured in decision making and action; ready to accept the risk and responsibility for taking timely action | Intentionality Clarifying direction and keeping actions aligned and on track, all without stifling dissent or neglecting needs to adjust course |
| Concern Demonstrating interest in others, encouraging adaptive development, and promoting a healthy, sustainable culture | Composure Proving to be steady in a crisis; able to calm and focus others, and to bring objectivity and perspective to critical decisions | Inclusiveness Actively involving others, welcoming diverse points of view, encouraging ownership in mission, and empowering initiative |
| Restraint Displaying a calm disposition, characterized by reasonableness and by avoidance of emotional extremes or impulsiveness | Resonance Connecting with others; attentive, attuned, and responsive to feelings, motivations, and thoughts; deepening alignment | Interactivity Promoting an interpersonal style of dialog and timely exchange of information and questions to coordinate action |
| Humility Showing awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses, an openness to others, and a belief that all people have worth | Vision Generating an inspiring, enterprise-wide picture of what could be; recognizing emerging trends, and engaging all in strategy | Assertiveness Speaking up, valuing constructive conflict, and raising issues directly without shutting others down |
Bates Executive Presence Index™ — bates-communications.com
A standard 360 aggregates perceptions of outcomes and intent. It tells you what people think of you. The ExPI tells you which specific behaviors are driving those perceptions — and whether the gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you is helping your cause or holding you back. That gap is almost always where the work lives.
What Coaching with the ExPI Looks Like
We administer the ExPI as a multi-rater process: you rate yourself, and so do your manager, your peers, and your direct reports. When the results come back, we sit down and work through the data together.
The first thing we look at are your strengths — and that’s intentional, for three reasons.
First, this can be an introspective process. Before we look at anything else, we take time to appreciate what you’re genuinely good at. That matters.
Second, your strengths are the tools most immediately available to you. Think of them as sitting on your desk, ready to pick up. Your development opportunities, by contrast, are on the top shelf or in a box — accessible, but it takes more time and effort to get there and deploy them effectively. When you need to drive results quickly, your strengths are what you reach for. Knowing what they are — and making conscious decisions to deploy them — is itself a leadership skill.
Third, and perhaps most importantly: your strengths can be actively used to develop against your development opportunities. If you score high in Integrity, for example, that same quality can be used to build and stick to a disciplined plan for improving a facet that needs work. Your strengths aren’t just things to feel good about. They’re levers.
Once we’ve grounded the work in strengths, we turn to the gaps — places where your self-perception diverges from how others experience you. A leader who rates themselves high on Resonance but receives low scores from direct reports on that same facet has a specific, addressable problem. We know exactly what Resonance means behaviorally. We know what doing it well looks like. We have something concrete to work on.
That’s the difference between coaching with a behavioral framework and coaching without one. Without it, you’re working from anecdote and intuition. With it, you’re working from data — specific, behavior-level data tied directly to your organizational effectiveness.
I know this firsthand. I was an executive with a coach long before the ExPI existed. There is no question in my mind that I could have improved my effectiveness more rapidly if I’d had this level of behavioral insight at the time.
The first thing we look at are your strengths — and that’s intentional, for three reasons.
First, this can be an introspective process. Before we look at anything else, we take time to appreciate what you’re genuinely good at. That matters.
Second, your strengths are the tools most immediately available to you. Think of them as sitting on your desk, ready to pick up. Your development opportunities, by contrast, are on the top shelf or in a box — accessible, but it takes more time and effort to get there and deploy them effectively. When you need to drive results quickly, your strengths are what you reach for. Knowing what they are — and making conscious decisions to deploy them — is itself a leadership skill.
Third, and perhaps most importantly: your strengths can be actively used to develop against your development opportunities. If you score high in Integrity, for example, that same quality can be used to build and stick to a disciplined plan for improving a facet that needs work. Your strengths aren’t just things to feel good about. They’re levers.
Once we’ve grounded the work in strengths, we turn to the gaps — places where your self-perception diverges from how others experience you. A leader who rates themselves high on Resonance but receives low scores from direct reports on that same facet has a specific, addressable problem. We know exactly what Resonance means behaviorally. We know what doing it well looks like. We have something concrete to work on.
That’s the difference between coaching with a behavioral framework and coaching without one. Without it, you’re working from anecdote and intuition. With it, you’re working from data — specific, behavior-level data tied directly to your organizational effectiveness.
I know this firsthand. I was an executive with a coach long before the ExPI existed. There is no question in my mind that I could have improved my effectiveness more rapidly if I’d had this level of behavioral insight at the time.
Presence Is Visible Before You Say a Word
There’s one more dimension worth addressing — because I live it on both sides of the lens.
Look back at the Style column in the chart above. The first facet is Demeanor — looking and acting like an able executive, adapting to the situation, handling social contexts with tact. Of all fifteen facets, Demeanor is the one that shows up visually before you open your mouth. It’s what people read in the first few seconds. And it’s what a headshot either captures or misses.
I’m also a headshot photographer. When a senior leader sits down in my studio, I have about thirty seconds before I take the first frame. In that window I’m not thinking about lighting or focal length. I’m watching how they carry themselves. Whether their posture signals authority or apology. Whether their expression is open or defended. Whether the version of themselves sitting in that chair is the version they think they’re projecting — or something quite different.
Most people don’t know. They know what they intend to project. They don’t always know what’s actually landing.
That’s the same problem the ExPI solves inside an organization. The coaching work and the camera work are, at their core, the same work: closing the gap between who you are and how you show up. The ExPI gives us the behavioral data to do it with precision. A great headshot gives you one frame where Demeanor is either working for you — or it isn’t.
If you’re wondering whether any of this applies to you — it probably does. And that’s worth a conversation. Get in touch.
Look back at the Style column in the chart above. The first facet is Demeanor — looking and acting like an able executive, adapting to the situation, handling social contexts with tact. Of all fifteen facets, Demeanor is the one that shows up visually before you open your mouth. It’s what people read in the first few seconds. And it’s what a headshot either captures or misses.
I’m also a headshot photographer. When a senior leader sits down in my studio, I have about thirty seconds before I take the first frame. In that window I’m not thinking about lighting or focal length. I’m watching how they carry themselves. Whether their posture signals authority or apology. Whether their expression is open or defended. Whether the version of themselves sitting in that chair is the version they think they’re projecting — or something quite different.
Most people don’t know. They know what they intend to project. They don’t always know what’s actually landing.
That’s the same problem the ExPI solves inside an organization. The coaching work and the camera work are, at their core, the same work: closing the gap between who you are and how you show up. The ExPI gives us the behavioral data to do it with precision. A great headshot gives you one frame where Demeanor is either working for you — or it isn’t.
If you’re wondering whether any of this applies to you — it probably does. And that’s worth a conversation. Get in touch.