Flashback

A number of years ago I was a mid-level partner and slated to appear at a hearing at which leadership in a class action lawsuit would be decided. I had reviewed all the pleadings, spoken with all the plaintiffs’ lawyers involved, analyzed the slates of leadership the judge had implemented in other cases, and planned out a variety of scenarios and how I would react if they occurred. I knew I was ready. But a week or so before I was scheduled to attend I came out of an expert deposition and checked my email. A senior partner had written to me to say that, because I didn’t have much of a “courtroom presence,” he was replacing me with one of my male colleagues.

There was no objective reason to send this male colleague to the hearing: he knew nothing about the case, had never appeared before this particular judge, and had no unusually strong relationships with any of the lawyers who were competing for leadership. Conversely, in the hundreds of hearings and arguments in which I’d appeared in my career, no one (including that senior partner) had ever told me I lacked “courtroom presence.”

The senior partner’s excuse was designed to demean me, and to put a yet another man in a place that you almost always see them. Indeed, as many scholars have noted, MDLs tend to be led by the same people (usually men) over and over again.

“Executive Presence” and Other Nonsense

I am not, of course, suggesting that appearance and public speaking skills are not relevant to success in the courtroom, during client meetings, or even within the politics of the workplace. But there’s danger in calling those things “presence” or other vague terms that can be manipulated to keep women out of courtrooms, strategy meetings with clients, or workplace leadership simply because they don’t sound like men. How many times have you heard a male colleague speak about a female attorney by saying something like: “I don’t know what it is, but I just really don’t like her”?

I suspect that, had I possessed the presence of mind to ask, that senior partner would not have been able to tell me what specific aspects of a “courtroom presence” I lacked. He would have instead responded with something akin to “I know it when I see it.”

But that’s the problem with the concept of “presence” in the first place. “Executive presence,” the term typically used, is defined by the people in power. Most men might say that executive presence means commanding a room, acting decisive, or never backing down. But if you ask federal judges what they are looking for during a leadership hearing, I doubt most of them would say that they want someone with those characteristics. Indeed, most leadership applications purport to extoll the applicant’s ability to get along with other attorneys and reach compromise.

The concept of executive presence also lacks objective criteria. Sylvia Ann Hewitt, CEO of Hewlett Consulting and author of the book Executive Presence, The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, says executive presence is “an amalgam of qualities that telegraphs that you are in charge or deserve to be,” and rests on three “pillars":

1. How you act (gravitas)

2. How you speak (communication)

3. How you look (appearance).

While Hewitt’s book attempts to make the concept gender (and race) neutral, it’s not hard to see how such broad ideas about what constitutes presence could become yet another paradigm that tells women they don’t belong at the top.

Even if executive presence is more complex than acting like a man, it ends up becoming something like “act like a man, but not too much.” One woman attended a 2018 seminar on Executive Presence for Women at Stanford University, and described the overwhelming feeling of trying to process all the messages she received:

Some articles have attempted to remove executive presence from its origins in the traditional halls of power by suggesting that executive presence merely means to “be authentic.” But that command seems even vaguer than the original. Do workplaces, judges, and clients really want complete authenticity? Decidedly not. So we’re supposed to be authentic, but not so authentic that we make people uncomfortable? What on earth does that mean?

In short, we should just abolish the concept of executive presence. It has little meaning and is too easily manipulated by those with authority to deny power to those who are different from them. If you’re a woman and someone tells you that you lack executive presence or something similar, make that person be specific about the criticism they’re purporting to give. And, if you’re purporting to offer criticism, and you want to tell someone they should articulate their words more clearly, or speak louder, or look people in the eye, or stand up straight—tell them that. Just don’t tell them that they lack “executive presence.”