At a roundtable I led last month, a senior woman said something that stopped the room. In the same review cycle she had been told she was too direct, and that she needed more executive presence. Both pieces of feedback came from the same leadership team. Everyone around the table nodded. They had lived some version of it.
The Bind Hiding Inside the Feedback
This is the contradiction women keep running into. Assertiveness that gets a man called decisive gets a woman called abrasive. Hold back to avoid the label and you get marked as lacking presence. The bar moves depending on who is describing it, and the woman in the middle is left trying to satisfy two demands that cancel each other out.
Executive presence is usually taught as if it were a fixed trait. Stand tall, speak with conviction, command the room. The advice assumes a neutral audience that rewards the same behavior consistently. For many women, that audience does not exist. The feedback is shaped by expectations they did not set and cannot win against by adjusting their delivery one more time.
Why the Usual Advice Fails
Most guidance tells women to manage the perception. Soften here, sharpen there, find the precise register that reads as confident but not threatening. The problem is that the target keeps moving. Spend enough energy managing how you come across and you have less left for the actual work, which is the thing that was supposed to earn the presence in the first place.
I have watched talented leaders pour years into this. They become fluent in reading the room and exhausted by it. The effort is real and the results are thin, because the contradiction was never theirs to resolve. You cannot perform your way out of a standard designed to shift.
From Performance to Influence
What I keep noticing is that the women who break through stop treating presence as a performance they can perfect. They treat it as influence they can build. The shift is concrete. They get specific about the outcome they want in a meeting before they walk in. They say the hard thing once, clearly, and then they stop managing the aftermath. They let the result speak instead of narrating how they came across.
This is not about caring less. It is about moving the effort to where it pays off. Influence is built on outcomes other people can see and rely on, not on a flawless impression that has to be renewed every meeting. When the work lands and the judgment proves sound, the presence question quietly answers itself.
What This Looks Like in Practice
- Decide the one outcome you want from a conversation before it starts, and aim everything at that, not at how you are perceived.
- Say the difficult thing a single time, plainly, and resist the pull to soften, repeat, or over-explain it afterward.
- Track the results of your decisions over time, and let that record do the arguing for you.
- Stop trying to be legible to people who keep moving the line. Spend that energy on the people whose trust actually compounds.
What Is Left When You Stop Auditioning
Presence is not a costume you put on to satisfy a contradictory audience. It is what is left when you stop auditioning. The most powerful thing I saw at that table was a woman deciding she was done trying to be legible to people who kept moving the line. She was not giving up on influence. She was relocating it to ground she could actually stand on.
If you have been told you are too much and not enough in the same breath, the contradiction is not a flaw in you to fix. It is a signal to change the game you are playing. Build the kind of influence that shows up in outcomes and relationships, and let the people who keep adjusting the standard adjust to that instead.
