Beyond Executive Presence: Why Ambient Judgement Might Matter More

For years, "executive presence" has sat near the top of every leadership competency framework I've come across. Stand tall. Command the room. Project gravitas. It's a seductive idea, not least because it's so easy to spot in others and so hard to define for ourselves.

But the more I coach senior leaders, the less convinced I am that presence is something you project. Increasingly, I think it's something you read.

The trouble with "presence"

Executive presence, as it's usually taught, is performative. It's about how you land in a room: your posture, your voice, your ability to hold attention. Useful, perhaps, in a pitch or a town hall. But most of leadership doesn't happen in the room with the microphone. It happens in the corridor conversation, the one-to-one that overruns, the message you send at 6pm because something's shifted and you need to react before tomorrow's meeting.

In those moments, presence isn't about being seen. It's about seeing, accurately, and quickly enough to act. I've started calling this ambient judgement: the situational awareness a leader carries with them everywhere, ready to draw on, rather than a performance reserved for the stage.

Awareness, not authority

Good leadership, in my experience, comes down to making the right decision, for the right person, in the right moment. That sounds obvious written down, and yet it's the thing I see senior, capable people get wrong most often, not because they lack judgement, but because they're reading the situation a beat too late.

That requires three overlapping kinds of awareness. Situational awareness: what's actually happening around me right now. Anticipatory awareness: what's likely to happen next, and who will be affected. And temporal awareness: whether this is the moment to act, to wait, or to simply listen. Leaders with strong ambient judgement move fluidly between the three, largely without noticing they're doing it. The good news is that this fluency can be built.

A framework for building it: the five C's

The underlying framework, along with the idea of "pocket presence" that first named it, comes from Brené Brown, who introduces both in her book Strong Ground and explores them further in conversation with organisational psychologist Adam Grant. What follows is my own adaptation of her framework, under my own name for it, into a practical, two-directional worksheet for the leaders I coach.

To make this practical rather than abstract, I use five lenses with the leaders I coach: the five C's. They work as a discipline for reading any situation, and I've found they're most powerful when leaders apply them in both directions: managing down, towards the people they lead, and managing up, towards the people they answer to. Most of us are far more fluent in one direction than the other.

• Colour: The emotional and situational tone in the room. What mood is your team carrying into this conversation? What pressure is your own boss under that you haven't clocked yet?

• Context: The bigger picture behind the task. Have you explained the why, not just the what, to the people below you? Do you understand the pressures shaping the ask from above you?

• Connective tissue: The relationships and trust that let things actually happen. Who needs you to open a door for them? Whose support does your boss need you to help secure?

• Cost: The real toll of a decision: time, energy, political capital, goodwill. What are you asking someone to sacrifice? What is a request costing your boss that you're not in a position to see?

• Consequence: The ripple effects of action, and of inaction. What happens downstream if this goes wrong? What happens to your boss, or to the wider organisation, if you don't deliver?

None of these five are complicated on their own. What makes them powerful is using them together, deliberately, until they stop being a checklist and start being instinct, which is really the point of ambient judgement in the first place.

A tool, not a test

I've put together a short worksheet built around the five C's, with prompts for managing up and managing down side by side, and a simple way of scoring your own confidence in each. It's designed to be revisited, not filed away: a live practice rather than a one-off audit. If it would be useful, get in touch and I'll send it over.

The leaders I most admire aren't the ones who fill a room. They're the ones who read it, and read the people in it, before they decide what to do next.

As always, thanks for stopping by...

5Cs worksheet.pdf

Download PDF • 716KB

References

1. Brown, B. (2025). *Strong Ground*. Random House.

2. Brown, B. & Grant, A. (2025). *Time Scarcity, Asking Questions, and Pocket Presence* [Podcast episode]. In *Dare to Lead with Brené Brown / The Curiosity Shop*. Available at: brenebrown.com/podcast

3. Knowledge at Wharton (2025). *Brené Brown on Values, Vulnerability, and Playing to Win*. University of Pennsylvania.