There was a meeting last month where you knew the answer and did not give it.
You had watched the same approach fail somewhere else. You could see what it would cost. The decision went the other way and you told yourself you would raise it later, in a smaller setting, once you had the numbers lined up.
Later came and went. The thing you knew is still in your head.
The strongest people I work with do this
That is worth sitting with, because it is easy to read holding back as a weakness. It is a habit, and it was trained into you deliberately.
The path to senior leadership in this industry rewards restraint. Build the team. Run the account. Do not make waves. Be the safe pair of hands. Twenty years of that teaches you to hold your view until somebody asks for it, and to notice that the person who speaks last has the least to lose.
It worked. It is why you have the seat.
The moment it stops working
One of the leaders I coach described the moment he noticed. He was sitting in on a client visit. Two people senior to him held a conversation with the chief executive that ran two and a half hours and was never on the agenda. He watched how they moved through it.
Afterwards he said to me, “I'm nowhere there now, today.”
He is not a weak leader. He is a very strong one who has never been asked to do that particular thing, and who had just watched it done in front of him.
The next level asks for the opposite of what got you here. Say the thing in the executive meeting while it still matters. Push back on a decision you believe is wrong. Lead the conversation with a client's chief executive instead of supporting it from the side.
What “presence” actually is
It has very little to do with slides or voice training. It is the distance between what you already know and what you actually say.
You know the business. You know the client. You know what needs to happen next. Every one of those is already in your head, fully formed. The gap sits between knowing it and saying it where it counts.
When senior leaders tell me what worries them, failing is seldom on the list. Most of them have failed at something large and survived it. What they name is being read wrong, and not getting the chance to correct it.
So they say less. Which brings about the exact thing they were guarding against.
What changes when you close it
The leaders who work on this describe something very ordinary. They stop rehearsing. The view arrives and they give it, and the meeting moves because of it.
Their people start bringing them problems earlier, because the response is now predictable. Their peers stop being surprised by what they think. The work they were doing invisibly becomes work other people can see and build on.
None of that requires a personality transplant. It requires closing a gap of about four seconds.
Three questions for your week
One. What did you know last week and choose not to say?
Two. Who was in that meeting, and what did your silence cost them?
Three. What is the smallest version of that thing you could say this week?
Start with the third one. The smallest version is enough to prove the ceiling you have been assuming is not there.
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Raju Panjwani | Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc.
I was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley for 18 years. I now work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, on becoming the leader the business now needs.