Present tense
How do you project yourself in the workplace – and what impact does it have? Taking part in a mentoring programme, whether as mentor or mentee, can greatly enhance how you operate. Audrey M O’Sullivan takes the lead
The Women in Leadership mentoring programme has been operating since 2018, and over 550 mentees have participated to date.
Both mentors and mentees have found it to be a rewarding experience. The programme has also provided invaluable insights into the state of the profession and its workplace culture.
What has come through repeatedly in the mentoring programme is the importance of respectful communication between colleagues in the workplace.
In a competitive employment market, the benefits of being known for operating a positive work environment are obvious. In an increasingly complex profession, spending time actively providing positive leadership can have immense benefits and enable a practice to thrive.
Perennial questions
So how can solicitor/managers and employees assess the way they project themselves in the workplace – and the impact it can have?
Taking part in a mentoring programme, whether as a mentor or mentee, can greatly enhance how you operate.
As mentors on the Woman in Leadership Programme over a number of years, it is curious to observe that some perennial questions continue to arise for many participants, including “how can I create more impact, especially in terms of my role?” or “how can I have more impact and influence with my boss, work colleagues and clients?”
In other words, “how can I build upon my ‘leadership quotient’ rather than plateau and become stuck?”
A useful dimension to think about in this context is that of personal and professional ‘presence’ – meaning how we perceive and project our identity in the world.
Many clues as to our presence reveal themselves in how we ‘show up’ in our work. Presence is about our way of being in the world.
Master coach Dorothy Siminovitch writes that leadership ‘presence’ is something that’s hard to describe – it is elusive, even mysterious, and yet when we see it in others, we recognise it immediately.
One simple definition of ‘presence’ by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is that presence is “the ability to be fully conscious and create spontaneous relationship with others using a style that is open, flexible and confident”.
For this reason, the ICF regards presence as a key leadership competency, requiring professional mastery.
‘Where’ our presence shows up in our lives (for good or for ill) is more easily and clearly recognised in our interpersonal and social exchanges with others at work, because ‘presence’ is something that is “encountered and known” (according to Siminovitch) only through engagement with other people.
Becoming self-aware
Master coach Geoff Pelham suggests that most people tend to be unaware of the kind of presence they have as they engage with people, day to day, and thus will be unaware of the kind of impact their presence has on others.
Yet everyone possesses presence, regardless of their level of self-awareness of what their presence is like or the impact their presence has on others.
So having a conscious awareness of what we evoke (or provoke) in others is like a key to unlocking a door onto a pathway to more fulfilling and rewarding professional and personal relationships.
For example, presence is communicated to others powerfully through speech and the words we use – how we breathe, the use of our gaze, and whether we are present and paying attention to a conversation or are distracted.
A particular coaching model on ‘aspects of presence’ (developed by William Warner, 1975), suggests that presence is embodied through our physical appearance, our manner (how we place ourselves, vis-à-vis others), the quality of our voice (sound quality: loud, soft, high, low, even or varied), our mood (even-tempered or manic, serious or humorous), and whether we are emotionally available and open.
It is about our values: whether they are explicit attitudes and values, or implicit and implied.
Finally, it represents our ‘signature’ uniqueness (are we active/ passive, flamboyant/serene, ambiguous, orderly/bumbling, inward/outward looking?).
Compelling presence
And while this list of characteristics of presence is important, Siminovitch maintains that a compelling presence also depends on a “coherent and consistent” presentation of self (that who I am on the inside is reflected on the outside), and whether there is ‘alignment’ between our embodied presence, mind, and spirit that evokes positive resonance in others.
The ‘quality’ of our presence is also enhanced by focusing on being connected to and embodying our values (what is important to us), our creativity (flow and play), emotions and our heart-based relations with others, our communication, and intuition.
And, as leaders, it is our responsibility to develop, embody, and access these qualities of presence.
Paying attention to the tone of our voice, the quality of our words, and the congruence of our body language as we speak affects the impact we make.
It also helps to improve the effect of our presence if we have the capacity to notice and understand our psychological drivers (are we perfectionists, or do we always have to be right?) and our somatic responses to situations that trigger us.
Emotional intelligence
Using emotional intelligence (the skill of understanding our own feelings) will deepen our self-knowledge, together with having an empathetic and compassionate approach to the feelings of others.
This openness equates to a successful leadership arc leading to a leadership ‘signature’ of executive presence.
For this reason, it is useful for us to reflect regularly on the nature of our own presence and become more conscious of it – to understand how and why we react the way we do, and whether we adapt well or not to the volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (‘VUCA’) world we live in.
Cultivating presence is a daily integrative practice of all we know and our capacity to cognitively reflect and integrate self-awareness, aspects of our presence and its quality, and emotional intelligence with an empathetic key.
Accordingly, the value of mentoring and coaching as a development approach is that the mentor (and coach) can offer valuable data and feedback for what might be useful for an individual to enhance their presence in terms of what might be needed, wanted, or missing, to reorientate them to achieve their desired goals.
This serves to positively influence our social connections. And an authentic presence is fundamental to establishing and maintaining trust, and trust is a key to building successful personal and professional relationships.
Mentoring questions
Some useful mentoring and coaching questions to ask in developing leadership presence include:
- What kind of presence do I (think) I have, and what might it evoke and or provoke in others?
- Do I spend time reflecting and working on my personal and professional presence?
- To what extent is my presence grounded and fully integrated (or not) across the aspects of presence?
We all tend to have a default pattern of how we show up to work – and in the world – so the challenge for us is whether we can expand our emotional repertoire and way of being with others.
This is important, as who we are (or who we think we are), drives what we perceive – and what we perceive drives who we are, suggests Siminovitch.
Our presence, however, is not static. It can always be developed and enriched, and having a mentor or coach alongside us to accompany us in this challenging work can profoundly accelerate our awareness and mastery in successfully adapting to change in the ongoing VUCA situations we face as we move towards the impact we truly wish to achieve and onwards to unimagined possibilities.
Audrey M O’Sullivan qualified as a solicitor in 1999 and is an accredited executive coach.
Audrey O’Sullivan, Claire Loftus, Anne-Marie James, Nicola McDonnell, Sinead Keavey, and Clare Daly are all solicitors and mentors on the Women in Leadership Programme, organised by the Law Society of Ireland. Visit: www.lawsociety.ie.