Episode 355: Executive Presence and Leadership with Dr. Alexa Chilcutt

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Alexa Chilcott. She's an executive coach and an expert in executive presence and leadership. You know, the name of this podcast previously was the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, and we talked a lot of times around leadership. And truthfully, I still love leadership. I think it's a topic that you can't ever really fully grasp. I mean, think about John Maxwell and how many years he taught so many different angles around leadership, and so it was great to be able to have her on. We certainly talk about in this episode communication, but one of the topics I thought was really interesting is how do you reestablish the way your team views you? If you're going through a journey and you want to reestablish and change how people, or specifically your team, is viewing you, how do you do that? That's one of the many topics we cover this episode. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Alexa Chilcott. Alexa, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Thank you, I appreciate being on here, Brad.

Excited to have you. Yeah, so I love to start with background and origin story. I love hearing how people got to where they are. So why don't you take our audience back and bring them to present day?

Okay, well, I think probably like most people, I have a very circuitous route to where I am now. Um, I don't know that many people who have a linear pathway, but I actually began in public relations and advertising. And so I was a development director for a nonprofit many years ago in my early 20s, mid-20s. Um, returned to school later on for graduate degrees after I'd already had children. So in my mid-30s, didn't finish my PhD until I was 40, taught at the University of Alabama, was a director, and then— but always kind of kept a foot in executive education or continuing studies because I'm such an applied person. I think working in advertising and PR, I just— I want that information to be applicable, right? So I love working with professionals to kind of help them be better communicators, communicate about themselves, be more effective leaders. And then today I work for Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in executive education and love what I do. That's awesome.

So I, I have to ask, because I, whenever I was doing a little bit of research beforehand, I think that I have heard a lot of different terms, and now I tend to try to make sense of what a word means. And so executive presence— you and I talked about this before we kind of get started, but why don't you share with our listening audience what is executive presence and maybe what it's not?

Okay. At its core, I think the best definition is executive presence is the ability to influence a group of people and to move them to action. What I think people thought executive presence was is that kind of charisma, Mad Men ideal, right? This guy in a suit and very 1950s, you know, they're charismatic, they lead, they're strong, they can be autocratic. But what we know is that actually executive presence is not just short-term impressions, but evaluations over time, which foster that trust and rapport that allows people to want to follow a leader.

Yeah, I think one thing that you said there that resonates with me, that they want to follow, they're actively wanting to be able to follow that leader as opposed to being forced to follow the leader, etc. What is your definition of leadership?

Ooh, um, my definition of leadership is— I think it falls back to that. It's about the ability to have a vision, to have a direction, to clearly articulate that, but to be able to motivate people to move in that same direction with you. So it's about alignment, right? Knowing where you want to go owning those decisions, but how do you align a group of people toward that vision to get those things done?

You know, I can look back and sometimes your greatest strength can also be a debilitating weakness at times. And as an example, from my own personal journey, uh, my background was in sales before, well before I ever became in, in leadership. And I say that not because I was some special salesperson, that's not the case. But at the time there was a lot of talking. I did a lot of talking and it took me a really long time. And still to this day, this podcast is a forcing function for me to learn to be a better listener and try to ask better questions, which I think plays itself out into the business, or at least I hope it does. Can you talk about the importance of listening, active listening, asking questions in becoming a great leader versus, as you said, and I thought was so good, about not just being charismatic and always holding the floor? And you know, this person's on the stage, and you know when you go to Disney World and there's like actors and they're standing up on something just to have a little bit of elevation, right? That's kind of what the old, like, the Madman example is. But yet that's not necessarily leadership at all.

Listening is a whole class. I mean, I don't think there are too many of us that are really great listeners. And in leadership, it's so important to be a good listener. And actually, it's tied to executive presence. In that one of those characteristics of executive presence in those evaluations over time is interpersonal integrity. And the definition of that based on this research study was, or the examples of that was that people, leaders, they weren't just engaging, right? At the beginning, you meet somebody and they're engaging. Oh, how are you? And tell me about yourself and blah, blah, blah. But that they could remember someone's last conversation. So there was this idea of truly being invested in listening to and getting to know people and understanding, and that is tied to interpersonal integrity, which I thought was kind of— that was a new concept for me. But listening, I think, is so important because leaders can get caught in a vacuum about what they think is going on. So the more that you listen and do exactly what you're talking about, having that work— I mean, it's work to put yourself in an active listening mode versus a responsive mode. And when they're really intentional about listening, then what they're doing is they're being kind of not just information seekers, but kind of intelligence gatherers, right? So we're always gathering intelligence. The more that we know, the better we can respond. The better response we have to something, the better decisions that we make. And so listening is incredibly effective. And I think leaders need to be intentional, kind of like you are with the podcast, right? Making yourself do it in a different kind of format. But they need to be intentional about how they listen and the opportunities they take to gather that information.

This is going to be a really loaded question, and I'm going to try my best.

Okay.

How do you know that whenever you are listening and then what your team is sharing with you is the truth, or what you want to hear, or what they think you want to hear?

Okay, I was going to say those are two different things.

What they think—

the truth and what you want to hear.

Okay, truth, or they're sharing, they're telling you Let me just think. And the reason is because I can speak to this from personal, personal pain in my own leadership is that I find out like people are saying the right thing and then come to find out, oh my goodness, this place, this, this place is, is not at all, this is not what they're saying in one-to-ones, in team meetings. Say this, don't say that. Say this, this is what he wants to hear. This is not what he wants to hear. Now, that's a big part of developing culture and all of those kind of things. Yes, I understand, which is why I said this is a loaded question. But how do you know?

Okay, well, you're right in that a lot of times, especially leaders can get isolated or insulated, right? They're insulated from conflicting ideas. People want to be kind of They don't want to be the person that, you know, don't kill the messenger kind of person, right?

Yeah.

So they're going to tell you the things that you want. I think then intentionality comes with, as you said, culture. Culture is huge in building a culture from the ground up or kind of reestablishing, hey guys, as a leader, I need to hear the tough things. I need to be able to make good decisions. I need you to— I mean, in communication, sometimes you actually explicitly have to say the thing and not infer. So explicitly saying to people, and maybe it's people closer, in a closer circle to the leader, I really need to hear the hard things. I need to know. But one great example I actually heard from— so Carla Harris, I don't know if you're familiar with Carla Harris. She was a former senior VP at Morgan Stanley. She was a woman on Wall Street for over 30 years. Brilliant. She's written 3 books: Lead to Win, Expect to Win, Strategize to Win. But the last one is Lead to Win. And in one of the chapters, she talks about intentional leadership. And part of that is not making sure that you're not insulated and having that honest sounding board. But she was talking about one leader who was, you know, leader of a Fortune 100 company. He could have very well been isolated away from hearing anything negative. But he made it a point to keep conversation open between, um, him and the gatekeepers, right? So the janitors, the cashiers, the, you know, whatever, to really kind of be with the people who weren't getting those messages— don't tell them this, tell them this. So I think there are a lot of different ways. First of all, just explicitly, hey, I need feedback. I'm not going to kill the messenger. I got to hear the things if I, if I'm going to make good decisions. And secondly, kind of shopping around and, and getting ideas from different people even farther down on the rung than you would normally communicate with.

You know, you brought up something that I think is, is really important there, and you used the word reestablish. Um, so going back, and I'm not, I'm not making this about my journey, I'm just simply giving it as an illustration for certain topics. Um, and one of them is that when I reflect on that, on that scenario, and I reflect on the culture, the culture had drifted. It was never designed that to be that way. It was never intent. There was no intentionality for it to go the direction that it did. And so therefore there needed to be a reestablishing of my, of the culture, but But really, more importantly, what needed to be reestablished is the view that I felt like the team had of me. And so that's the question I want to ask, is that if you begin to kind of figure out that the team thinks you're stodgy, they're stuck in your ways, or this, this, this actually is probably more relevant, not even stuck in your ways, opposite. You keep changing. You just keep changing things, searching for a silver bullet. There's no stability. There's no stability. You go to a meeting, you hear somebody talk, you're going to come back and change it again. And so change it again, change it again. So there's kind of both/and right in that some people are too, uh, rigid, they don't change. And then for a lot of entrepreneurs, they're just changing so many things constantly, don't give anything ever a chance to work. That was certainly the case for me. And so the question here is really, how do we go about reestablishing with our team the view that they have of us as the leader?

Yeah. Well, you said, you know, reestablish, right? I think that the first thing is we know, we know that the people who make the best leaders have a high degree of emotional intelligence. Right? So you're self-aware, which, number one, that would be exactly what you're going to— whether you've got somebody who's stodgy or you have somebody who's constantly trying to search for the next solution, the first thing is that that person has to be self-aware enough to recognize that I'm being perceived this way and it's, it's taking away from my leadership ability, right? Or that perception of my leadership. So being self-aware. The second thing about emotional intelligence is self-regulation. So self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation. The motivation could be, I've got to change this because things aren't going in the right direction. Then social skills and empathy. So looking at that picture of emotional intelligence and we go, okay, so I've become aware that these things that I'm doing are not working. Whether I'm being perceived one way or I'm behaving in a way that is not working, and therefore I need to change my behaviors in a consistent way to shift those perceptions. But it does take kind of a reset. It takes an intentional, strategic viewpoint of where am I, as opposed to where do I want to be, and charting that path. So, okay, I'm being perceived as this right now, but really what I want to be perceived as are these things. So how do I do that through my attitudes, my actions, my behaviors to kind of move that needle in that direction? And then it's about consistent behavior in those directions. So let's say your, your example of I'm constantly searching for the next solution band-aid, and now the team doesn't know which way they're going and they don't trust that I know which way I'm going. Okay, then we all need to kind of have a timeout. A strategic retreat, meeting, whatever, to say, all right, things are not working. We're going to be intentional. I've, I've become aware that I've been doing these things and we're going to move it in a different way. We're going to have a solid vision. We're going to give it time to work out. But once again, you have to be intentional, strategic, and you have to communicate that strategy and then have consistent behaviors to execute.

Yeah, when you put it that way, it makes it so easy. It's almost like, okay, paint-by-numbers type, type thing. But the reality is business is complex because you're dealing with people and people are complex, right? I want to ask you around if someone says, and they realize they have a self-awareness, right? So you, this person says, I want to really improve myself in one of the areas. That I feel like I need to do a better job with is, is communication, right? And I've had this come up a couple of times. Well, again, myself, but also with clients that they've said something to that effect, basically that way, like, I need to improve my communication, my communication. And yet they're incredible speakers. They're really articulate. They, and, but they yet realize that there's a disconnect from what they're saying and what is being received from the team. But then they don't know where to start. They say, I need to improve my communication. What do I do? Do I go read a book? Do I listen to Alexa on a podcast? I mean, those are probably maybe good things, but they actually want to know where to start. Like, where do people start in, in beginning to improve something like a soft skill like communication?

Yeah. Oh, well, at this point in my career, I would say, I mean, honestly, the, the best thing is to— leaders have to be constant learners, right? And as I teach executive education, I'm an executive coach, you know, you know this, it's about working with people to build those skills. And whether it is taking a class, signing up for an executive education course around communication, just to kind of submerge yourself for 2, 3 days on that topic and be strategic. But it is— communication is about, once again, it's really about strategy. So asking yourself in every type of interaction, whether it's face-to-face, virtual, a meeting, an email, okay, what am I trying to accomplish, right? What is this communication interaction trying to accomplish? At the end of this email, at the end of this meeting, at the end of this presentation, what do I want my audience, whether it's one or many, to walk away remembering or doing? So many times we communicate and it's just information throw up, right? I mean, we're just regurgitating information and we're not really thinking about who we're communicating to and why that information is important to them. They might not need all the information. They just need the information that's relevant to them. And oh, by the way, it's your responsibility as a communicator to figure out why it's relevant to them and to answer that question immediately. So that's the other thing. Like, you have to lead with meaning. Okay, we're going to have this meeting. This is why it's important. At the end of this, this is what I want everybody to walk away with, or a decision we want to make. You know, and then choosing like how to communicate. I think people just don't even think about how they're communicating. Are they sending 50 emails when, you know, email becomes white noise? People aren't, you know, it's like, what does this have to do with me? The email's this long and people are deleting it or saying they're going to come back to it, but they don't. When it really should be a phone call or it really should be a 10-minute Zoom meeting with everybody on the meeting instead of a 2-page email. So I mean, I think it's a lot about how we communicate. In the channel that we choose, but also how we construct our messages to really target connecting with people and making sure they're taking away what they want, what we want them to take away.

Yeah, that's great. As you were talking, I wrote down asynchronous versus synchronous communication. So on a call, on a Zoom, on a call, on a Zoom, in person. Right. I guess that's the only thing synchronous was. And then asynchronous, I can shoot a Loom video. I can send you a, a Voxer or WhatsApp message. I can send you a text, an email, something like that, where I'm sending it wherever I want to. And, um, also one of the things is then the length of that. So for instance, an area specifically that I'm attempting to improve in my communication is brevity. How can I say it completely, yet that message now is 4 minutes, as opposed to— because it gave me the ability to send a 14-minute voice message, I used 14 for 15 minutes to say it. I could have said it in 14 or in 4 minutes.

Well, and this brings up a really great point of people's attention spans. Okay. We have an attention span. In 2015, researchers showed that the average attention span was 8 seconds. That was in 2015.

Oh my goodness.

So I guarantee that today it's like 4 to 5 to 6 maximum seconds.

Sure.

As a leader, as a communicator, you have to recognize, just like you're talking about brevity, not only the brevity of the message, because people are just not going to tune in that long. They're just not going to.

Yep.

But also the ability at the very beginning of the message, whether it's the very beginning of the email or the very beginning of a meeting or presentation, whatever, you have to capture their attention immediately. Like, this is important to you because— and what I'm going to tell you is about this. So you need to do both of those things. Keep it short and capture their attention at the beginning.

Yeah, and I think that the needle that I'm trying to thread with that is capturing attention, keeping attention, giving enough context, giving enough nuance. Because where I've struggled is I've got to be short with this just to be short because I'm trying to work on my brevity, and then at the same time I leave things out And so the needle, the thread there is both being complete in the communication. Let's just say it's around business vision and strategy. This is where we're going. This is what we want to accomplish, and this is how we're going to do it. Okay. Well, that is nice whenever someone says, put it on, you know, you got two sentences. Yeah, but that, that leaves a lot, right? And so there's, there's this balance of brevity and yet completeness that, that, that sometimes is difficult. And I guess that's the art of leadership.

Yeah. And I mean, I think if you're talking about, let's say we pull everybody together for a meeting about, hey, we're going to kind of do a reset, right? We're looking at the vision, we're looking at the mission, our goals, short term, long term. Obviously, you can't do that in 10 minutes. You can't do that in 30 minutes.

Yeah.

But what you can do is you can break it down and you can also keep people engaged. So how do you keep them engaged? How do you make them make it interactive if humanly possible? Because once again, people just tune out, right? So it's not that information can't be in longer form. It's just that you've got to be really— you have to choreograph it.

Yeah. Yes.

You know, you have to, you have to make it a dance where it's interesting and exciting, but then you're also kind of bringing people into it with you.

I think that's great. That's a good— that's a perfect way to put it, is it becomes— it becomes a dance. Yeah. Uh, before we hit record, I told you, I said, hey, here's kind of the beginning and the end, and I said there's kind of the messy middle. I think I'm going to change that to the dance, right? It's just going to be more of a dance.

Well, it is, right? Yeah, it's a back and forth.

I think it's great. Um, what is my last question for you is You work with a lot of leaders. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you are someone who has a growth mindset. You would not be listening to our podcast. And I'm so grateful for our listeners that have been with us for so long. If you did not want to grow, if you didn't want to grow, you didn't want to improve, you would be listening to something else. And so given that leaders The right leaders want to improve. They want to get better. And sometimes with leadership, we can be attempting to do the right things, yet we're doing it wrong. What are a common, a couple common mistakes, um, maybe myths that you see where you work with someone who is obviously working to try to get better? They want to grow. They want to develop themselves. They want to be, be a better leader. They want to be a better manager. Yet the actions, the behaviors that they're going through are just— they're, they're misaligned slightly.

So have I seen that? Sure. Are you asking me what do I do with that?

No, I'm asking what are some of the common mistakes that you've seen, common, uh, pitfalls that people have fallen into?

Um, Well, be honest. I mean, I think for the most part, for the, the professionals that I work with, whether it's in executive education courses or, you know, one-on-one, if they want to grow, generally they have a higher sense of emotional intelligence, right? They're putting themselves in that position because they recognize there is a gap, there is a need. And most of the time um, they are open to seeing what is amiss, what's going, you know, awry. And so I really don't see too much of that mismatch where they can't quite get a hold of it, um, or understand what's going wrong. I think it's a lot of times, I— there is something going wrong, let's figure out what it is. But then it's reconnecting kind of the dots of, okay, now how do I, how do I shift and move and change those things? So I've only really worked with one person that, and it was around communication actually, that it just did not matter the processes, the things that I could give. It just was not going to stick. And it truly was an inability to be agile.

So they were stuck in their ways.

Yeah, I mean, they just really couldn't justify how, even though if there was a proven method given to them, it was like, yeah, but I— yeah, they were just stuck in their ways. And anyway, it was— and it turned out recently, I just heard this person was let go as the leader of this organization. And it pointed back to this fact that they weren't agile, right? They— but oh, but here's a great point to make, and I'm glad I kind of circled back to this. They were actually made to get coaching. So it wasn't somebody who signed up for it, going back to my first point of people who are signing up for it, people who are kind of knowing that they need to change, they're generally open and they've got, you know, a good degree of emotional intelligence and want to become more aware of what's going on.

Well, that says everything there is, that they were forced to get it versus voluntarily seeing it. But to that person, though, hopefully that scenario actually can become an opportunity for them to be able to learn and say, you know what, It took me being let go or something bad happening to change. And unfortunately, certainly in my own life, business and personal career, sometimes there are difficult things that happen that you have to go through them to finally say, hey, you need, you need to wake up and make this change. And that could be, that could be a catalyst for great things for that person down the road. We, I mean, we'll see. That's the work that they have to do for sure. Alexa, this is great. People want to connect with you. Where would you point them to?

I am primarily on LinkedIn, very responsive. Love, love for people to connect. And I post a lot of things about just leadership, communication skills, presentation skills, executive presence. But feel free to connect to me on LinkedIn and send me a connection request, as I said, or a message. I'm, I'm very responsive.

Awesome. What does above the business mean to you?

I think it really does go back to, um, someone who can see beyond the kind of the ground level, right? You have to be able to kind of— we get so busy in our day-to-day that we're consumed with what's going on here, and it's being able to kind of just lift your head and see see things from a different perspective.

Oh, that's great. Alexa, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I hope to have you back on in the future.

Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation.

Thank you so much. As I said in the beginning of the episode, I don't think that there's ever any way that you can fully grasp all of the things when it comes down to leadership. And to me, the thing that certainly spoke to me around my own journey Maybe it does as you, you as well, is, you know, you, you're not the same person if you've been in business for any amount of time, but also just in your life, you're not the same person. You have different experiences that begin to, to shape you. And so when you look back, if you've been in business 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, you hope that over time that you have evolved, that you've improved. You at times maybe have had setbacks, but through those setbacks and those challenges, it changes.

You, you.

And ultimately, you want your team to be able to kind of see the different in the new version of you as well. And so I thought really that conversation that she mentioned there, having self-awareness, uh, she mentioned emotional intelligence a couple times in there, but having a self-awareness, the social skills, and then empathy, and then just the, the motivation to make the change itself goes such a long way. I think it was a great episode. Connect with Dr. Alexa Chokut on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear what you all thought about today's episode. As always, want to give a shout out to our podcast partners, Autopilot Recruiting, TodayApp Pro, Coach B Consulting, and Club Capital. I think I was doing a web class recently, and the thing that I shared The most important asset in a business, I believe, is the founder or the owner's time. But the second most important asset is your team. Now you may say, well, I think my team is my most important asset. Yes, but really where you put your time is the most fun. But the second, very next, second most important asset you have in that business is absolutely going to be your team. How do we find A-players? How do we develop them, train them, motivate them, inspire them to be able to be at their very best? We really have two of the best that you can work with: Autopilot Recruiting to help you source and how to find A-players for your team, and then how do you develop them, how do you coach them. I think one of my own kind of, I guess, aha moments, so to speak, or maybe it was just revelations over time and probably wasn't an aha moment, was that I did not have to be the one to train the team all the time. I used to think it all had to sit on my shoulders, that I had to position myself as the expert, and really nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, some of you have a great skill set in training and developing and hiring and recruiting, and some of you have some incredible assets with that. And some of you, that's not your skill set. That's not the thing that you're the best at. You're maybe incredibly good when it comes to setting up structures and systems in the, in the business. Some of you are great at the financial aspect and managing the financials of the business. You have different skill sets. There's a lot of hats to wear. Some of you incredible marketers that are out there, you just naturally bent that way. There's just a lot of different, uh, hats to wear in business. And so if you want help to be able to find better candidates to bring on board and then develop them, go to autopilotrecruiting.com and then reach out to Coach P. Go to coachpconsulting.com and let them know that you heard about them on the Above the Business podcast. I mentioned I was, uh, that one of the hats you wear is being able to be really great when it comes to your financials. And I was in Scottsdale and, uh, one of our retreats with our business owners, and a couple of our clients are absolutely phenomenal when it comes to this. In fact, one of them is literally a former CPA And so he is really on top of his numbers, as you can, you know, imagine and would expect him to be, no question about it. Well, but not everybody is that way. And if, you know, we came out of tax season, corporate and personal taxes, and if it didn't turn out the way that you wanted to, reach out to Club Capital, get them to have a demo, talk to somebody on the team, go to club.capital and see how they can be able to help support you. You know, there's a— there's some terminology I'd never really heard before except for a few years ago, but it was the tech stack. So what's your tech stack? So it's the tech that you use. It's different things that you use to communicate. You've heard me talk around like Slack as an example. We really love to use Slack to be able to communicate. And so there's different tools that we use in the business. Some of those tools may be a, a PDF, maybe, uh, an, an Excel spreadsheet. Some of them may be a Word document or a Google document that we may have, and some of them are just some other software tools. And so what's in your tech stack? Um, are you happy and do you love the tech stack that you have? Do you have something where it's unified with your bonus and compensation plans and it's beautifully used, corporate approved, and going to sync with your corporate approved CRM itself? If you're not happy with that, you want something that's going to be easy to start up and something your team's going to love, I encourage you to go and check out TodayApp. Go to todayapppro.com. todayapppro.com. All right everyone, till next episode, lead well.