2: E.P. Profile: Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Investment

Today: Can you improve your executive presence by studying those who have it? We take a look at Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Investment to learn more. Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you.

You can watch her 2019 talk from the SingularityU ExFin South Africa Summit here.

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

Transcript

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but can you get executive presence just by copying another person? I actually have a bone to pick with a lot of approaches to executive presence, where they just take a look at a bunch of people and have some qualities that they have and say, you should just copy them.

Well, as you know, if you study a boxer or an athlete or even a great singer or musician, and you just try to copy them, that's not actually going to make you the same as them or give you the same qualities. So, as you can see, imitation will not get you executive presence. However, it is useful to have role models and learn from people who do things really well.

So what does that mean? If it's not imitation, what is it? It’s distillation. So today we're going to distill someone with outsized executive presence. Her name is Cathy wood. You may know her. She's the CEO of Ark Investment. It's one of the hottest investment companies around right now. And this is something I saw her in a video when she was at singularity UX Fin in South Africa. It's a financial, economic type summit.

And I'll include the link to the video so you can watch it after, and I'm going to go over two qualities or principles. I call them the Six Degrees of Executive Presence. I'll go over two of them that she exhibits during this talk.

Now the first one happens right at the beginning, where, you may not notice this if you're not paying careful attention, but her slides are not ready at the beginning of her presentation. So you imagine she's in a room with a huge bunch of people — Luminaries, competitors, colleagues, she's getting ready for her 20, 30 minute talk. Slides are not ready.

What does she do? She is cool as a cucumber and just starts talking about relevant things to her talk, but doesn't jump into her talk until they figure out the technical glitches about a minute or two into it. And then her slides are ready and then she notices, and then she jumps right into it without missing a beat. A true mark of someone with executive presence.

And the quality that she's exhibiting here is equanimity. It's just a fancy way of saying cool under pressure.

Now a lesser person would have gotten upset, would have gotten flustered. And the reason why equanimity is important is when things go wrong, that's when you really need your leaders to step up. So a leader who can only lead when things are going well, isn't really going to be the type of leader that you want to follow.

I experienced this sort of equanimity, as well in my own career, with one of my bosses who was an amazing presenter as well. His name was Louis Sapirman. We were in Argentina, I believe, giving a presentation and he had this gimmick where he would have a pen and he would use a pen as an example of what was going on.

So he had these pens printed out for Compliance, with a nice little logo on them, “Do the right thing!”, that sort of thing and he would hand them out to the audience. So it was always sort of a big fan favorite. So I was there to support him and I had one job that day, one job. Guess what that job was?

Bring the pens to the presentation.

So I'm watching him give this masterful kind of Compliance presentation. Everything's going so great. I'm jotting notes. I'm, I'm learning from the master and he walks over and he goes, “Joe, you got the pens?” He whispers. And I go, “OH, um, I left them at the hotel.” And the hotel was like a five minute cab ride away.

So he didn't even miss a beat. No one in the audience noticed anything. He just looked at me and whispered, “Get the pens.” So I got up, walked out to the door and then I sprinted, got a cab, got up to my hotel room, grabbed the pens, came back. Sprinted some more. Once I got to the room I walked and then I brought the box of pens in, I handed him the pens and then he went on with his presentation.

So no one in the room knew that anything was wrong because he maintained equanimity.

Another quality that Cathy Wood exhibits in her talk is stillness. If you watch the video, you'll notice that she only takes up a small portion of the stage. She doesn't need to roam around and be all over the place and gesticulate wildly. She's in total control of her content and her presentation. And she moves only as much as she needs to, to make her point or to connect with the audience.

So leaders with executive presence, as well as being proactive, which is another of the Six Degrees of Executive Presence, they also have the quality of stillness. They move when it's time to move, but not a single second before. And that makes all their movements that much more effective. And those types of leaders are the ones that inspire confidence.

So thank you so much for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. This is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. There's a great function on Anchor.fm where you can leave a message. So if you'd like, please leave a message as to who you think would be a great person to profile next, or leave me your questions or thoughts on executive presence. I'd love to hear from you.

Remember, it's not what you say or do or wear, it’s how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.