3: Dread Pirate Roberts - The Battle of Wits

Today: What does being proactive have to do with executive presence? We learn some lessons from the man in black. Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you.

DEI article on being proactive.

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

Transcript

You ever notice when you anticipate or start preparing ahead of time, things tend to go better? Like imagine if you live somewhere where a flood or storm is threatening. Would you prepare your sandbags or get ready to evacuate before the storm hits or after it's already arrived?

This state of being, and one of the Six Degrees of Executive Presence is called being proactive. People want and trust proactive leaders who are thinking ahead and prepared for what is to come. Whether what's coming is good or bad.

There's a great scene in the Netflix show glow about the female wrestlers and one of the characters, Sandy Devereaux St. Claire, played by Gina Davis is talking to one of the wrestlers Liberty Bell, and Liberty bell is recently divorced. She's a single mom with a young child so her season in Las Vegas, she imagined it would just be a single season doing the wrestling show and then she would just go back to doing whatever and go back to where she was living before.

But what happens is the show is so successful it gets picked up for another year. And so Sandy Deveraux St. Claire, the Gina Davis character is talking to her about it and thinks that she'll be all excited. But, Liberty bell is like, oh no, I can't. I only wanted to do this for one season. I have to go back and take care of my child. Because it's been hard for her to wrestle full-time and be a single mom.

And Gina Davis said something so interesting. She said, “you mean to tell me you didn't prepare to succeed?” Right? It was like, she assumed that it wouldn't be a success and that she would be done, so now she was in a very tough spot in terms of her options, because she hadn't even considered that a good thing could happen.

Now being proactive, people generally think of it as things going bad. Right? And it also helps to be proactive in anticipation of bad things happening. So to really drive this point home, let's listen to a clip from one of my all-time favorite books and the movie adaptation, “The Princess Bride.” Look out for where the Dread Pirate Roberts has used being proactive to his advantage.

Here's the clip (clip plays)

For those of you who haven't seen the movie, this period right now, Vizzini, he drops dead after laughing.

(more of clip plays)

I love that clip. I originally identified this example for a series of diversity and executive presence articles I wrote for Medium. I'll include a link to the article and a clip of the movie in the show notes. So, what happened here?

He prepared so far ahead of time, he couldn't lose. No matter which cup he drank from, he was going to be okay because he had built up an immunity to Iocane poison.

It's a bit of a fantasy and dramatic example, but you can think of that in terms of executive presence and leadership, too. Are you, or are your leaders doing things to prepare for when bad things happen? Because inevitably there's going to be problems, things aren't going to go right 100 percent. There's going to be unexpected things that happen. A vendor will fall through. A person who's an important resource will no longer be available or we'll move to a new position or a new job.

Have you done the things to anticipate and as much as you can prepare to deal with those things ahead of time so like with the storm coming, the results can be smoother or as smooth as it can be, all things considered. And consider how, when you have that proactive state of mind, that proactive state of being, people feel that, and that is part of what they perceive as your executive presence.

There's this great feature on Anchor.fm where you can record a message with your thoughts or questions on executive presence. I'd love to hear from you. Just go to the anchor FM app or the website and hit the message record button, and you can leave us a message.

Thanks for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. This is Joe Kwon, the connection counselor. Remember, it's not what you say do or wear. It's how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.