Towards leadership – Elevate your Presence, Influence and Impact

April 14, 2025|Accountants, Kim's Blog, Lawyers, Management Skills, Psychology, Relationship Management|

I recently visited the North West – PM Forum at the offices of PWC in Manchester to facilitate a session on this topic. I would like to thank the Committee members – Rachel Kelly | LinkedIn, ⭐️Angela Brown | LinkedIn, Ally Lumsden | LinkedIn, Amanda Watson | LinkedIn, Linda Stoddard | LinkedIn and Rachael (Evans) Kinsella FCIM MCIPR Chartered Marketer | LinkedIn for inviting me to speak and organising the event. I thought I would summarise some of the key themes we talked about. Thank you to everyone who came along and participated in the exercises to put some of the ideas into practice. Towards leadership – Elevate your Presence, Influence and Impact.

Presence

Jessica Pearson and Harvey Specter – lead characters in the TV drama series Suits about New York lawyers and litigators – started my talk. I used them to explain a model of personal power which looks at how we can use presence, authority and impact.

Presence relates to physical characteristics (such as how attractive you are) and your charisma. Charisma | Psychology Today United Kingdom The downside is that presence can be intimidating.

Authority relates to your knowledge and track record. And many fee-earners leverage these for power. The downside is that they often want to be right

Impact relates to your ability to make change happen. And you demonstrate this by asking incisive questions. Why are questions so important? (Questioning skills)

While presence and authority may only be accessible to some of us (and to TV stars), we can all use Impact. The PIA and related frameworks are described further here: How do you make a personal impact – Make a difference. We also considered a similar model to help with visibility and executive presence. – Be more visible – the PVI model

Your presence is also affected by how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you. So that requires a little self-reflection and also maybe obtaining some feedback from your colleagues.

The statistics on the prevalence of Imposter Syndrome – especially amongst working women and Millennials – are staggering (Imposter syndrome afflicts most people, but very few talk about it – Workplace Insight). So you may need to do some work on your self-confidence to overcome your inner critic. We shared some of our most common Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) at the session. These confidence resources may help:

Confidence to overcome a fear of failure – Kim Tasso September 2024
Confidence – How to get a word in when people keep talking July 2024
Boosting Your Confidence at Work – A Toolbox for Success July 2023
The psychology of successful women by Shona Rowan June 2022
Soft skills – Boost your self-confidence and confidence (Video) October 2020
Overcoming low self-esteem – a self help guide using cognitive January 2025
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and Self-Doubt

There are many ways to introduce yourself (Personal introductions: BrandMe the power of 3 in networking) but in Manchester we tried out an approach suggested by Andrea Wojnicki in Harvard Business Review (A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself August 2022). This involves a three-part introduction:

A short present-tense statement about yourself
Two – three points in the past tense relating to your background (and to establish credibility)
A future-oriented statement – an opportunity to demonstrate enthusiasm for what’s ahead

We also considered storytelling skills Book review: Unleash the power of storytelling by Rob Biesenbach (kimtasso.com)

As well as considering the content of our messaging, we need to consider it’s delivery. So we took at look at non-verbal communication (Non-Verbal Communication (NVC) – the basics (Video)). We considered some gestures (e.g. The Catapult or “hooding”) that we might see in others. And also practiced some ways to look more confident when presenting (6 Ways to Look More Confident During a Presentation HBR, 2017 Kasia Wezowski).

Influence

We considered the difference between influence and persuasion. Buy in – Influence and Persuasion Toolbox – Kim Tasso Both rely on having a good presence and strong relationships

And spent some time exploring – through exercises – the difference between reacting and responding in interactions.

Listening skills were also discussed You’re not listening – What you’re missing. And part of listening was being open-minded and prepared to change your views. The danger of maintaining unexamined assumptions was mentioned. Strategic thinking – Audits, assumptions and alignment. And we discussed the value of curiosity What is curiosity and why is it important in business relationships? (Video)

“In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work” Alan Webber.

We explored conversations skills (collaborative conversations for change include: co-creation, coherence and commitment). And considered some of the key ideas in Book review: “Now we’re talking” by Sarah Rozenthuler, which is aimed at leadership development. This neuroscience insight is also relevant: leadership conversation skills: SCARF model of neuroscience

We considered Power of three – Writing and presentation basics (Video) and Aristotle’s pillars of persuasion comprising: credibility (back to presence), logic and emotions Influence and persuasion skills with Aristotle and Knights and Dinosaurs. There was a fun exercise here – using a combination of these techniques – where we presented our projects as if to fee-earners.

Impact

Many leadership models are based on balancing task achievement and relationships. Which means you can measure impact in many ways. For context, we looked at one of the many models for the competencies of leadership (self-awareness, learning agility, influence, communication) leadership-models-for-development-by-center-for-creative-leadership-ccl.pdf. And the related Leadership Development Impact (LDI) framework – which considers leader factors, leadership solutions and context for impact at individual, group, organisation and society. leadership-models-for-development-by-center-for-creative-leadership-ccl.pdf

We examined multiple ways in which we can make an impact – building on personal impact from the section on presence. We touched on how to make an impact in meetings: Confidence – How to get a word in when people keep talking. And consider how to use David Kantor’s Four Player model for meetings (Move, Follow, Oppose, Bystand) Kantor Baseline Instrument Profile | Individual and Team Profiles | PeopleTalking

We considered a variety of recent marketing and business development campaigns which demonstrated the impact in terms of social media engagement, web traffic, downloads, preference and propensity to buy – noting it can take time for multi-year programmes to generate financial results (which are required for ROI or ROMI calculations). See, for example, Marketing case studies – Digital thought leadership campaigns and Marketing and BD case studies in legal, accountancy, consultancy

We also considered case studies achieving, for example, increased conversion rate in tenders, increased satisfaction and profit from key account management programmes and creating new income streams in new markets and with new products. It was noted that the most impressive impact was where marketing and business development worked collaboratively – either as part of the Board or of a cross-functional team.

At a more fundamental level, adopting a strategic focus to marketing and business development planning means we bring focus to a fey priorities and projects. By concentrating effort and resources at clearly defined and universally-supported objectives we are likely to achieve more impact than by a “spread yourself too thin” approach across multiple minor initiatives. Developing the future generation of leaders will also have a significant impact on a firm’s future Retiring from a senior leadership role – the other side of succession

But we considered lots of other ways to have an impact. For example, by supporting and developing team members. By providing the tools, training and coaching to senior fee-earners to help them grow their practices. By changing attitudes amongst the most senior members of the firm and driving cultural change which is needed to enable significant behaviour change. Change challenges – Culture, Communications and Clutter

Impact works both ways. Our thoughts and behaviours have an impact on others. And others have an impact on us. That’s how we continue to adapt, learn and grow. We looked at the social impact we have – perhaps in our life beyond work – whether that is raising our children, donating our time to charities and the third sector or more direct social action.

“Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be – we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others” Carl Sagan

There was also a reminder that we are responsible for managing our own mental health and those in our teams with the PERMA well-being model from positive psychology encompassing: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishments. The PERMA Model: Your Scientific Theory of Happiness

We ended by looking at future PM Forum training programmes: PM Forum – PM Forum

Presence

Influence

Impact

Related links on leadership development – presence, influence and impact

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Towards leadership – Elevate your Presence, Influence and Impact

Presence

Influence

Impact

Related links on leadership development – presence, influence and impact

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