Brian was disappointed. He had just been turned down for a senior leadership role at his current company, and he wasn’t quite sure why.
Playing through his mind repeatedly was the direct feedback he had been given. “You are lacking Executive Presence,” his boss had said. It didn’t make much a sense.
So, keen to understand his deficiencies and find a solution, he pushed his boss for a bit more information. Unfortunately, the response he received was ambiguous at best. His boss stated, “Executive Presence is a required quality of all senior leaders in our company. It’s difficult to frame with a definition, but I know it when I see it, and unfortunately you are lacking.”
What could Brian do to sort his ‘lack of Executive Presence’ out?
Professional Guidance & Training
In my many years of consulting on the topic of Executive Presence, Brian’s story is very typical. And his challenge is understandable.
First off, without full awareness of what Executive Presence is, it’s hard to self-assess. However, if you ask ten different business leaders for their definition of Executive Presence, you will likely get ten different answers. And this makes it even harder to resolve.
So why is this the case? Well, as a topic, Executive Presence casts a long shadow across many different attributes; appearance, work ethic, vision, perseverance, persuasiveness, authenticity, relatability, and sense of humor are just a few of the attributes that are directly correlated to one’s Executive Presence.
So where do you start?
What is Executive Presence?
To begin the process of improving your Executive Presence, it’s critical to understand the definition of it. Fortunately, that definition is relatively simple.
Executive Presence is the attributes of a leader (or person) that inspire, engage, and motivate people to take action.
Let that sink in for a minute. Truly, Executive Presence is defined and understood through its correlation to many different attributes. So, if you want to begin the process of understanding your Executive Presence, you need to begin exploring your aptitude across these various attributes.
Fortunately, these attributes are much easier to understand, define, and improve upon because they can be tackled in bite-size chunks.
Exploring the Attributes of Executive Presence
When I conduct a workshop or provide consulting services on the subject of Executive Presence, I dedicate a significant amount of time exploring all the associated attributes.
At current count, there are 30 of them that I examine, and I invite the learner to self-assess their proficiency against each one.
For the rest of this article, I will focus on a few of the attributes that can have the biggest impact on your Executive Presence. And, as you read my comments, I invite you to consider your proficiency in these areas and identify opportunities for growth.
Passion
I spent 22 years of my career at Microsoft, with the last 11 years in a role where I led a team of managers who administered premier support contracts for Fortune 500 companies.
Much of that role was focused on helping my team help our customers consume their support contracts and be ready/willing to renew their contracts in 12-month intervals. Return on investment, contract consumption, customer satisfaction, and contract renewal were the ongoing marching orders.
But somewhere during those last 11 years, my passion started migrating further and further away from these orders. Instead, I found myself getting more and more interested in career coaching, leadership development, and motivational speaking. I remember with absolute clarity the day my boss sat down with me and asked, point blank, “Do you like your job and is this something you want to be doing?”
The reality was that my passion for my job, as it was defined, had all but evaporated.
I was doing my job, and I was meeting my responsibilities, but my heart wasn’t in it. My drive and determination and passion were almost extinct, and it showed.
If you are not passionate about what you are doing, it will show. However, those with Executive Presence exude passion. It is a passion that inspires people and makes them want to get on board and follow the path that you are walking. And so, to have Executive Presence you need to fuel your passion.
Listening
I had just spent the past 12 months developing and deploying a training program for top performers in the organization who had aspirations of becoming people managers.
The training was a huge success, with overwhelmingly positive feedback. The success was so pronounced, in fact, that I was invited to meet with the Senior Vice President to provide an overview of the program and see if it should be launched across all departmental organizations.
I spent hours and hours preparing for this meeting and rehearsed my commentary repeatedly. I had created a compelling PowerPoint presentation and was anxiously looking forward to the opportunity to meet with the Sr. VP.
The day arrived and upon entering their office, I was informed that time was tight, so I should jump right in with my presentation.
About 30 seconds in, while I was still on the first slide, they interrupted me and asked, “So you are proposing to take all of our top performers through this training to help prepare them for an opportunity to be people managers?”
I replied, “Yes.” But as I moved to explain the additional benefits of this training, I was interrupted again.
“But people manager openings are so infrequent, we would just be setting up all our top performers for disappointment because they wouldn’t be given enough opportunities to move into the roles they are targeting.”
And with that statement, the meeting was adjourned, I was thanked for my time, and I was invited to leave.
Leaders with Executive Presence have a deep-seated interest in learning from and listening to people in the organization that have experience and insight.
They are laser focused on gathering and collecting feedback from others and treat that feedback with value and respect. And even when presented with information that doesn’t seem to align to their thinking, they still show a desire to listen intently.
Unfortunately, my estimation of this Senior Vice President’s Executive Presence took a major negative hit through their disinterest in listening to the presentation I had so carefully prepared.
Transparency / Candor
Early in my management career I was leading a team of 10 Senior Technical Support Specialists who provided mentorship to about 100 front line customer support agents at a third-party vendor.
We had hired this vendor about three years prior and had spent a lot of time getting them to the point where they were hitting customer satisfaction and call-time targets. However, this was also the time when customer support operations were being moved overseas to lower cost labor markets.
As such, I was given the task of shutting down this call center with an operational end date that was six months in the future. I was also tasked with making sure the performance of this third-party vendor did not deteriorate during the ramp-down timeframe. And finally, I was informed that at the end of the six-month window, the 10 Senior Technical Support Specialists reporting to me would need to find a new job, or they would be laid off. And so, I had a decision to make.
I could keep all these developments a complete secret, maintain the status quo, and hope that the performance of our third-party vendor did not decline. Or I could inform the Senior Technical Support Specialists about the plan, give them an increased runway to plan for their pending career change, and hope that in so doing they would not communicate this to our vendor.
Indeed, I knew that if our vendor became aware of the loss of the business, they would immediately begin making changes that would hurt business performance.
I really struggled with how to handle the situation, but ultimately decided to be transparent with my direct reports, while at the same time getting their commitment to not share any of this news with our vendor.
I remember distinctly calling them into a conference room for a special meeting and swearing them all to secrecy, which was an agreement they all made.
Then next morning, at 8:30 AM, I received a phone call from Russ, the site manager at our vendor. His question to me was direct. He said, “Ben, I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes with three of our top performing customer support agents in my office, and each of them is telling me that they’ve heard from your team that our site is going to be shut down in six months.”
This entire experience had a profound impact on me and how I viewed the management role.
There was a period of time where I was very angry with myself for being so transparent about business operations. And I was angry with some of my direct reports for not waiting even 24 hours before breaking the promise they made.
And sadly, after confirming to Russ that what he had heard was true, vendor performance did decline as word got out and their top support agents began moving to other projects. Plus, ultimately, my opinions and overall experience changed.
To be clear, there are times when it is critical to keep business realities from spreading too soon. In this example there were tangible negative consequences I suffered from being so candid with my direct reports.
However, in hindsight, one of the most powerful positive results of my transparency emerged over time as I continued to work with these 10 direct reports in various capacities over many years to come. Their regard and respect for me became profound as they experienced first-hand my willingness to trust them and be transparent. The way they viewed me as a leader and regarded my Executive Presence was exponential.
If you’re looking to increase your Executive Presence, you need to understand the strong connection that exists with the attributes I’ve outlined above. It’s your managers, peers, and direct reports that ultimately determine your level of Executive Presence, and they do so by observing your performance against these attributes.
A LMS’s power defines the power of the website. If a LMS is crooked, or if it lacks certain functionalities, it will limit the potential of the website. Choosing a stable and robust LMS for your website should be of your #1 priority.
LearnPress is currently the WordPress LMS that has the most number of active installs with 110,000+ installs. It is free and it comes with many great lightweight add-ons. Therefore, while it makes sure your site is powerful enough to deal with things a LMS often has to handle, it makes sure your site is fast.
Besides, a contributing factor to the success of an online learning education website is the UI and UX it brought to the user. However important the information is, if it does not come with a great presentation, it will be ignored.
Even though LearnPress works perfectly with most normal WordPress theme, the 6 themes mentioned below are the best education and LMS WordPress Theme that are designed especially for LearnPress.
1. Eduma | Education WordPress Theme
When it comes to LMS and Education WordPress Theme, Eduma is always the one. It is made by ThimPress team, the author of LearnPress, so it utilize LearnPress’s power more than any other themes. Currently, Eduma is the #1 best-selling theme on ThemeForest. It has 30 different pre-decorated demos for schools, universities, kindergartens, course hubs,… etc. Eduma gives you the power of building your dream online school like Udemy, like Coursera in less than 30 minutes without having to write a single line of code.
Beside Feature availabilities, Well-designed layouts, Eduma is also famous for having an awesome customer support that is always willing to help you solve any of your problems with the theme.
Finally, The ultimate power of Eduma lies in the fact that it saves you a lot of cash since ThimPress included a premium package of LearnPress’s add on and many other premium plugins that otherwise would cost you 582$
With all these advantages, Eduma also is suitable for anyone to create a Udemy or Coursera clone easily with LearnPress.
Some Special features of Education WP
- 30+ Education pre-built demos+
- Bonus $439+ LearnPress Premium Addon
- SiteOrigin Drag & Drop Page Builder
- Elementor
- And many more.
2. Course Builder | LMS for Corporate Training WordPress Theme
LMS for Corporate Training WordPress Theme is the most amazing high quality and well-design WordPress Learning management system theme for online learning and education. It is the newest Education WordPress Theme at the moment and it has all the most advanced features one needs to create an online course & membership website. With this theme, you can setup your website up and running in just a few minutes. You can sell your course with many different options: Sell courses individually, sell course based on monthly access or sell courses based on many other methods.
Course Builder also have some newest improvement that makes it the most unique theme for eLearning and LMS like: User Course Dashboard, Course announcement, Course Landing Page, etc. Besides, its design quality is top-notch. No other theme can compare with its beauty. All elements are well researched so that nothing is irrelevant.
There is no surprise when CorpTrain is one of the best in 8+ Best Education Elearning & LMS WordPress Themes in 2023.
Some of Course Builder’s special features:
- Brilliant LMS Courses Management with Units/Sections, Lessons, Quizzes – link to Youtube video how to create a course.
- LMS Course Collection – combine particular courses into collections.
- LMS Course Review/Rating.
- Free Course, public accessible course support.
- Lessons Management with powerful WordPress Core Editor improved to support: video, attachments in any type of media
- Quizzes Management with multiple Question Types.
- Paypal, Stripe, Offline Payment Methods Integrated. Paypal payment method to allow to receive payment over Credit Cards or Paypal balance, Stripe payment method to allow to receive payment over Credit Cards, and Offline payment method is convenience to receive payment in offline ways. More is coming.
- WooCommerce support as a shop solution and/or selling courses over WooCommerce.
3. Speaker and Life Coach WordPress Theme – Coaching WP
Unlike most other Education WordPress Theme, Coaching is built specially for Coaches, Trainers, Instructors and Teachers to improve and promote their name to the world. Having all necessary elements like introduction, event, timeline, course, blog posts, this is the best WordPress theme for instructors on Udemy, Thinkific and Teacheable. The theme even got some beautiful demos for Health Coach and Professional Fitness Coach. So, no matter who you are and what area you work in, as long as you are a teacher, a lecturer, an instructor or a coach, this is the perfect WordPress Coaching theme for you.
If you need to learn more about LearnPress and other LMS WordPress Plugins: Best WordPress LMS Plugins: 15 Super Monsters for Websites.
- One Click Demo Install
- Drag and Drop Page Builder
- Special Effects For Lasting Impressions
- Introduction boxes with special effects
- Unique Testimonial
- Smart Event Management System
- Mobile First, Responsive and Retina Ready
- LearnPress LMS – Courses management made easy
- Timeline- display and scrolling
- Full site Search Engine Optimization
4. Epsilon | eLearning LMS WordPress Theme
Being one of the first themes that integrate with LearnPress, eLearning WP has revolutionized how people use WordPress as a LMS. If you are looking for a theme that help you both ease the process of creating and selling course, and to effectively persuade your students to buy your courses by a professional and user friendly design. It’s also made my ThimPress with a bunch of awesome features:
- Quizzes management with multiple question types
- Drag & Drop Page Builder
- SEO Optimized with Microdata, Structure data for all plugins, pages
- WooCommerce support
- Co-instructors – multiple instructors support for each course
- bbPress support
5. Deep – Educational WordPress Theme
Deep Theme along with demos especially made for schools and educational purposes and the most popular integrations like Michigan can offer every tool you need to promote your school and courses. Deep’s beautiful and minimalist design offers lots of customization tools like Elementor page builder, Header Builder, and powerful theme options to help you achieve the exact design you have in mind. It is also compatible with the MEC calendar, one of the best event calendar plugins on the market, which gives you a wide variety of options to display and sell your courses online. Deep is fully compatible with the LifterLMS plugin as well, which offers 4 categories for University, High School, Kindergarten, and Online Learning courses with all the necessary features needed for each.
• Free demos
• 1-click demo importer
• Content slider
• Layout options
• Advanced typography
• Woocommerce ready
• Fully responsive
• Translation ready
• Advanced animations
• Pricing tables
• Round-the-clock support
• Instagram feeds
6. Coursaty – Courses | Education WordPress Theme
Released in May 2016, the theme quickly catches on and shows off with an interesting half-traditional and half-modern design. It has 8 different homepage layouts and is completely responsive on any device. Besides LearnPress, Coursaty is compatible with Woocommerce, Visual Composer and Revolution Slider, which are the essential plugins for just about any WordPress theme.
7. LMS WordPress Theme| Education | Elearning | Online Course | LMS Theme
The theme was first published in the same month with Coursaty but it represents a different design style. The theme has many animations, evoking an energetic look and feel for the audience.Course pages are designed in a minimalistic way, removing all unnecessary buttons and make courses feel more friendly to register.
8. Language School – Courses & Learning Management System Education WordPress Theme
The Language School WordPress Theme is dedicate to language centers to create and sell their courses. It is has a trendy design with many self-made plugins, a great improvement and a great addition for the original LearnPress LMS.
9. SmartOwl
As the name suggests, SmartOwl is about learning to be “smarter”. The author Modeltheme has re-built some parts of LearnPress to give it a seamless and modern outlook. Since this theme is a nominee for the Awwwards, this could be one of your safe choices for the eLearning theme.
Final thoughts
Unlike other costly expensive LMS, LearnPress is free and is still powerful than most. Its wide range of functionalities will allow you to make an education website of any field that you want. The only thing left for you to choose is a theme that fits your demand and a theme that sells. I believe Education WP and eLearning WP are the best option to go for. On the one hand, they are made by ThimPress – the author of LearnPress, and on the other hand, they have the top-notch quality that many other themes seldom have. Besides, choosing these will help you save some money for premium LearnPress addons.
Go for it!