Conviction: The Position You Hold Before You Walk In
Trait 25 is Conviction, and the fastest way to understand it is to notice who in a meeting has some. Not the loudest person. Not the one with the most slides. The one who, when the question comes around, has a position, states it plainly, and can tell you why, without checking the room first.
Conviction is not certainty. The leaders with real conviction change their minds more often than the ones without it, because they are working from a position instead of a posture. You can only update a view you actually hold. What conviction is, underneath, is knowing what you would say if nobody was in the room, and then saying that in the room.
Here is why it reads as presence. People can feel the difference between a leader who is telling them something and a leader who is telling them what will land. The second one is exhausting to work for, even when the words are pleasant, because nothing they say can be built on. The first one gives the team something solid to push against, and that is what people mean when they say someone has weight in a room.
The practice is small, and it happens before the meeting, not in it. Take the one issue on the agenda that matters, and write your position in a single sentence, in plain words. Then write one line under it: the cost of holding it. Who it might disappoint, what it might get wrong. If you can write the cost and still hold the position, you have conviction. If the position dissolves the moment you name the cost, you had a preference dressed up as one, and it is better to find that out on paper.
Then say the sentence. In those words. Especially in the room where it costs you something, because that is the only room where conviction is visible at all.
Conviction is not something you project. It is something you have already decided before you walk in. The room can always tell which one it is.
Executive Presence: 50 Traits. The field guide. therightaltitudebook.com
Comments