Executive Presence
This tool covers the communication slice of executive presence, using the Social Style model developed by David Merrill and Roger Reid, which maps people onto four communication styles, Driver, Expressive, Amiable, Analytical, by assertiveness and responsiveness, so a leader can adapt delivery to the audience instead of pushing one style on everyone.
Two axes cross to form four quadrants, Driver, Expressive, Amiable and Analytical each sitting in its own box.
Reach for this when…
- A technically excellent leader keeps losing the room in meetings.
- Prepping for a high-stakes pitch to an audience the leader doesn't know well.
- The same pitch lands well with one audience and falls flat with another, and the leader can't see why.
How to run it
- Introduce the four styles: Driver, Expressive, Amiable, Analytical.
- Have the person identify their own dominant style.
- Map the style of each key stakeholder they need to influence.
- Adapt delivery per style: brief and decisive for Drivers, bold and big-picture for Expressives, personal and low-risk for Amiables, logical and thorough for Analyticals.
- Practise the adaptation in role-play before the real conversation.
A worked example
Situation. Ivan Horvat ran production at Jadran Namjestaj, a furniture manufacturer in Split, Croatia, and kept losing budget arguments to a board he found impossible to read.
Applied. Mapping the board, he found his own instinctive Analytical style, data, caveats, thoroughness, was landing flat with the CFO, a clear Driver who wanted the number and the ask inside thirty seconds. He built two versions of the same case.
Result. Both proposals passed. The content hadn't changed, the delivery had, one direct and numeric for the CFO, one bold and conceptual for the board's Expressive chair.
The catch
Style-typing simplifies real people into one of four boxes, and most people are a blend that shifts by context and by how threatened they feel. The framework only addresses how you're heard; it says nothing about whether the underlying case is any good. And reading people's styles correctly is itself a skill the model names but doesn't teach. Filed under 'executive presence,' it also only covers delivery. The gravitas and confidence that research shows carries most of how presence gets judged sits outside this tool entirely.
Adapting your style to be heard is not the same as the other person agreeing with what you said, and it is not the same as having executive presence either. Most of that is gravitas and confidence, not delivery.
Origin: David Merrill & Roger Reid (Social Style model)