Women Leadership: Building Your Leadership Presence

Leadership presence can be hard to define. Some describe it as an innate quality that either one possesses or does not. Others attribute leadership presence to learned skills combined with a confidence that makes others want to follow and emulate the leader’s behavior. It is generally not attributed to a person but to accomplishments and educational achievements. For women, achieving leadership presence is even more difficult as they tend to ascribe their ability to lead to those who have helped them. Betty Liu is a well-known television anchor and the owner of Radiate, a media education company that develops leaders, both men, and women. She has interviewed women leaders from all types of organizations, including large corporations, small businesses, and nonprofits. Liu is a perfect example of a woman who has achieved true leadership presence.

In this course, she talks about her philosophy of developing leadership presence. She explains the maxim that leaders should “always be closing and always be moving” in context of her 80:20 rule for work, with 20 percent time spent on thinking and 80 percent on doing. Liu discusses why successful business people, such as CEOs of companies, tend to have an entrepreneurial spirit; why success is not generally due to a series of happy accidents but from putting in the work; and the commonality of the struggle to the top for both men and women. Liu discusses how to cope with what many leaders view as the most challenging aspects of their jobs—loneliness and responsibilities. She also talks about different types of networking that can be used to achieve career goals and techniques to network effectively.