Belle Linda Halpern is co-founder of The Ariel Group, and co-author of Leadership Presence. She brings the skills of a consultant, speaker, educator, and singer-actress to her work. Belle has developed and delivered leadership programs to executives in the US, Europe and Asia for the past 15 years. Her clients include Boston Consulting Group, General Electric and American Express. She has been featured in the New York Times, Fast Company, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Management Communication Letter and on CNBC. She has designed and delivered leadership workshops for the executive education programs of Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School and INSEAD. As a cabaret singer, Belle has performed in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Paris, Munich and the hill towns of northern Italy. This year, she launched a non-profit arm of The Ariel Group, seeking to foster leadership capacity for social justice through offering Ariel's theater-based programs around the world, particularly in the areas of education and peace building.
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KE: Your book Leadership Presence centers on the connection between leadership and acting. Can you tell us about that connection?
BLH: Leadership and acting can seem unrelated, however if you look at the skills required to be a great actor, and then consider those same skills as applied to a leader, you would see the enormous cross-over. To engage the audience, actors must be authentic, creative, have passion and physical presence and be able to express emotion and empathy. In order to play a role an actor has to understand another character and have empathy. Being able to read the audience and have clarity of purpose is important as well. Actors work to have clarity of intention so they know where to go and what they want to influence. When I started doing this work, people questioned why leaders needed to have passion. Today it’s clear that leaders must be able to move people emotionally. Many of the skills that an actor has can be transferred into a leader's tool kit.
KE: When people see you compare leadership to acting is there concern that leaders will take on a role, or hide behind a mask, and not be transparent?
BLH: We play different roles every day. Sometimes it is of mother, father, child, colleague, boss, or subordinate and we behave differently in each role. We don’t talk to our boss the same way we talk to our kids. In each role we play, we use very different sides of ourselves. As a leader sometimes you have to play the coach, the collaborator, or the captain of the ship. Sometimes you are the visionary, painting a picture of the future. In those different roles you have to find a different side of yourself.
KE: How did you come upon the marriage of your gifts in singing and leadership?
BLH: When I was at Harvard pursuing a degree in English, acting and singing, there was a director that gave me the idea that you can apply acting to other contexts. When I started working in business, mostly in financial services and consulting, I realized that there is a strong connection between the world of the actor and the world of a leader.
KE: What is leadership presence and how does a person know if she or he has it?
BLH: Leadership presence is the ability to connect authentically with the hearts and minds of others in order to motivate and inspire them towards a desired outcome. To find out if you have leadership presence, take the self-assessment on our website: (http//www.arielgroup.com) to uncover your strengths and the areas where you could develop more presence.
KE: You believe that presence can be developed in people. How do you know this?
BLH: Through my own work with leaders over the past 18 years, I have seen people develop into their own presence and make a major difference. Also, American Express surveyed 386 participants who had attended our two-day executive presence workshop. It found that six months after the program, 87% of the participants and 83% of their managers observed improvement in leadership presence. It defined leadership presence in terms of American Express competencies, which are to build and leverage relationships, to communicate effectively and to demonstrate personal excellence. They measured people’s ratings of those competencies after our program and found improvement.
KE: What are the four elements of your leadership presence model?
BLH: We talk about leadership presence in terms of the PRES model. P stands for being 100% present in every engagement. This is tough in our current multi-tasking society because we are constantly bombarded by input and data. In order to be flexible and to think on your feet, you have to be present. R stands for reaching out, which is about relationship building. E stands for being expressive. This is an obvious transfer between actors’ skills and leaders’ skills. Both have to be congruent in emotions, body and voice so that when you say something, everything: your face, your heart, your body, your voice, your emotions are all saying the same thing.
In leadership, it is very clear when you say one thing but mean something else. The ability to be expressive and congruent is very important. S stands for being self-knowing. This piece of the model came later to me. I saw that the leaders who really had presence had something else as well. They knew what they stood for and were comfortable in their own skin. They were seen as authentic people who could be trusted. They had high emotional intelligence.
KE: How can someone work on being present?
BLH: One way is to increase your awareness of your audience so you are not solely focused on your own agenda. For example, at a meeting, check in with people when you feel their attention moving elsewhere. Try to figure out what’s going on. You may have to move away from your agenda to bring their attention back to you, but if you don’t you will lose them. Another aspect of being present has to do with your nerves when you are in presentation mode. Sometimes it’s hard to think straight when you are trying to get your point across.
There is a little voice in your head that can sabotage you. The best way to disengage from that inner critic is to breathe. This is a major tool for actors to get themselves to relax. Acknowledge the things that are going on physically like clammy hands or fast heart beat. By capturing how you feel you can transform it. I recommend working with leaders to help them disengage from their inner critic voice. I teach them to breathe from the belly. This can inhibit the adrenaline response that is part of the fight or flight response. When you get into the fight or flight response, you really can’t think straight. If you can get yourself to breathe deeply, it makes it possible to think clearly. Develop a ritual for how you talk to yourself in moments of stress.
KE: Can you share an example of a time you worked with someone to help him or her become present?
BLH: One example has to do with stage fright. The shiest person I ever worked with had a new job where she had to present regularly to a group of 200. She was beside herself. We talked about what would make her feel good and confident so she could visualize that before her presentation. She was able to get rid of the nerves that caused her to stumble and not make eye contact. By getting her to be present she was able to get her message across and make a connection.
Another example has to do with what I call “corporate speak.” An executive from a major oil company was going to talk to a group about a major reorganization that was going to happen. He planned to give the rah-rah speech about how they would be very happy with it. I asked him what he thought they really felt. I told him that if he put a brave face on it he was not going to meet his people where they were. I encouraged him to tell his team that he knew what they were feeling and to let them know what he thought about it as well. He later told me that speaking that way was very different for him. He had never shared his own emotions and by doing so he built a deeper bond of trust between him and his team. It also increased his credibility and allowed them all to go forward more constructively.
KE: The second element of the model is reaching out and building relationships. Do you find leaders to be good listeners?
BLH: It depends. There is a wide spectrum of listening skills. To get to their level, leaders have to be good problem solvers. They listen and look for what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. This kind of listening does not necessarily build relationships. So when someone comes into your office with a problem, rather then going directly to the problem, you want to listen for the person’s values and strengths. You want to listen for what they are experiencing emotionally. I find that leaders often are not so skilled at listening in that way.
KE: I agree there’s a big difference between listening for the facts to help solve a problem versus identifying the emotional tone under the words being spoken. It requires a different level of awareness.
BLH: I would also say not to lose the problem solver in you because that is why you get promoted. That is what makes you great in many ways. But trust that the problem solver can work after you’ve done some of the more subtle work.
KE: How would you help leaders get better at this?
BLH: I do an exercise using a specific kind of listening. I have the leaders in a workshop practicing one-on-one by having a deep conversation with someone else about the important turning points in their lives. I have them practice listening for values and for the person’s strengths. I have them work on the kind of conversation to have when sharing, responding, or capturing someone else’s values or strengths. I see the relationships go to a deeper level.
KE: Listening has always been an important part of reaching out. What are the other elements involved in developing the ability to reach out?
BLH: Emotional Intelligence, which has to do with recognizing where you are emotionally, recognizing where the other person is emotionally and then building some kind of bridge between the two. It is awareness of emotion. Then thinking about how you speak to people in a way that allows for this presence of emotion. One piece of relationship building is listening, another is the ability to understand emotion and the third is empathy.
KE: The third element of your model is expressive. What are the common barriers to leaders around being expressive and how do you help leaders become more effective at expressing themselves?
BLH: Even if you really believe what you are saying, if your face and voice do not match your words, you can come across as not credible. Many of us were brought up to be seen and not heard. In the business world, depending on the company, you have probably been told to keep it “buttoned up” and then all of a sudden you are in a larger leadership role and you have to find a way to use your fullest self. I worked with an incredibly smart Harvard and MIT graduate. He was the leader of a team in a financial services group in New York City. I worked with him all day in a hotel conference room. He had no affect, no vocal variety, and no facial expression. I tried to get him to be expressive and nothing happened.
That evening I happened to walk by him in the hotel lobby. He was talking to somebody on his phone. His face was lit up and he was like a different person. When he got off the phone I went up to him and asked him whom he was talking to. It was his kid. I asked him to bring that kind of expressiveness to our session the next day. When he thought about his kid, and talked about his recent project he sounded excited. Once you have eight or 10 people in a room, you need some variety to keep them engaged. When you have a big room, you have huge permission to use your voice, face, and body to keep them engaged.
KE: You talk about the importance of congruity. I have noticed that leaders don’t always take ownership of their messages. They might be cascading down a corporate message and come across as simply the messenger.
BLH: Middle management is a challenging place to be because you have to get messages across from up high, which is difficult to do in an authentic way. If you just speak them, you clearly aren’t behind them, and that won’t work to inspire your troops.
KE: Can you tell us more about the energy level for which you believe leaders are responsible?
BLH: As a leader you want to think that you are responsible for the authentic level of excitement in a room. It’s not just the words you say but how you say them. Daniel Goldman in his book Primal Leadership says, “Great leaders move us, they ignite our passion and inspire the best in us.” Great leadership works through emotion. When leaders fail in the primal task of driving emotion in the right direction, even if they get everything else right, nothing will work as well as it should or could. When I ask the leaders with whom I work for their purpose in a particular piece of communication, the most common answer I get is “to inform.”
The problem with this is that it is passive and boring. Rather than inform, leaders want to think about how they can affect listeners and how they can bring authentic excitement to the room. One thing I recommend is to take a speech and write down the passionate purposes in each section. You can even underline certain words to highlight the key areas to emphasize.
KE: One way for a leader to go beyond informing and to connect in a more inspiring way is to incorporate a story. What type of story do you recommend and how should it be communicated?
BLH: There are different kinds of stories you will need for different situations. You will probably want a story about whom you are to tell to every new employee. You will want a story about your company and the kind of atmosphere you want to create within it. When you have a personal story that teaches a lesson or motivates a change it allows an idea to come alive and it helps build relationships. I encourage you to think about the powerful stories from your life, stories that elucidate your core values and stories about turning points in your life.
Think about your leadership credo. What do you feel is really important for personal and organizational success? If you can speak to your group and tell them powerful stories about your values and why they are important to you, your group will feel like they know you. They will work better and be inspired by you. Those values will be ingrained into the whole working group when they hear them not just as words, but as experiences that have been significant for you.
KE: Do you find that when you encourage leaders to use more stories they resist, insisting that they are not relevant or too personal?
BLH: Absolutely. It is very important that the stories leaders use are relevant. That they tie back to the message. There is some wonderful writing about this by Noel Tichy, a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Michigan. He was Jack Welch’s major guru at GE. He says that: “The best managers are leaders, the best leaders tell stories and the best stories are personal.” When leaders avoid using personal stories I think it’s because they feel vulnerable. They need to find the strategic places to allow themselves to be vulnerable.
KE: Your book outlines some best practices for storytelling. Can you review those for us?
BLH: There are many things you can think about when you tell a story to help it come alive for your audience. Re-experience the event. Use language that will let people feel the experience and not just hear it. This has to do with sensory language, sound, sight, and feeling. Tell your story, not with run on sentences, but rather short sentences or bulleted phrases. Use the present tense. Use descriptive language. Pause between sentences to allow your audience to really see the picture. You can think of a story in three phases. Use the beginning to set the context, then create conflict and change and then have an emotional payout at the end. Make sure that there are three different parts to your story and that there is emotion in it.
Stories really give license to use more vocal variety and body language. This has to be around your own comfort level, but I have seen leaders make great strides in their presence and their expressiveness by practicing telling stories.
KE: The final element in your four-element model is S for “self-knowing.” What happens when someone is not tuned into themselves? Does this impact their ability to be present?
BLH: I often find this with very young people. I work with consultants who are in their 20’s and 30’s who are trying to build relationships with CEO’s who are in their 50’s. They feel like they have to establish the relationship based entirely on their intellect and what they know. There are studies that show that these CEO’s in their 50’s do not want to connect with the person in their 20’s or 30’s just on their expertise. There has to be a level of connection as human beings. There is the consulting adage: “Nobody cares what you know until you can show that you care.” Self-knowing has to do with knowing what you stand for and being comfortable in your own skin. If that’s not there, you will have a “disconnect” between what you say and what you feel which breeds a lack of credibility.
KE: How can you help an individual acquire greater self-knowledge?
BLH: This is an interesting one. As you get older, in general you are more willing to allow yourself to reflect on the important times in your life, which helps with self-knowing. One self-reflective exercise that I have my clients do is to think about their lives as a river. I have them identify the important experiences that have been formative. We take those experiences and label the various tributaries in the river, with both the affirming and challenging experiences. Then we talk about what was learned from each experience. This exercise helps to increase self-knowing.
Leaders also want to know how they can be more inspiring. One way to increase your ability to be more inspiring is to know your values and share and live them in a way that people can see them manifested. In England, 2,000 managers were surveyed and the single most important factor most people wanted in their leader was the ability to be inspired. But only 11% of the leaders showed an ability to inspire their people. Some leaders are promoted for their strategic thinking or problem-solving capacity, which are both very important, but if they can’t be clear in their values and live in a way that is inspiring, it is hard to get a very engaged and motivated workforce.
KE: Which of the four elements in your PRES model is the most challenging to develop?
BLH: It really depends on the person. For people who are not self-reflective, being self-knowing may be harder. There are also people who are quite reflective and not comfortable taking up space. They don’t recognize that to use their voice and body in a bigger way is being more generous towards their audience. For those who are very attached to technology, just getting present with another person can be very challenging. Often leaders don’t recognize until later in the game that their leadership rests almost completely on the voice they develop.
KE: Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share with our audience today?
BLH: One is a beautiful passage from Nelson Mandela who is quoting Marianne Williamson in his 1994 inauguration address: “If we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. If we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” We need to stop feeling that working on our presence is self-indulgent and recognize that it is generous and will allow other people to develop. I ask each of you to think of one or two things that you can do differently in terms of your own presence to enhance your ability to connect authentically with hearts and minds of others.
If you want to e-mail your contact information to me, I am happy to send you the first chapter of my book, which will give you a sense of what we talked about today. You can reach me at:info@arielgroup.com.
