Today started with a normal corporate ritual. A strategic planning session presenting to the executive team. After the session one of the senior executive leaders pulled me aside, we had a short, but insightful conversation. That conversation then steered into deep thought for me. A thought, I’m now sharing with you.
After I had presented the biggest problems we needed to solve and how we would get there, he told me the presentation was clear, structured, and had directly shaped strategic thinking. The work had landed. The outcome I actually care about, had happened. The organisation now UNDERSTOOD and aligned on the problem to be solved.
From that point onwards, we did what people in that moment always do: we decompressed into shop talk.
We moved into a strangely specific debate that anyone who has worked in product, consulting, or strategy will recognise immediately:
PowerPoint vs Miro.
He joked that my deck felt familiar — the consulting kind of familiar. We both had that background. The place where you learn to think in slides, where structure is a discipline and not decoration, where a presentation is not information but an argument. PowerPoint, in that world, isn’t a tool. It’s a thinking method and a convincing narrative.
Then, I admitted something: I don’t like building ideas and then presenting in Miro.
He laughed and said Miro isn’t really a presenting tool. It’s a collaboration tool.
That distinction mattered more than it sounds.
Because at that point I shared that I don’t actually use group sessions the way most people use them.
I don’t ideate in real time with a group.
Not because I dislike collaboration.
Because I use those sessions to diagnose the problem, not solve it.
While people are brainstorming solutions, I’m watching:
- where confusion appears
- which assumptions people share
- which concerns repeat
- what nobody says out loud
I’m not generating ideas yet.
I’m trying to understand what the room believes reality is.
He paused and said:
“So you’re a deep thinker.”
Then he asked a question that I wasnt expecting and dramatically shifted the conversation.
“How has that impacted your career?”
And then he told me his own story.
Earlier in his career he had presented analysis without giving a recommendation. He believed the role of the analyst was to show the truth and let leadership decide. But what leadership saw was something else: a lack of executive presence. A lack of leadership signal. In their minds, a leader doesn’t just explain reality — a leader tells people what to do about it.
It affected how he was perceived.
He learned: organisations don’t only evaluate correctness.
They evaluate direction-setting.
I realised I had never really thought about that question.
I told him, honestly, I would have had to care about promotion to notice whether it affected my career.
Even if it did, I didn’t track it.
I care about whether the work changed the decision.
Not whether the decision changed my title.
I said the same thing to him, as I say to all my leaders:
I care more about getting the job done than talking for the purpose of alignment in the hope of getting the job done.
That doesn’t mean alignment doesn’t matter to me. Its just not the role I want to play in the organisation. That role (in my view) is delegated to my manager and that set up, suits me just fine. Yes, I could do the influence part, but frankly being patient with people who are in risk delegation mode over impact improvement mode drains the hell out of me.
Having said that. I’ve also been fortunate. I’ve had leaders who actively amplified my voice — often when I didn’t want them to. They would pull me into rooms I wasn’t trying to enter. They interpreted my thinking as leadership even when I wasn’t attempting to demonstrate leadership.
But I also realised something else.
That was often the moment I started considering leaving.
Not because I disliked responsibility.
Because I wasn’t interested in playing what I privately think of as leadership theatre.
The Corporate Paradox
Large organisations run on coordination.
Not intelligence.
Not even strategy.
Coordination.
The hardest problem inside a big company is not figuring out the right answer. It’s getting hundreds of people to move in the same direction at the same time. So leadership signals evolve around behaviours that make coordination possible: confidence, framing, early direction, visible ownership.
The system is logical.
But it creates a quiet tension.
Some people think out loud.
Some people think first, then speak.
The first group helps groups move faster.
The second group sometimes helps groups move correctly.
Organisations tend to reward the first more consistently, because speed is visible and correctness is only visible later.
Neither group is wrong.
They are optimising different risks.
A startup fears being wrong about reality.
A corporation fears organisational misalignment.
That single difference explains a lot of what we classify as having “executive presence.”
Personally, I’m looking for a leader that can balance both. I believe a great leader can make them coexist.
What I Ultimately Learned From the Conversation
The executive wasn’t telling me I needed to change.
He was revealing a truth: leadership perception forms before the final answer exists.
My instinct has always been: understand → structure → recommend.
The leadership signal often happens earlier: orient → reassure → decide.
That doesn’t mean one is better.
It means they serve different organisational needs.
I still don’t enjoy real-time ideation sessions. I still prefer forming a view after observing the system, not during the noise of it. And I still don’t measure my work by whether I looked like a leader while doing it.
I measure it by whether the decision improved.
But I now better understand what others are seeing in those moments.
They’re not watching who is smartest in the room.
They’re watching who helps the room know where to go when nobody is certain yet.
Why This Matters
Not everyone wants the same relationship with leadership.
Some people want to lead organisations.
Some people want to solve problems inside them.
Both are valuable.
But they are not the same skillset, and confusing them creates quiet career anxiety for a lot of capable people who assume they’re doing something wrong when they’re actually optimising for a different goal.
For me, the conversation didn’t change how I want to work.
It changed how I interpret what I’m observing around me.
Sometimes leadership is decision authority.
Sometimes it is influence.
Sometimes it is simply the person willing to speak first.
And sometimes it’s the person in the room who is still trying to understand the problem while everyone else is racing toward the solution.
I’m still that person.
I just understand now why organisations react the way they do to it — and why the same behaviour that builds trust in one context can look like hesitation in another.
That’s the chaos part.
The constant part is this:
I’d still rather improve the decision than improve the perception that I improved the decision.
