Keeping your executive presence intact when life is logistically complicated

Recently, I was thinking about executive presence as a mother and what this means when life is challenging logistically. When I think about the term “executive presence”, I think about being in a conference room, speaking up (but not too much) and keeping a level of personable professionalism that is engaging but stays on task with the right metrics and talking points befit for a CEO.

But for working mothers, I think there’s another layer that we deal with that most people aren’t juggling. It’s the challenge of carrying the mental load associated with being a parent — being the first call when kids are sick at school, or trying to do the mental math needed to determine if you’re going to make it to pick up when the 4:00 call that should have ended at 4:30 is still going at 4:52.

There’s so much advice about living loud and while I think this is a great way to normalize being a working parent, I think that in some situations, it also quietly undermines your authority as a working mother.

There’s so much advice about living loud and while I think this is a great way to normalize being a working parent, I think that in some situations, it also quietly undermines your authority as a working mother.

Hear me out.

I’ve been on teams where we all knew when each child was sick, which illness they were dealing with, and a play by play on whether their temperatures were going up or down ever 6 hours. That worked for the team. No one thought any differently about each other. It just was the norm.

And I’ve been on teams where folks had kids who were sick, home from school on holiday or were playing quietly in the background after early dismissal. While it wasn’t frowned upon, it just wasn’t announced or acknowledged. Maybe a manager knew what was going on. Maybe a teammate knew because a child’s voice can through the speaker from another room. But it was handled in the background quietly and with zero context to what’s going on behind the scenes. It wasn’t that we were hiding it — we all knew we were working mothers juggling life and work. We just didn’t draw attention to it.

There’s a binary that we are handed here — either perform a seamless life, one with limited constraints that acts as if you don’t have any dependents or external considerations to your job. Or explain, with detail, what’s happening, so that you get your version of the story on record or release the frustrations that only working mothers bear.

In some situations, both of these can slowly leak authority. One leaks it by pretending. The other leaks it by over-narrating to the wrong audiences.

Executive presence isn’t the absence of constraints. It’s the absence of the chaos you make other people absorb as a result of your constraints.

Executive presence isn’t the absence of constraints. It’s the absence of the chaos you make other people absorb as a result of your constraints.

Read that again, because it’s the whole argument. Nobody in that room is actually tracking whether your life is complicated. They’re tracking whether your complications become their problem — whether your edges show up as their dropped balls, their last-minute scrambles, their “wait, who’s covering this.” Everyone knows that being a working parent — a working mother — comes with logistics and challenges that are unique to our demographic. Executive presence, for someone whose life has real moving parts, isn’t denying your reality. Instead, it’s managing what your constraints signal about yourself to other people and what that will cost them as a result of what is logisitcaly, your problem. It’s signal management. You are managing what your constraints cost the people around you, and you want that answer to be very little, if anything.

And that takes three things.

But before I go into this, I want to acknowledge a few things. First, the playing field is not level when it comes to the challenges working mothers face. It’s not fair. And truthfully, I don’t know when it’s going to be fair when women’s rights seem to be headed backwards in the United States. I don’t need to spend time acknowledging what this means for women. Regardless of this, we still need to navigate a playing field that’s ripe with obstacles that only a working mother will experience and full of bias that we need to manage. With all of this said, I want to share how I think we move forward as we continue to advocate for environments that are more conducive to family friendly policies.

The reflex, when you can’t be everywhere, is to compensate by being reachable everywhere. Always-on becomes an apology of sorts — I can’t be in the 6pm, but look how responsive I am at 9PM. But availability isn’t the same as executive presence. It’s noise that happens to feel like effort. A leader who answers every ping in four minutes reads as reactive, not senior. A leader who makes a clear call, states it once, and moves on tends to read more like someone whose judgment you’d want in the room.

Being confident when you signal your unavailability is the higher-status move because it’s scarcer. And leaders take calculated risks. It says: I don’t need to be in every conversation to be trusted with the outcome. Availability says the opposite — I need to be here or else this won’t get done.

Constraints stop being disruptions the moment they become patterns. If the room knows you’re offline at 5 and back at 8, that’s not a limitation — it’s information that’s easy to plan around. Plenty of situations call for hard stops — time zones, the closing bell of the stock market, the start of a press conference. The disruption isn’t the problem. It’s the surprise that the disruption creates. It’s the person whose availability is a coin flip, who’s heads-down for three days and then suddenly needs everything, whose team never quite knows which version they’re getting.