Welcome to this course on building your executive presence. I'm Blair Koch. And I'm a many times CFO and corporate director, how often have you been in a big meeting or bumped into someone important, and when that opportunity came to showing things that pull it differently than you had hoped? afterwards, you keep replaying the scene reflecting on how things went awry. Let me begin by telling you my own story of just how I got my career started in the executive ranks because it wasn't by design. I had been working for almost 13 years since graduating from university and achieved my professional financial accounting designation.

And I really knew at some point that I wanted to become an executive during my career, and really the only proactive measures I took in those 13 years was to obtain an MBA. Now I'd worked my way up the ladder in public practice and all the way from a staff accountant to a senior manager before moving to industry and an industry. I've worked my way through the middle ranks of management working in various finance functions. But my progression towards the executive office was painstakingly slow, mainly because those above me had me squarely pigeon holed as a financial expert, and not a financial leader, because so frustrated my stall career in these middle management, specialist roles that I took a leap of faith and actually left the public utility that I was working for, and went to work for an entrepreneur. Now, the first assignment he had me work on was a struggling seafood company.

During my first six months, I was working as kind of a consultant on behalf of the Board of Directors. My experience and my education gave me credible insight into how we could kind of turn things around with this company. I wrote a memo to my boss who was one of the Corporate Directors of the company outlining my plan for a turnaround and I titled this 101 things to do at this particular company. I really wasn't sure what his reaction was gonna be. But the next day I got a call from him and he was asking me said, Hey, Blair, what is it you want me to do with this memory? Exactly.

And here was my golden opportunity, the perfect open ended question that we only get asked a few times in our careers, the ability to ask for anything. And so I went for it. I replied to him, I said, Make me the president of this particular company, so that I can execute on those hundred and one action items. The company had been leaderless for a few months. And I believe that this was the crux of the challenges the company was facing during this turnaround. And much to my surprise, he actually agreed, but one condition, the other executives at the company would have to support me in this position.

So the following week, we returned to the company's offices, which were in Boston, I lived in Canada, we held an executive meeting with the eight of us present he outlined the plan that he and I had agreed to to make me president of the company. But then he went one by one and asked for feedback from each one of the executives. This was the interesting part because one by one right in front of me, they all had issues with his decision. He they would say things like Blair's too young Blair doesn't know this business, Blair doesn't know the industry. Blair hasn't been here long enough, Blair doesn't even live in the city, which is all very true. In fact, the only person supporting me in this in this quest to become president was the vice president of finance because he knew that the backup plan was that if I failed to get the support of the other executives, that I was to become the chief financial officer.

So needless to say, I was named Chief Financial Officer A few minutes later. But while I got my first executive appointment, it's hard to say that was a complete success or by design, because I really didn't get the support of the other executives. what it came down to was that I lacked executive presence, the intangible qualities that in the minds of others would have made me successful in that leadership role for this particular company. Now spin forward a dozen years later, I was consulting for another large food processing company last year. I had been there six months and the President was begging me to join them to become their CFO, month after month. kept asking me the same question until I finally caved.

That was to become my fourth CFO role. So what is it that I had learned in those dozen years in between this, suddenly, I was now so credible as an executive. And that's really what we're going to learn about in this course. And then the other courses that accompany this particular course on confidence. Now, Jen and I are the only ones to recognize that there's this chasm between being a financial professional and a financial executive. And in this course, and the five others that round out the six traits of executive presence.

We hope to kind of narrow this gap and give you the tools to build kind of a bridge between the two ends of your careers. A financial professional is one who derives their livelihood primarily from your financial expertise. You could be a gap expert, you may be a tax specialist, you may be a finance junkie like myself, or perhaps an auditing Pro, but your value your credibility are driven by your technical expertise. Financial executives on the other hand are those that have a chief technical competence at one point or another in their career, the sorts of people who have been there and done that. However, if you ask a financial executive where they derive their value today, it's a much different answer. Financial executives add value by thinking and acting and communicating strategically by influencing and persuading others to make decisions based on data and financial theory and through leadership leadership of not only themselves in their direct reports, but across the organization to more broadly with external financial stakeholders.

What makes an executive and executive is beyond what they know. Strong executives have an aura about them that commands respect and inspires a following our graduate programs and our professional designations do a wonderful job building up those technical concepts. But it seems that I referred to earlier. They talk about some of these higher level competencies, but they really don't train us to embody them to own them, to make them part of our presence in the face of others. This is what we intend to develop today. At executive finance, we focus on executive development for financial professionals.

We work to develop courses and programs that take you from your professional certification training, or perhaps where your MBA left off and show you a career path toward the executive suite. We describe this transformation as the cubicle to the corner office. The six traits of executive presence is the combination of our own research our own experience, working as executives and consultants across a variety of companies and industries. So let's explore graphic a bit more before we dive into developing our executive confidence. Accompanying this course is a workbook which you can use to work through some of the ideas discussed in the course. You can Pause the video and fill out the workbook or you can play along in your head if you prefer.

So beginning with exercise one in the workbook, let's think about an executive, you know, or perhaps you heard of that you greatly admire. And I want you to try to explore why it is you admire that person so much, what makes them the great executive, they are using those three categories that we talked about in the previous slide, take a moment to write down the attributes that impressed you the most and try to sort them by one of the three categories of competencies. We talked about in the previous slide, the technical competencies, the enabling competencies, which are those competencies that supplement and help you express your other competencies, as well as executive competencies, those higher level traits of executive presence. You ready to go take a few moments to do that right now? Welcome back. So let's take a look at some of the examples or some of the thoughts you may have considered.

So for instance, you may have identified that the executive knows the market, or perhaps that they know the business, inside and out. How about this one, they're brilliant operator or grads, a great sales mindset. Under enabling competencies, you might have written down things like there are people person, or they're a great project manager or they're hard working or they're very well organized. Under executive competencies, you may have written down things like these, like they, perhaps the individuals, that visionary leader, or perhaps that they motivate others through empowerment, or that they are highly connected, or perhaps that they have a magnetic personality, and they're highly confident. This simple exercise is designed to raise your own self awareness. Building self awareness is more involved in many things, particularly because there isn't a prescribed roadmap between financial professional and financial executive.

You luckily have enough Have Known weaknesses, we all have some that may be technical in nature. Because we're not specialists in every aspect of Finance. Maybe you've never worked in a public company context and therefore, you may feel intimidated by the regulatory and the reporting obligations. Many of us address these sorts of weaknesses through additional education or professional development. However, let's think beyond just the technical weaknesses. And once again, think about the executive competencies that we had in the third column of the first exercise.

This is where we want to focus on during this particular course, because by the end of this course, and the other five related courses to it, you should have a much better sense of the sorts of things you should be working on going forward to build your executive presence. Now we all have blind spots that can inadvertently hold us back in our careers. Now here's a list of the common blind spots that come back when peers evaluate the executive presence in others. You may hear feeding Like not making eye contact, or rolls their eyes or shakes their head when listening to new ideas, or always says no as a first response or Yes, but they don't shake hands. Well, they don't make a good strong first impression. They telegraph a lack of confidence through their overall body language.

They shuffle papers in meetings, they overreact to situations. they yell at their subordinates, they don't speak up in meetings. They have an inability to make small talk during networking events. They're no at all. They are too abrupt. They're too personal.

They wear clothes that perhaps don't fit or look appropriate for the position that they're aspiring towards. These are all the sorts of blind spots that we inadvertently may or may not be aware of, that directly impact our executive presence. And so what you need to do is have kind of a two pronged assessment of your own executive presence, your own strengths and weaknesses because the feedback from others as well As feedback from your own self assessment will help you identify where you have potential blind spots. At the beginning of the workbook, there's a little introductory exercise that will help you uncover some of these blind spots for those blind spots that perhaps you aren't aware of or you don't see as easily. This is where the role of a mentor and executive coaching become extremely helpful, because they only have your long term interests at heart and can help you not only see but work through some of these areas of weakness.

So welcome to this course on executive presence. And in this course, we're going to get started with working on your confidence.