Use These Three Key Skills to Establish Gravitas at Work

As an executive coach to entrepreneurs and senior leaders at startups, my clients often ask me about how to build gravitas. This is not surprising, given what it takes to start a company or lead a small business, and what it takes to run a larger one are much different. Gravitas is not necessarily required at the early stages, but as time goes by, it is one of those “soft” skills that is both necessary and quite hard to cultivate.

I remember the first time I saw Mark Zuckerberg. It was early 2006 and I was working on a startup out of Accel’s office in Palo Alto. Facebook had just received a big investment from this firm, and Zuck was waiting in the lobby for a meeting. He

was still very much a kid, with his hoodie up and sitting in the large leather chair looking as if he wanted to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible – not someone who was trying to project or invite gravitas.

Now when I see Mark on stage or in interviews, he can really command his audience. He is still young and his dress has only matured from the hoodie to a t-shirt. But he wears it with confidence. And while he doesn’t have the polished stage presence of a politician, it is not just because he runs Facebook that people listen to his every word. He has cultivated gravitas.

What specifically can you do to build your own version of gravitas? Here are three practices that I recommend.

1. Get to Know Thyself

As is inscribed at the Oracle at Delphi, knowing thyself is the key first step to all human development. If you don’t know how you are built, your strengths and weaknesses, what you value and believe, and how you see the world, you will not be able to grow and evolve.

Get a journal and spend some time in self-reflection. Consider your core values and beliefs that drive your primary behaviors. Take the Enneagram and learn about your personality. Ask your teammates to give you feedback on what they see are your leadership strengths and areas for development. These will all help you to better understand you, and how others perceive you. It’s a never-ending process, so make it a regular practice.

2. Manage Reactive Behaviors

One of the surest ways to lose gravitas is to have an outburst, or any other type of reactive behavior, like being snarky or sarcastic, or even getting quiet in the midst of a challenging situation when others are watching. As a leader, everyone is watching you like a hawk, and if you act out, people are sure to notice. All it takes is one moment to lose gravitas in the eyes of your team. Remember, you are extremely influential to them, in some ways like a parent to a young child. A reactive behavior immediately detracts from your position of grounded power, and makes you look like a smartass, a power-hungry jerk, or a weakling.

So how do you stop reactive behaviors? It isn’t easy, but the first step is to know what yours are. We all have our favorites, whether they are more common examples like getting angry, sarcastic, using humor, or quietly leaving the scene, or something that is unique to you, reactive behaviors render you powerless to thoughtful, mature responses.

Now that you know your behaviors, the second step is to determine your triggers—what happens before you act out. What is it that throws you? We all have our triggers, whether it is a teammate missing a deadline, a screaming boss, or fumbling answer to an easy question. Maybe you feel justified–the other person is being an idiot or a jerk in your eyes, or too scary to handle. It doesn’t matter. Only you can manage you. And most people won’t approve your bad behavior, regardless of what happened first.

So figure out when you get triggered and get prepared. They will come, notice your visceral reaction, and then choose a different action. This is much harder than it sounds. It takes a lot of work, and is best developed through daily practices such as meditation to build up the “muscle” of self-awareness. With discipline and dedication, you can shift from reactivity to proactivity.

3. Ask High Impact Questions

Focusing on your communication skills is a third critical skill for building gravitas.

Strong leaders ask high-impact questions that require their team members to go deep, to really consider the question and answer from a more nuanced and thoughtful perspective that can be the starting point of a more meaningful path forward. Open-ended questions are a good start, but they often don’t efficiently or effectively move conversations to a clear solution.

For example, rather than asking a teammate “What did you learn from the conference?”, try framing the question in a more impactful way: “What are the top three takeaways from the conference that we can apply to our business?” You are giving your teammate guidance on how to frame an answer in a focused way. At the same time, you are teaching her to take her interactions with others up a notch, to a more precise level.

Often, high-impact questions are met with silence while the thinking is happening. That’s okay. It’s not up to you to fill the void and great leaders know that it’s often good to talk less. You’re creating the space for your teammates to think creatively and constructively, so don’t rush to provide an answer or give more instructions. You’re giving them an opportunity to grow and shine and extend their thinking and problem-solving to a more impactful place.
And they’ll respect and appreciate you more for it. They will say you have gravitas.