For many years, “executive presence” was defined by the ability to walk into a room, command attention, speak with clarity, and project confidence. Important? Of course. But in today’s hybrid, global, and asynchronously connected organizations, presence no longer lives only in the room. Most leaders are influencing their teams long before they open their mouths, and often without ever being in the same room at all.
The New Reality: Most People Experience Leadership Asynchronously
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for many leaders: Your team is forming their impression of you long before your next all-hands meeting.
How?
A confusing email that triggers more questions than decisions.
A memo announcing a change that lacks transparency and next steps.
A Slack message that’s three paragraphs too long.
A late-night comment on a doc that sounds harsher than intended.
A project update with no POV, no next steps, and no sense of priority.
A deck so dense that your team screenshots it and asks, “What does she actually want us to do?”
This is asynchronous presence: where every written, typed, posted, or shared communication that represents your thinking and influences action, often without you there to explain, soften, clarify, or reinforce it. And when that communication is read hours or days later, the impact has to stand on its own.
This isn’t theoretical. Look at the data:
Workers spend 28% of their week on email (McKinsey).
Slack processes ~200 billion messages a year, much of which becomes the de facto decision record in hybrid companies.
Nearly 70% of managers say unclear communication is their biggest source of wasted time (Axios HQ).
And 1 in 2 employees say they’ve misinterpreted a leader’s tone in the last month (Grammarly/Harris Poll 2024).
Your presence has a digital footprint that’s shaping trust, alignment, and productivity every single day.
The Biggest Blind Spot: Leaders Underestimate Written Influence
Leaders still vastly overestimate the influence of their live interactions. Meanwhile, their teams are:
Making decisions based on quickly scanned emails
Aligning around Slack updates
Cascading messages from memos about organizational changes
Socializing ideas through docs and decks
In many organizations, the written word is the primary vehicle for direction, alignment, and influence, not because email is the dominant channel, but because asynchronous communication spans every channel that doesn’t happen in real time.
When a leader communicates asynchronously, the clarity, conciseness, and tone of the writing must compensate for the absence of body language and vocal delivery.
It’s about how leaders communicate when they’re not in the room.
So let’s reframe executive presence:
“How effectively a leader communicates in a way that builds trust, clarity, and confidence, in person and asynchronously.”
Now executive presence becomes measurable, repeatable, and coachable.
Presence isn’t performance. It’s communication, across all channels.
What Does Asynchronous Presence Look Like?
Old
New
Clear Point of View (POV)
Here’s context and background, and more context…
What | So What | Now WhatHere’s what we should think about, here’s why it matters, and here’s what we’re doing.
Listener-centered writing
Here’s everything I want to say…
What you need to know, what to do, and why it matters to you.
Brevity with intent
400-word Slack updates that bury the lead.
Four sentences with a clear decision and next steps
Tone that builds trust
Short comments that feel abrupt or critical
Intentional phrasing that shows context, empathy, and partnership
Structure that reduces cognitive load
Dense blocks of text
Skimmable bullets and purposeful formatting, because 75% of messages are read on mobile
Asynchronous presence is strategy, not style. It’s clarity, not charisma.
The Bottom Line
Leadership isn’t defined by how you perform in the room. It’s defined by how you communicate everywhere else.
If you want people to trust your direction…
If you want teams to move faster and with more alignment…
If you want influence that scales beyond meeting invites…
Then your executive presence must extend beyond your voice, your gestures, and your slides.
The modern leader shows up in the inbox, in the doc, in the channel, and in the workflow, every day, whether they intend to or not.
