Member portal

Promotion decisions

Visibility is not a seat requirement

What quiet confidence teaches us about putting the right leader in the right seat.

In the promotion conversations I am part of, there is often a moment when someone says of a candidate, “She just has presence,” or, “He doesn’t really speak up in meetings.” Neither sentence tells us whether that person can lead people, yet either one can quietly decide who gets the seat.

Across policing, healthcare, municipal government, and corporate teams, I have come to see it as one of the least examined ways we put the wrong person in the wrong seat.

Jennifer Marcou, a former vice president and general manager at Microsoft and American Express and the author of Lead with Quiet Confidence, names the problem cleanly in a recent Forbes conversation with leadership writer Rodger Dean Duncan.

Her point is that organizations tend to reward what is easy to see, such as speaking first, projecting energy, and networking widely, and then treat those behaviors as evidence of judgment, influence, and strategic ability. The cost runs in two directions. Capable people are passed over, and the people watching them get passed over begin to conclude that leadership is not for them. That is a pipeline issue, and it is a seat issue.

Gino Wickman’s GWC test, from his Entrepreneurial Operating System, asks three questions of anyone in a seat.

I use it constantly, and in The People-Leader Imperative I argue that the people-leader seat deserves that same standard, with desire to develop others weighed as seriously as technical skill. Notice what none of the three questions asks. Not one of them is about who is loudest in the room.

Yet when a promotion committee cannot see GWC directly, it reaches for the nearest visible proxy, and visibility is usually the nearest one. Gallup’s long-running research finds that organizations choose the wrong person for the manager role roughly 82 percent of the time. I suspect a meaningful share of those misses begins right here, when presence is allowed to stand in for capacity.

Marcou’s prescription is to separate visibility from value. The most practical way I know to do that is to build the seat before judging the person in it. When a role is written as five key responsibility areas, each carrying a stated outcome, we no longer have to guess who is contributing, because we can see whether the outcomes landed.

The analyst who keeps regional commitments on track without escalation, and whose team can absorb a peak week without overtime, has demonstrated leadership whether or not anyone heard her say much in the staff meeting.

Marcou is honest about the other half of this, too. She was passed over for a general manager role herself and concluded that strong work cannot speak for itself if nobody knows about it. Outcome-based key responsibility areas help there as well. They give quieter leaders a natural, unself-promoting way to make their contribution known: report against the outcome the seat owns.

Selection is where this bias gets corrected or confirmed. Unstructured interviews favor the fluent candidate, which is why I push for structured questions and, on every abstract answer, the same follow-up: “Give me a specific example.” Specifics level the field between the quick talker and the careful thinker.

The Hogan Development Survey helps from the other side. Several of its derailer scales, including Bold and Colorful, describe tendencies that read as confidence and charisma in an interview and can become liabilities under pressure once the person is in the seat. And because organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s research suggests only 10 to 15 percent of us are as self-aware as we believe, I pair self-report tools such as the EQ-i 2.0 with 360-degree feedback once a leader is in role.

Once the right person is in the right seat, the same principle shapes how they lead their team. Marcou frames the issue as a decision-quality problem rather than an inclusion problem: a leader who hears only from the fastest voices is not getting the full intelligence of the team. Her practices are simple, and I recommend them to the new people leaders I coach.

None of this favors introverts over extroverts. It gives both a fair chance to contribute their best thinking, and it protects the leader from the pull of the most confidently stated idea, which can win on delivery rather than merit. Yes, this requires additional preparation on the leader’s part, but it is also a leadership best practice: readiness.

Marcou also redefines executive presence as the ability to create confidence and trust through clear communication, follow-through, composure, and conviction, with charisma as optional. That definition sits comfortably inside the order I teach, confidence, competence, and credibility, and it is far more useful in a seat decision than an interview impression.

We end up with the leaders we have trained ourselves to notice. My hope is that we learn to notice judgment, listening, follow-through, and the steady development of other people, and then put those leaders in the seats where they will do the most good.