What it usually means
Executive presence is a description of what one particular room rewards, not a trait you are missing. It is almost never about volume.
It usually points at the first ten seconds — how you open, how long before you land the point, whether you finish a sentence or trail into a question.
What else it can mean
- A style mismatch. You are being read against a communication style the room treats as the default. The content is fine.
- A seniority tell. You defer in a way that reads, to this room, as not ready.
- A placeholder. The person does not have the specific version and reached for the phrase everyone uses.
What to find out first
One moment they would point to. Which meeting, what happened in it. "Presence" with no instance behind it cannot be worked on — by you or by them.
What the research says, and where it stops
Across nine studies of more than 11,000 people in the United States, the gap in leadership attainment for East Asian Americans ran through assertiveness — a communication style — and not through prejudice or motivation. The authors call it a matter of cultural fit.
Lu, Nisbett & Morris 2020, PNAS 117(9). Limit: US organisations only, mostly correlational. It says nothing directly about an office in Asia.
Which door
This is The Room — “I had the answer. The meeting ended before I said it.”