Executive presence is not a quality you have or lack. It is a description of what one particular room rewards, and rooms disagree with each other constantly. The measured pace and the deliberate pause that read as gravitas in one company read as hesitation, or a lack of urgency, in the company across the road.
That is why the feedback feels impossible to act on. You are being asked to acquire a trait, when what is actually being described is a mismatch between how you deliver and what this specific room has learned to reward.
What the research says
Edward Hall's work on high context and low context communication is the clearest starting point. Some cultures encode a great deal of meaning in what goes unsaid, in the pause, in the relationship, in what everyone already understands. Others put the meaning almost entirely in the explicit words. Neither is more sophisticated than the other. But someone fluent in one and evaluated by the other will look like they are underperforming, when what is actually happening is a translation problem nobody in the room has named.
The competence research points the same direction. Grant, Gino and Hofmann, writing in the Academy of Management Journal in 2011, ran a study across pizza delivery stores and found that introverted leadership outperformed extraverted leadership when the team was proactive, and underperformed when the team was passive. The same leadership style, measured against real revenue, produced opposite results depending on the room it was in. The trait did not change. The fit did.
Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety adds the last piece. Whether speaking up is viable at all is a property of the team, not of the person deciding whether to speak. A room where naming a problem gets you punished will read a careful person as disengaged, and it will be wrong.
Put those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but useful. When someone tells you that you lack executive presence, they are usually reporting an accurate feeling about a real mismatch, and then explaining it with the wrong theory.
Why the feedback is always vague
Because the person giving it is describing an impression, not a behaviour.
They noticed something. The meeting did not land the way they expected, or you did not seem certain, or the senior person in the room did not lean in. That noticing is real information. But turning an impression into a specific behaviour is genuinely hard, and most managers do not do it, so what comes out is the category label. You need more presence. You need to be more visible. Work on your gravitas.
None of that tells you what to do differently on Tuesday.
What to ask instead
The move is to convert the label back into the behaviour it was describing, and you do that by offering two specific options rather than asking an open question. Open questions get you the label again.
If you have been told you speak too slowly, ask whether that means shorter answers overall, or the same content with less space between the sentences. Those are two completely different fixes. The first means leading with your conclusion and going into detail only if asked. The second means keeping the substance and tightening the delivery.
If you have been told you need more presence in senior meetings, ask whether that means contributing earlier in the discussion, or contributing more often, or being more direct when you disagree. Again, different fixes, and the person giving the feedback usually knows which one they meant the moment you put the options in front of them.
The question does two things at once. You get something concrete. And you demonstrate the exact quality you were told you were missing, because asking a precise question about your own performance is what a composed senior person does.
Where this stops holding
Do not rebuild your whole delivery around one room's preference.
If your measured pace was working for a decade and stopped working when you changed companies, the pace was never the problem, and abandoning it entirely costs you something real. The pause does genuine work in a complex or contentious moment. Keep it there. Default to a faster, more direct opening in the ordinary update moments where it is not earning anything.
And be honest with yourself about which situation you are in. Sometimes the feedback is a fit problem you can close with a small delivery change. Sometimes it is a room that has decided what a leader sounds like and is not going to revise that. Those call for different decisions, and only one of them is about how you speak.
The one conclusion to resist is that the problem is you. Two decades of watching people receive this feedback, and the pattern is consistent. The people told they lack presence are rarely the people doing weaker work. They are usually the people whose way of being competent does not match the local convention for looking competent, in a room that has never examined the difference.