🪞 Why "just be authentic" isn't the same advice for everyone

⏱️ Reading time: 6 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly-ish newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for women of color in social impact navigating power, career, and change.

A client of mine — brilliant, well-liked, consistently delivering — kept getting the same two words in her reviews: "lacks executive presence." Nobody could tell her what it meant. When she pushed, the closest anyone got was "just be a little more polished, a little more confident…" and the sentence trailed off.

So she guessed. She softened her accent and spoke up more on client calls. She straightened her hair before board meetings. She got quieter about where she grew up, or joked about it first so no one else could.

None of it worked. She didn't feel like herself. And she still didn't get the promotion.

It was never that she wasn't "polished" enough. She was trying to answer a leadership question with a costume.

I call this pattern the Translator. It's the version of you that spends so much energy converting yourself into something a room will accept, that you've erased the entire person who is actually meant to lead.

Maybe you've met her. Maybe, some days, you are her.

Researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett has tracked what senior executives say "executive presence" means for over a decade.

Confidence and decisiveness have topped the list since 2012 — that hasn't budged. But her 2022 survey shows something new climbing the ranks: inclusiveness and respect for others.

On communication, "command of the room" now sits next to "listen to learn."

And appearance — historically the most rigid category — shifted most of all: authenticity, simply looking like yourself.

The old rulebook rewarded one look, one voice, one register. The new one asks something different: do people actually know who you are?

That's good news. It's also more complicated than it sounds — and I'll say plainly, from conversations with Black women and Black gender-expansive leaders in particular: "a polished look" has too often been quietly defined to exclude Black hair, Black vernacular, Black expression, full stop. "Just be yourself" has never been a level playing field.

Which brings me to Carla Harris — Vice Chairman of Morgan Stanley, one of the highest-ranking Black women on Wall Street. What you might not know: she's also a gospel recording artist who's sold out Carnegie Hall.

Sit with that. The same woman.

Carla doesn't treat those as competing versions of herself. She brings both, on purpose, everywhere. She distinguishes performance currency — the results you deliver — from relationship currency — whether people actually know and trust you.

You can't earn the second by hiding. Her advice: bring all of you to the table, deliberately, instead of letting a room edit you down.

I think about that a lot. I didn't grow up with models for carrying more than one truth about myself without apologizing for either. My family didn't look like the executives on the posters. My hair didn't look like theirs. I spent years thinking I had to pick a version of myself and leave the rest at the door.

Watching Carla — boardroom and gospel stage, both fully hers — reminds me you don't. You just have to stop asking permission.

Nelson Mandela's words also ring truer than ever:

Speaking someone's language isn't a betrayal of your own — it's how you are able to relate. It's how you build a bridge sturdy enough for both of you to stand on. The Translator's mistake was never code-switching. If you are multicultural or live in a multicultural society this is normal. The mistake is forgetting that fluency and erasure are two different things.

And this isn't just a boardroom question. It's a LinkedIn question. Everyone's using AI to write now. I do too. That's not the problem. The problem is when someone reads your post and can't feel that there is a real, living person underneath it. You can be confident and on-message, and still lose someone's trust the second they sense you aren't really in it. Confidence doesn't fix that. Only you can.

Here's the real work: telling the difference between an Anchor — the part of you that is core to your being and does not change, no matter who's in the room — and a Dial — the parts of yourself that can flex by context and expression without it impacting you. Most "executive presence" feedback is really pointing at a place where the two got confused.

I put together a free, self-guided assessment that walks through the full list of what tends to fall into each column, plus space to build your own inventory: 👉 Authenticity Anchors: An Executive Presence Assessment​

And if you want to go even deeper, live: I'm running a free workshop on this exact question on October 13 — Fluency, Not Erasure: Executive Presence in a System Not Built for You.

Full invite coming next week, but you can get it sooner if you subscribe to the events calendar → luma.com/webefearless​

I'd love to know what came up for you either way. Hit reply and tell me what's in your Anchors column.

Warmly,

Maya 🧡

P.S. Don't forget to save the dates for these free workshops!

📅 From Reactive to Strategic: Your Year-End Leadership Reset — Wednesday, September 30

📅 Fluency, Not Erasure: Executive Presence in a System Not Built for You — Tuesday, October 13

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