Strategies to Elevate Your Executive Leadership

Your social media profile headline is nothing more than a phrase on a screen—a concise summary of your skills and expertise. But while that blurb gets you noticed, the real headline of an executive is in how they lead. The question is, what story is your leadership telling?

As an executive, you know that staying attuned to the pulse of your leadership practice is essential for driving growth, innovation and results. This means moving beyond a surface-level assessment and actively checking to see whether your professional identity—the story you tell—is the one your team is hearing. In this article, we’ll explore the deliberate effort of assessing your leadership practice and provide three practical strategies to ensure it resonates with your organization and drives success.

1. Assess the tone of your leadership.

One of the first strategies to check your leadership pulse is to assess the tone you’re setting in your organization. As you go through these checkpoints, ask yourself: Is the overall tone generally positive, negative or neutral?

• Check your emotional state: The narrative of your leadership begins within you. The emotional dynamic you set into motion is often a mirror of your own internal state and has a wide-reaching influence on your team. A headline of calm resilience finds its starting point in your own self-awareness.
• Check communication style: Your communication patterns are a major part of your brand. Do you deliver clear, empathetic messages and engage in active listening, or is your style unthoughtful and ambiguous, hiding behind jargon? Beyond words, your non-verbal cues—from your facial expressions to posture—are also telling a story. Your presence is a powerful aspect of your executive headline, signaling approachability or detachment.
• Check grapevine talk: The informal conversations that happen in your absence reveal how people are truly reading your headline. Is this dialogue filled with disenchanted vitriol or grievances, or is it focused on problem-solving and new ideas?
• Check feedback: To know if you’re telling the story you think you are, you must seek candid, unfiltered feedback. To get an accurate picture of your organizational impact, create safe channels for individuals to share their honest opinions of your leadership.

2. Select your power verbs.

Once you’ve assessed your tone, the next step is to explore the verbs being used to communicate and animate your executive headline. Strong action verbs signal what you do, how you do it and the impact or reach you’ve had. They tell the story of what motivates you and why people should take inspiration from you and align with your vision.

• Show your impact: Verbs like “transformed” and “cultivated” tell a story of your influence and success, suggesting your presence as a force for growth and development.
• Define your leadership style: A verb like “mentored” shows a people-centric approach, while “pioneered” highlights carving new paths toward innovation, suggesting your presence as a force for strategy and vision.
• Communicate your professional identity: Verbs like “delivered” and “optimized” communicate that you are an action-oriented leader, suggesting your presence as a force for organizational performance.

3. Chart your course.

Once you’ve assessed your tone and animated your professional identity with strong action verbs, the final step to check your leadership pulse is to consider the direction of your headline. What story is your leadership telling, and where is it guiding your organization? To answer that, focus on these key aspects of your leadership’s direction:

• Your headline is a guidepost: After assessing your tone and energizing your identity with action verbs, your headline should act as a navigation system. This system plots the coordinates to help your team understand the “why” behind their work, pointing organizational members toward a shared objective.
• Communicate the vision: The story your leadership tells must consistently communicate the organization’s mission, values and vision. This requires you to visibly reinforce the direction through decisions, resource allocation and communication, ensuring that words align with actions.
• Align your identity with your destination: To avoid confusion and establish trust, your professional identity must align with your ultimate destination. If your headline emphasizes continuous learning, your leadership story must embrace training and development programs and professional mentorship and coaching. Ask yourself: “Am I creating a culture of learning where problems are seen as learning opportunities, not just issues requiring immediate execution?”

Final Words

By actively implementing these strategies, you are doing more than just taking control of your professional identity—you are intentionally writing your headline. This journey begins by setting the right tone and using powerful verbs to guide the direction of your headline. The process of regularly checking the pulse of your leadership practice ensures that the story you want to tell is the one your organization is hearing and experiencing every working day.