THE GROWTH EDGE
The Leadership Edge
Development Insights for Leaders Who Do the Work
August 2026 • Issue #5
Two conversations in the past month have stayed with me, and they turned out to be about the same thing. The first was with a VP who’d been told for years that she “needed executive presence” but couldn’t get anyone to tell her specifically what that meant. The feedback had become background noise — vague enough to feel unfair, persistent enough to feel like a ceiling. The second was with a director who described his own state as “still doing the work, but not in it anymore.” He wasn’t planning to leave. He’d just quietly stopped investing his full self months ago, and no one had noticed.
From the outside these look like different problems. One person wants to signal more presence to move up. The other has stopped signaling much of anything. But in coaching, they show up as two sides of the same question: what am I actually communicating with how I show up, and does it match what I want to be true?
Last month’s posts covered both sides. Executive presence, deconstructed into observable behaviors instead of mystical qualities. And the quiet leadership crisis — the leaders who are still competent and still present but no longer fully invested, which is the fastest-growing form of disengagement the workforce data is picking up on. The research this month sits at that intersection, and there’s a specific pattern in the data worth paying attention to.
What We Published Last Month
Executive Presence: What It Actually Means and How to Build It
“You need to work on your executive presence” is the vaguest feedback in leadership development — which is why it’s the hardest to act on. This post breaks EP into its three research-backed components (gravitas at 67%, communication at 28%, appearance at 5%) and shows what each one actually is, why the vague version persists, and how Hogan and EQ-i data can turn the feedback into a specific development target. If you’ve ever received this feedback and left the conversation more confused than motivated, this is the post.
Read it: Executive Presence: What It Actually Means →
The Quiet Leadership Crisis: When Competent Leaders Disengage Without Leaving
The leader who’s still competent, still professional, still meeting the requirements of the role — and operating at 60% of their potential because something in the environment broke the contract they had with the organization. This post names the four causes (they stopped being challenged, stopped being heard, lost trust, or their manager stopped managing them), the warning signs to look for, and the specific conversations that re-engage a leader before disengagement becomes an exit. As much a diagnostic for yourself as for anyone on your team.
Read it: The Quiet Leadership Crisis →
Worth Knowing: What the Research Is Saying
Gallup, 2026 State of the Global Workplace. Global manager engagement dropped from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025 — the sharpest single-year decline the report has recorded, and steeper than the drop in individual-contributor engagement. The sharpest declines are among managers under 35 and women managers. Gallup’s phrase is that disengagement is “spreading upward.” And 64% of the global workforce now sits in the “not engaged” middle band: present, showing up, and no longer investing discretionary effort.
This is the data behind last month’s Quiet Leadership Crisis post. The population most likely to be quietly disengaged is not the underperformer at the bottom — it’s the competent manager in the middle who’s still delivering but no longer stretching. If you lead a team, the odds that at least one of your direct reports is in this state are higher now than they’ve been in the decade Gallup has tracked this. And if you’re honest with yourself, there’s a decent chance the same question applies to you.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett & Center for Talent Innovation, Executive Presence Research. Across a survey of nearly 4,000 professionals including 268 senior executives, gravitas accounts for 67% of what people mean when they say “executive presence.” Communication accounts for 28%. Appearance accounts for 5% — the exact opposite of how much airtime it gets in most development conversations. And within gravitas, the two most-cited components are confidence in a crisis and decisiveness under pressure. Both are behavioral. Both are coachable.
What I find useful about the Hewlett data is how it reframes the development target. If you’ve been told you need more presence and you’ve been focused on how you sound or how you dress, you’ve been working on 5% of the problem. Gravitas — the perception that you have substance and that you can be steady when things go wrong — is where the leverage actually sits. And it’s built the same way any other capability is built: through targeted practice in moments that matter, with feedback, over time.
Center for Talent Innovation, Executive Presence & EQ. 61% of senior executives cite emotional intelligence as very important for women’s executive presence, and 58% cite it as very important for men’s. In the same research, 70% of leaders identified decisiveness as a component of EP for both men and women — second only to confidence in a crisis. The composite picture: EP isn’t only about how you signal outward. It’s built on how well you regulate inward, particularly under pressure.
This is the piece that ties presence and engagement together. The leaders who show up with real gravitas aren’t performing steadiness — they’re actually steady, because they’ve done the internal work of knowing what they think, what they feel, and what they’re willing to say out loud. The leaders in the quiet crisis are the mirror image: they’ve withdrawn from the internal work of caring, and eventually that withdrawal shows up externally as diminished presence. Both problems, in the end, are solved by the same thing: reconnecting to the substance underneath the signal.
Resource Spotlight
7 Self-Sabotage Patterns That Hold You Back. A guide to the specific patterns that quietly limit leaders — including the ones that show up when you’ve stopped being challenged, stopped being heard, or lost trust in the environment you’re operating in. Useful precisely because self-sabotage is rarely dramatic. It’s the small daily decisions to hold back, hedge, or opt out — the exact behaviors that show up in the quiet leadership crisis and quietly erode presence at the same time.
Get the 7 Self-Sabotage Patterns guide →
Curious what assessment-driven development would look like for you?
Discovery calls are free, 30 minutes, and there’s no pitch — just an honest conversation about where you are, what you’re working on, and whether structured coaching or assessment work would help you get there.