“Rebecca, I need more gravitas,” Andreas said to me at the start of our first coaching session, “but I want to be myself. I don’t want to pretend to be someone else.” As an organizational psychologist at the London School of Economics, teaching leadership development in executive education programs and coaching professionals globally for 20 years, I’ve had the privilege of hearing the development goals of hundreds of professionals. They regularly describe wanting to be valued and respected — but they fear that to do so they need to betray their own personality or values.
Gravitas Is a Quality You Can Develop
Five tips to build it — in a way that’s authentic to you.
September 24, 2020
HBR Staff/Artem Hvozdkov/Getty Images
Summary.
Having gravitas at work can impact how seriously you are taken and how you rise in an organization. But it’s easy to associate gravitas with behaviors that fit a particular mold, and many people assume that if you’re not born with it, you can’t acquire it. The author argues that you can develop your gravitas while being true to yourself: The key is understanding that your real self can change as you build a deeper set of meaningful, trusted connections with other people. She offers five tips to help: 1) Be clear about what you want; 2) Be open to feedback; 3) Create time for broader conversations; 4) Beware the self-fulfilling prophecy of “needing more confidence”; and 5) Commit to integrity.