We’re Handing People Leadership Ten Years Early, and Not Teaching Them to Hold a Room

Something has quietly changed about what we ask of people early in their careers. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that junior roles exposed to AI are now seven times more likely to demand traditionally senior skills, things like leadership, strategic thinking and judgement, than the junior roles least touched by it. Entry-level postings have flatlined in the most AI-exposed sectors, while seniorised junior roles, the ones that expect senior-level capability from day one, have grown by more than a third since 2019. The career ladder is not just shortening. It is bending into an hourglass, and the old middle rungs are falling away.

The practical consequence is this. We now expect people to lead, present, hold a room and make judgement calls a decade earlier than their managers ever did, and almost no one is teaching them how. We have simply assumed presence will arrive on its own.

It does not. And the belief that it should is one of the more expensive myths in corporate life.

Presence is treated as a personality. It is actually a craft.

When people talk about executive presence, they usually mean it as something you either have or you do not. A natural authority. A room-filling quality some lucky people were born with. That framing is not just wrong, it is quietly discouraging, because it tells everyone who does not already feel it that the door is closed.

I came to this from an unusual direction. Before the MBA and the commercial roles, I trained as an actor. Three years of drama school is, in large part, three years of learning that presence is constructed. Actors do not arrive on stage with mysterious charisma. They build a performance deliberately, from the text up, through method and rehearsal and feedback, until it becomes authentic enough to be compelling. Presence is the most trainable thing in the building. We just do not think to train it at work.

What presence actually is

It helps to break presence into its parts, because “be more commanding” is useless advice. The components are recognisable and learnable: self-awareness, knowing your habits, triggers and how you affect others; the ability to hold focus and composure and be genuinely in the room rather than half in your inbox; authenticity, so that what you project lines up with what you actually believe; communication, the use of voice, timing and clarity to land a message; and the emotional intelligence to read and respond to the people in front of you.

Notice what is not on that list. Volume. Dominance. The loud, bombastic version of authority that the phrase “executive presence” often conjures. Some of the most grounded leaders I have worked with are introverts. What they share is not force. It is composure and openness, a way of being settled and available at the same time.

You can build the leader you want to be

We all wear different masks already. You are a different person with your children than with your bank manager, different again when someone cuts you off in traffic. We construct versions of ourselves constantly, without thinking about it. The insight from performance practice is that you can do this deliberately for leadership: decide who you want to be in the room, then build and rehearse your way toward it.

One warning matters here. Constructed does not mean fake. When a leader assembles all the outward parts of presence with nothing genuine behind the eyes, audiences feel the hollowness instantly, and the trust collapses faster than if they had done nothing at all. Presence built on real conviction reads as authority. Presence performed over emptiness reads as a stunt. The craft is in making it true, not just making it look right.

What this means for organisations

• Stop assuming presence will develop on its own. If you are promoting people into senior-level expectations years early, the presence to match has to be built deliberately, not left to chance.
• Train it like the skill it is. Presence responds to rehearsal, reflection, feedback and practice, the same way any craft does. It is not a fixed trait you either have or lack.
• Separate presence from personality type. Your quietest high-potential person may have more natural composure than your loudest. Do not mistake volume for authority.
• Make it safe to practise. People build presence by trying, getting it slightly wrong, and adjusting. That requires a setting where getting it wrong is allowed.

The organisations promoting people into leadership a decade early are running an experiment whether they admit it or not. The only question is whether they equip those people for it, or leave them to perform a role no one ever taught them.

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The Authentic Communicator and our Executive Presence Diagnostic help leaders build presence as a craft, not hope for it as a trait. Start a conversation.