Antonakis, Fenley, and Liechti's (2011) research addressed a question executive presence discourse has historically treated as settled in the negative: whether the qualities that make a leader appear charismatic, confident, and commanding can actually be taught, or whether they reflect a relatively fixed individual trait some people simply possess and others do not. Their study randomly assigned participants to receive training in a specific set of charismatic leadership tactics or to a control condition, then had independent, blind raters assess the charisma and leadership effectiveness of speeches delivered by both groups using identical content, isolating the effect of delivery technique from the effect of what was actually said.
The experimental design matters directly for what the findings can support: because content was held constant and training assignment was random, differences in how trained versus untrained speakers were perceived can be attributed to the trained tactics themselves rather than to pre-existing differences between naturally more and less charismatic individuals who happened to end up in each condition. This is considerably stronger evidence for trainability than the correlational research more common in the executive presence literature, which can show that certain behaviors correlate with perceived presence without establishing that teaching those behaviors to someone who does not naturally exhibit them would actually produce the same perceptual effect.
Antonakis, Fenley, and Liechti's research identified specific verbal tactics that, when trained, produced measurably higher charisma ratings: the use of metaphor and analogy to make abstract ideas concrete, rhetorical questions that engage the audience directly rather than only stating conclusions, and explicit expressions of moral conviction connecting the message to values the audience would recognize as genuinely important rather than merely instrumental. These are specific, describable communication techniques, not vague qualities like confidence or gravitas that resist concrete definition, and their specificity is precisely what made them trainable in a structured intervention.
The nonverbal tactics identified, animated vocal tone rather than a flat, monotone delivery, and genuine facial expressiveness matched to the emotional content of the message rather than a controlled, neutral expression, similarly proved trainable and similarly contributed to the measured increase in perceived charisma. Together, these verbal and nonverbal tactics accounted for a substantial share of what separated speakers rated as more versus less charismatic, evidence that a meaningful portion of what audiences experience as executive presence is produced by identifiable, teachable behavior rather than by some less specifiable quality of natural charisma the speaker either has or lacks.
Given experimental evidence that charismatic tactics are trainable, the persistence of executive presence as something organizations discuss primarily as an innate quality, someone either has it or doesn't, warrants explanation. Part of the explanation is that presence genuinely does correlate with certain individual differences, some people find these tactics more naturally comfortable to deploy than others, producing real variance in how readily different individuals adopt trained techniques even when the techniques themselves are teachable to nearly everyone with sufficient deliberate practice. This natural variance in ease of adoption is frequently mistaken for evidence that the underlying capability itself cannot be developed, when the experimental evidence indicates the capability is genuinely trainable even if some individuals develop it more readily than others.
The innate-trait framing also persists because it is organizationally convenient in a specific, uncomfortable way: it allows organizations to treat presence gaps as an individual characteristic rather than a developable skill, implicitly excusing the absence of deliberate development investment in exactly the capability Antonakis and colleagues' research indicates responds to structured training. Organizations that discuss executive presence as an innate quality are, whether intentionally or not, treating a trainable skill gap as a fixed characteristic, a framing with direct implications for who gets promoted and who gets development investment that the experimental evidence this brief has reviewed does not actually support.
Organizations building genuine executive presence development, consistent with Antonakis and colleagues' findings, should train the specific verbal and nonverbal tactics their research identified as causally effective, rather than offering generic coaching toward vague qualities like confidence or gravitas that resist the specific, practiceable definition the evidence indicates actually matters. This means structured practice in metaphor and analogy use, rhetorical question deployment, explicit values-based framing, vocal animation, and facial expressiveness matched to message content, delivered with the same deliberate, structured practice discipline organizations already apply to other trainable professional skills, rather than treated as a coaching conversation about an individual's general confidence or natural charisma.
The prototype-matching mechanism Lord, Foti, and De Vader's (1984) research identifies carries an important qualification for how broadly Antonakis and colleagues' specific tactics should be expected to generalize: if perceived charisma operates through matching a perceiver's leader prototype, and that prototype varies meaningfully across cultural, organizational, or industry contexts, the specific tactics found effective in one context may not transfer identically to a context whose shared leader prototype emphasizes different qualities. A prototype emphasizing measured, understated authority may respond differently to the animated vocal tone and expressive nonverbal behavior Antonakis and colleagues' study found effective than a prototype more oriented toward visible passion and energy.
This does not undermine the core finding that presence-related perception responds to trainable, describable technique rather than only to fixed individual trait; it suggests organizations should calibrate which specific tactics to emphasize based on genuine understanding of their own context's leader prototype, rather than assuming the exact tactic set from any single study transfers uniformly across every organizational and cultural context an organization might operate within.
The experimental evidence this brief has reviewed directly challenges the common framing of executive presence as a fixed, largely innate quality: Antonakis, Fenley, and Liechti's randomized study found that specific, describable verbal and nonverbal tactics, trained deliberately, causally increased how charismatic and leader-like speakers were perceived to be, and Lord, Foti, and De Vader's implicit leadership theory explains the underlying mechanism, that these tactics work by matching a shared cognitive prototype perceivers already use to judge leadership, not by expressing some intrinsic, untrainable charismatic property. Organizations treating executive presence gaps as a fixed individual characteristic, rather than as a specific, trainable skill set responsive to structured development, are working from a framing the experimental evidence does not actually support, with real consequences for who receives development investment and who gets excluded from opportunity based on a presence gap the evidence indicates was addressable all along.