I have spent 25 years telling serious, well-paid people how to look calm in front of a room, sometimes with TV cameras in it. It is tricky territory, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I’m so good at it, myself, in fact, that my wife will often accuse me of “lying about my competence,” in hindsight. “You had no idea what you were doing,” she will say, of a tricky situation. “And yet the way you were acting, I had full confidence in you.”
What can I say? It’s a good thing, I guess, that I have chosen to use my powers for good…
Nobody on an executive team is going to tell the CEO that she mumbles so much, she has lost the room. Nobody is going to tell a senior hire that looking like they got dressed in the dark undermines them. So, people hire me to say these things with tact. If I speak with too much bluntness, I don’t get invited back. If I dress up the bad news too much, nothing changes. “Your voice is getting lost at the back of the room, let’s fix that,” lands. “You mumble like a walrus with a sore throat” doesn’t.
It is with this in mind that I’m happy to recommend The Great British Baking Show. It turns out, a tent in the English countryside offers executive presence training. Executive presence is not a quality you either have or you don’t. It’s not like perfect pitch or good bone structure. It is a behavior developed under pressure. The baking tent is the purest pressure lab ever devised. Presence is not about never failing. Everyone in the tent fails. It is about what you do in the 30 seconds after the failure. That is the game.
Take Rahul Mandal, 2018. Final episode. Last challenge. He’s building an edible landscape. It includes 200 individual elements. Then a glass storage jar on his bench explodes in the 32-degree heat. Glass everywhere. Into everything. He has to throw away his entire showstopper. On camera, in the final, with the trophy on the line, Rahul says it “almost broke me.” He thought that was it for him.
Then he does the thing. He starts again. From scratch. He gets 15 minutes back from the judges for the time the clean-up cost him, and he builds the whole thing again, and he wins. Prue Leith said afterward that she was proudest that he came in unconfident. But he kept going, and never reined in his ambition. The judges rewarded the recovery as much as the bake. To Rahul’s credit he was also fantastic throughout the show. A detour on the road to glory? We’re all inclined to forgive it as part of the story.
In 2012, John Whaite sliced his finger open on a food processor mid-showstopper. Blood poured out of his glove. He got woozy and they whisked him off for medical attention. He missed the rest of the challenge. Then he came back the next week and won the whole series. The return is the story!
Here are some tips for communicating poise under pressure. None of these will work if you happen to be the CEO of Nvidia, unfortunately, and you’ve lied about having an affair with a Chinese spy. But for the rest of us? I encourage you to give them a try…
1. Narrate the recovery, not the panic. Rahul didn’t pretend the glass hadn’t exploded. He said it almost broke him, and then he got on with it. The room doesn’t need you to be calm. It needs to see you bothered and still functioning. “Here’s what happened, here’s what I’m doing about it” is the script.
2. Give them something to judge. A melted baked Alaska, served with a straight face and an honest explanation, is a bake. Serving nothing, having thrown it in the bin, tells a worse story about you. In a crisis, the worst thing you can do is withdraw the product, the statement, the answer — and leave a vacuum. Vacuums get filled by others. Own your story. Bumps and all.
3. Composure is a decision you make, not a trait you have. Nobody in that tent is born with it. The ones who win are the ones who keep choosing it, one collapsed cake at a time.
4. The clock is not your enemy, the story you tell about it is. Every baker in the tent is working against the same time. The ones who fall apart are the ones who start narrating their own defeat in real time.
Look, I know. A baking show. But I have sat through a lot of executive presence coaching in my life. Presence is what you do after the disaster, in full view of everyone, with the clock still running. You can do it. Now, believe in yourself.
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Matt Davis is a strategic communications consultant.
