What's Your Leadership Brand When You Aren't In The Room?

💥No trigger warning.

Just the jacket. The yellow shoes. And a room full of fantastic accounting and finance professionals who hadn’t signed up for either.

Today I asked them a question not enough leaders have been asked:

💫’What do people say about you as a leader when you’re not in the room?’

No one in the room put their hand up and said they knew.

Not a bad thing - but we all should know.

Because in the age of AI — where knowledge and competence are being commoditised faster than any of us expected — that question has never mattered more.

Here’s the equation I left them with:

🔥Competence + Presence = Impact

AI will handle more and more of the competence side.

Which means presence — your distinctly, irreplaceably human presence — becomes the multiplier.

Not someone else’s version of presence.

Yours. In your own way. Turned up loud.

That’s your leadership brand.

And if you don’t know what it is, someone else is defining it for you.

🙏Thank you to this brilliant, warm, generous room for making today so energising.

Keep being more human. 👋