Leading with Presence: The Hidden Systemic Power Leaders Overlook
What if the greatest shift your organization needs isn’t a new strategy, but a more present you?
Presence isn’t just a soft skill left to more junior leaders. It’s the leadership force that shapes the emotional climate, relational culture, and systemic flow of an organization. While many leaders chase outcomes, high performance, and execution metrics; those who lead with presence change not just what happens, but how it happens, and who their people become in the process.
Presence is not performance. It’s systemic awareness.
True leadership presence means you are not lost in task, role, or ego. Rather you are anchored in self-awareness, relational clarity, and systemic insight. It's the capacity to bring your whole self; body, mind, and spirit into the workspace with curiosity, openness, and the courage to confront complexity and your own failings and shortcomings. It is not about senior leaders leading from the proverbial ivory tower. It is about being present in the ditches regardless of how high up the corporate ladder you sit. It is about showing up.
From a systemic perspective, presence is more than personal mindfulness. It’s about your relational stance to the whole system. It is about positioning and what that position tells others about who you are, what is important to you and what you think of those you lead. How you show up affects the room: the tone, the pace, the depth of conversation, and the safety to surface and wrestle with hard truths. You become a beacon in the network, radiating calm or chaos, vision or vagueness, depth or defensiveness. Your presence and absence both communicate something. Sometimes your presence is needed and other times your absence is what is needed. Either way, how you show up is important.
Presence reveals hidden dynamics
When you lead with presence, you begin to notice what most leaders miss: emotional fields, repeated patterns, unspoken loyalties, lived experience narratives, how things actually get done, and subtle power structures and the abuse of those structures. These are the invisible threads that shape the culture and outcomes of any team or organization. Systemic leaders understand that every system has a history, a memory, and a logic of its own; and presence allows you to read and interpret this deeper intelligence, and then to act in alignment with it. You can’t ignore it when you are part of it. Leaders need to be present and immersed in the depths of their teams’ experience, narratives and culture.
everything is connected whether you see it or not
In systemic thinking, no part of the system stands alone. It is all connected organically. One change in one areas ripples out to others areas. Your absence in one domain creates pressure elsewhere. Your over-functioning in a team dynamic can unintentionally disempower others. Your presence isn’t just local, it’s distributed across the entire system. If you show up in Europe, it sends a message that you are active and present, even if you don’t show up in North America, the narrative travels. Though we must be mindful that different parts of the system might experience your presence and absence differently. The energy you bring into one room ripples into the rest of the organization. Presence, then, becomes a form of leadership hygiene where it keeps the relational canvas open, healthy and resilient (assuming of course you are a healthy and positive leader). Let's be honest, not every leader is, and so the presence of a toxic leader can actually be quite detrimental not only for individual employees, but also systemically for the entire organization and beyond. News and narratives travel fast in systems and for better or worse, they have a tendency to stick. Your presence is related directly to your reputation and your leadership legacy.
Regulating systems through embodied leadership
Organizations unconsciously calibrate themselves around their most senior leaders or most impactful members. If you are hurried, anxious, and reactive, those emotional cues set the cultural tempo. Presence disrupts this. It says, “We don’t need to rush. We need to notice.” Leaders who can stay with the moment without fleeing into solutions or performance activate deeper collective insights. Your regulated behavioral and emotional responses become a resource for others.
I recall inheriting a team, they were really good at fighting fires. They did it all day. They were exhausted. They were very hands on. When I arrived to take over the team, my own leadership was complacent, and said that is not something that you can change. I took on the challenge. We changed it in a few short months. The focus shifted from fighting fires to a more systemic perspective of trying to understand the underlying that were showing up as the fires. I had to address the underling culture and narratives around why the team felt that fire fighting was more preferable than real adaptive change. They had been disempowered. Once empowered and taught how to prioritize and how to think systemically and look below the symptom surface level, we were very able to quickly make some minor structural, cultural and relational tweaks that changed everything. The fires were just a symptom of a much deeper relational dynamic with a demanding high paying corporate client who did not have appropriate boundaries. Once the boundary issues were addressed and put in place, the fires stopped. This meant my team could focus on more high value tasks and activities, and the client felt secure knowing that we were addressing the key issues so they didn’t have to escalate every 5 minutes.
what’s left out shows up
If you consistently show up in strategy or when things are going well, but disappear in emotionally charged conversations, your team will feel your absence. What a leader avoids becomes amplified in the system. Presence allows you to integrate what’s been left out. Things like conflict, grief, feedback, or fear are things leaders tend to avoid, and so leaders who remain present and lean in during these very human experiences, allow the team and the system to reorganize around wholeness, rather than avoidance or fragmentation. In systems, avoidance creates pressure, where presence creates flow.
Presence and patterns
Leading with presence also means becoming fluent in pattern recognition. Where are the loops? The recurring crises? The unspoken tensions? The recurring fires? Presence helps leaders shift from being problem-solvers to pattern-seers. Systemic leadership isn’t about fixing symptoms, rather it’s about shifting dynamics. You can only shift dynamics you’re willing to sit with, sense, and explore. Though many leaders want to shift things from an ivory tower. Change just does not work like that, nor does leadership.
place and order
Systems have an internal order. People who feel unseen, roles that are unclear, or voices that are marginalized all create tension in the system. Presence restores order by honoring each person’s place, story, and contribution. It says: “I see you. You belong. You matter.” When leaders hold presence at scale, they don’t just optimize performance, they are actually liberating the system’s potential.
Presence doesn’t fix, it transforms
Senior leaders often carry immense pressure to perform, to fix, and/or to deliver. Though presence offers a different gift: the capacity to transform and deliver without force. To hold space for what is real. To acknowledge pain and tension without bypassing it. To listen without rushing to answer. To let silence do its work. In systemic leadership, presence is not a soft skill, it’s a hardcore strategic intervention.
Take a moment to reflect
How does my presence shape the energy and behavior of a room, even before I speak?
What systemic roles do I unconsciously inhabit or avoid (rescuer, critic, fixer, savior etc.)?
Where in the organization do I consistently feel disconnection or tension, and what might that reflect in me?
In what ways does urgency override my ability to be curious or relationally available?
What emotions am I most comfortable displaying, and which ones do I suppress?
When I walk into a space, what are people protecting themselves from?
Who holds systemic insight in my organization that I regularly overlook?
What historical dynamics or power patterns are present in the systems I lead?
Where am I leading from fear rather than freedom?
How do I want others to feel after experiencing my leadership presence?
Call to Action: Let’s Lead Differently
If you're ready to lead not just with authority, but with presence, then let’s talk. I help senior leaders build systemic fluency, emotional intelligence, and grounded authority. Through coaching, training, and systemic and narrative leadership development, I guide leaders to see beneath the surface, align with deeper truths, and catalyze lasting transformation.