AI, ‘executive presence,’ and how to stand out as a leader in today’s hiring environment

Originally published in the Human in the Loop newsletter on LinkedIn.

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Assertiveness is a slippery proxy for leadership potential. Here’s what executive search professionals can do to make better decisions, and how AI can help.

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I’ve discussed the dangers of over-relying on proxies to indicate potential a few times on Human in the Loop. The most contentious of these indicators are often the most subjective: assertiveness, confidence, and the elusive ‘executive presence.’

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The risk of bias is clear — especially when these qualities are treated as personality traits, rather than skills that can be learned. Introduce AI screening and interview tools without properly differentiating competencies and grounding them in tangible success factors, and the analysis is likely to skew toward candidates who most closely resemble a historically biased understanding of leadership, regardless of merit.

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So, how can C-suites and boards conduct searches and make leadership decisions with confidence? Let’s start with where we’ve been.

The assertiveness gap

Case in point: Asian Americans are the most educated demographic in the US workforce. Yet, in research at Russell Reynolds Associates, where I led the firm’s global DEI practice, my colleagues and I found that they are promoted from individual contributor to manager at lower rates than other groups — and that gap reappears at the very top.

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My work with Nisa Qosja in Harvard Law Governance found that Asian executives lose ground specifically at the final step to CEO. If you walk into any corporate executive team meeting, you’ll see the gap in real time. The person with the sharpest analysis sits quietly while someone else with less substance takes up more air — and more credit on the organization chart.

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Companies have tried to close this gap for many years — without success. Harvard’s Iris Bohnet, in a 2017 interview with McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland, estimated that US companies spend $8 billion annually on unconscious bias training on the premise that evaluators would judge more fairly if only they were aware of their biases.

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In a landmark study of EEOC data from hundreds of companies, sociologists Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin and Erin Kelly found that mandatory unconscious bias training by itself rarely moves the needle on representation — and often makes it worse. Even with good intentions, it is hard to retrain human wiring through a single workshop.

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In a 2025 article for the California Management Review, I argued that one approach for evaluators is the use of AI to provide structured and repeated evidence-based processes designed free of bias. In other words, if a human interviewer is likely to be swayed by bias, AI can help parse all skills connected to the job function separately, recording tangible measures of competency associated with each skill and providing a baseline to help reveal invisible assumptions.

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Critically, not all AI interview and screening capabilities are created equally. To effectively reduce bias, AI tools must be designed to prevent bias, trained on data structured using competency anchors, used responsibly, and monitored to ensure fairness is still at the forefront as technology evolves.

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In the meantime, in the face of a hiring landscape that increasingly treats confidence in tone as table stakes, what do you do if you aren’t naturally assertive?

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You learn — and according to recent research from management scholars Jackson Lu, Michelle Zhao, Hui Liao, and Doris Zhang, learning to be assertive might be more accessible than you expect.

Anyone can learn to be assertive

We have always known that assertive people get noticed for leadership roles. We have also known that assertiveness can be developed with practice, just like any communication skill. What we did not know was training people on assertiveness could increase their chances for promotion.

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Lu, Zhao, Liao, and Zhang’s field experiment took place inside a Fortune 100 company. Employees signed up for a nine-week debate training, and researchers randomly assigned half of 471 registrants to receive it.

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Eighteen months later, those who had received the training received more promotions than those who did not receive such training. The underlying mechanism was assertiveness. The trained group was better at speaking up, holding their ground, and stating their case when it mattered — a shift that predicted who moved up in the company.

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It is worth being precise about what this study does and does not prove. It demonstrates that debate training increases the chances of getting promoted. It does not show that assertiveness makes someone a better leader. Turning it into a formal training target doesn’t resolve that question. However, by treating assertiveness as a skill that can be taught to everyone, we can stop allowing access to the currency of assertiveness to be an accident of who gets sponsored through informal networks and social capital.

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The participants in the study were recruited from the Asian employee resource group, a population that can be disproportionately affected by the bamboo ceiling — the effect of cultural norms that favor humility colliding with American leadership prototypes, which reward assertiveness. However, the new research found no significant differences in the effects of assertiveness training across gender, ethnicity, or birthplace.

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Because the effect held across groups, this is not a fix that benefits one group at the expense of another. Assertiveness is simply a capability that was never offered to the people who need it the most.

So, what should change as a result of these findings?

For those running learning and development programs, stop treating executive presence as an intangible quality that is reserved for a chosen few who get tapped for expensive outside coaching. Instead, build structured assertiveness training, like debate training, for everyone who shows promise — not just those who already look like your current leaders.

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If you manage people, stop writing “needs to speak up more” in a performance review and call it feedback. Offer a way to close the gap by pairing the feedback with an actual mechanism for practice.

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And if you are the person who has been told you are too quiet to lead, this is not a verdict on who you are. It is a skill gap, and the evidence shows that the gap closes in nine weeks. The real failure is not your assertiveness. It is every year your company waits to teach it.