It, first of all, I would like to say thank you for everyone who are joining in, and, also, thank you for, Women in Tech Global Conference.This is, I don't know. I think I come here every year, but this year, I've coming, I've come here as a technology leader every year, but this year, I'm coming as an executive coach for tech leaders, transition my career as well. So today, I'll be talking about a very important topic, from authority to impact, which I call it as a strategic presence that's required in for any executive today for leading AI enabled organization. Right? So before I begin, I want you to reflect on something for a moment. In the last thirty thirty days, right, how many of you have felt leadership, requires more emotional capacity than ever before? Not necessarily the technical capability, but emotional capacity.

Well, because leaders today are not only managing, strategy and execution, they're managing uncertainty. Continuous visibility, faster decision, organizational anxiety, and constant transformation, often all at the same time. And I believe this is exactly where leadership itself is being redefined. Well, over the last few years, technology organizations have transformed at extraordinary speed. AI adoption, we all know the changes that it is taking place, digital acceleration, distributed workforces, regulatory complexity, and why technology has accelerated the demand placed on the leaders have fundamentally changed as well. Here is the uncomfortable truth I share with every senior leader I coach. If you are at the executive table today, the room already assumes you're credible. They assume you're technically strong. They assume you have authority. Those things got you into this room. They do not keep you effective once you are in the room. They are the baseline.

What I see distinguishing the leader who are scaling organization versus the leader who are quietly burning out something to prove themselves twice over is something I call a strategic presence. It is the ability to influence system, shape culture, and drive performance without creating organization fragility and without breaking yourself in the process. The leadership challenge today, is not about the authority. It is about creating impact. It becomes more evident as AI enabled organization is undergoing various changes. Leaders are constantly being observed. Every decision, every reaction, every escalation, every silence also. And increasingly, leaders are being evaluated not only for what they decide, but how they decide. Decide. Their tone, their clarity, their emotional regulation, their consistent consistency under pressure. If you have to look what happened in the last few years, yet AI adoption has compressed the decision cycle. The space between the input and output has collapsed.

You used to have week to deliberate. Now you have hours, sometimes minutes, and the decision still has to be defensible. Digital acceleration means visibility is constant. You're not being watched at quarterly milestones anymore. You are not being watched in motion in every Slack thread, every all hands, every comment in the talk. Regulatory complexity has multiplied. Every decision now gets judged against multiple lengths, legal, ethical, geopolitical, and reputational. And distributed workforce mean your presence has to travel through screens. You cannot lean on proximity on the hallway moment, on the body language in the room. So here's the question I want you to hold for the next few minutes while you're there in the session. What got you here? Was it built for this environment? Because leadership behavior is no more personal. It becomes cultural. Well, I have to be very honest with all of you.

I've spent, like, two decades in global technology leadership environment. And now through more than thousands hours of executive coaching and facilitation with senior leaders across organization, one pattern continuously emerges. Many leaders who are incredibly successful in one phase of leaderships struggle in the next, not because they lack intelligence, not because they lack capability, but because leadership model itself has changed. Isn't it? I want to share these three archetype archetypes with you, the three patterns I see time and again at the executive level. They are not any one leader, but almost every senior leader, be it men or women I coach, recognize themselves in at least one of them. These three architects play a very critical role in your day to day, behavior. Let's take a look at it at a deeper level. The commander, the first architect.

In the three archetypes today, I would be giving you example of a women leader, but I also want to to call out is these three archetypes is also seen very commonly among men. There is no gender on these act archetype. But for the session today, I'm taking examples of women leaders so that could be related to you more closely. So let's talk about this, The leader who's brilliant, she's decisive. She has earned every bit of her authority, often twice over because she has been the only woman in too many rooms. Well, we all know. We have been there. The rooms move when she speaks. That is what got her promoted. And here is what is quite costly. Her team begins optimizing her approval, not the actual problem. Her senior leaders stop bringing dissent because every disagreement feels like a costly negotiation, and the culture stops maturing one layer below her. The recalibration for the commander is this.

She doesn't need to give up her authority. She needs to use it less often and more deliberate from directive authority to deliberate influence. That would make the difference. This printer. Let's take a look at the archetype. Second one called as printer. In the AI enabled world, this is one of the most rewarded until she isn't. She matches the speed. First one, to come in any meeting. First fast input and faster output. She's the one where the CEO actually reach her reaches her out at 11PM and gets a clean answer by 11:08. Well, here what is compounds quietly. Her decision starts getting revisited because they were directionally right but contextually shallow. Her team stops being able to tell the difference between urgent and important, and our own cognitive load becomes the bottleneck.

The recalibration here that is required is speed is not the asset. Judgment about when to be fast is the actual asset. Actual asset. The third architect, I the one I call as performer, she's the one whose outputs the entire function is built around her. Her standards are exceptional. Her execution is exceptional, and she knows the organization runs on her. The last part is the problem. The organization runs on her, not on the system she could build. Succession becomes invisible, so does the rest, and burnout arrives as a surprise. Well, though, it was never a surprise when such things happen, but, you always feel a surprise. The recalibration that is required here is stop being the operating system. Become the arc architect of the situation. Well, for years, organizations have rewarded. We all know it very well for responsiveness, execution, problem solving, being the person who could always step in and deliver. And those trends are absolutely matter.

I am not saying that these trends are irrelevant. These are the necessary strength for the executive level. But when you go to the executive level, more than these trends, you need more. Organization do not scale through heroic leadership. They scale through leadership maturity, and that requires a different shift. So here is the recalibration. I call them as postures. They're not personality changes. They are poster changes, and they are what I see as that distinguished leaders who scale organization, not just themselves. And what does that mean? It means from direct to authority to deliberate influence, from reactive speed to disciplined decision making, from individual excellence to enterprise wide impact because leadership role is no longer only to drive performance. It shapes systems, cultures, and environments where performance is scalable. Now let's look at these three shifts in detail, the deliberate influence. Well, authority makes people comply.

Influence makes the system move. And if you look at by old posture, you had an answer for the situation. You said it clearly. The team executed it. The model worked when you were closer to the work. But at executive level, it stops working because the room is full of people who also have answers. And if you if yours is always the one that wins, you have built a team of executors and not thinkers. So here is what deliberate influence actually looks like. One, you ask before you answer. In your next leadership review, before you give your view, ask one question that forces the room to surface the real disagreement. Two, you name what the room is avoiding. Every meeting has a topic. Everyone is dancing. Political one, cultural one. It could be anything. Your job at this level is to make the unsetseable, not aggressively, deliberately, once. Third one, you let someone else be the loudest voice.

If you are the one who's always articulating in the room, you are the ceiling on your team. Influence at the top means making other people other people's clarity possible, but not replacing your own. Here's what I ask every leader I coach. Did you did the room move because of your title or because of the question you asked? If it is title, you used authority. If it was questioned, you used influence. Both work, but one scales. Let's look at disciplined decision making. And this is in the AI environmental, environments. Speed speed is cheap. The system can generate faster options than any one of us can, do it. The three disciplines I coach the senior leaders is to install install reversibility, and this is very, very critical. What do I mean by reversibility?

Match your decision speed to the reversibility of the decision. A reversible decision deserves 80% of confidence and fast move. An irreversible one, like a higher at c level, strategic bet, or public position, deserves slow, deliberate, and multiple lens deliberation. The mistake at executive level is treating both at the same energy and same urgency. That should be avoided. Second one is cadence. Set as a deliberate cadence for different decision classes. Third one is behavior. This one I see the least talked about, and it matters the most. If you are calm, the organization calibrates your calmness. If you're visibly anxious, heist at the high stake moments, the organization becomes anxious. Your tone is the policy document. When you slow down, your organization also moves fast slows down, and they get smarter. So it is important what makes the disciplined decision.

The last one is the enterprise wide impact. This is this is the one decides whether you scale yourself or whether you're scaling the organization. Executive behavior cascades. Anything you do twice becomes the norm. You repeat a behavior. Your team reads it as standard. The organization builds the system around it. This means your interruptions in the meeting, your tone in difficult conversation, your willingness to disagree with the CEO, your weekend name is they are no more the personal choices. They are the cultural artifacts. So the calibration is to ask a different question. The new question is, instead of asking what did I deliver, what is now true in the enterprise because I lead it? Now what does that question lead you into? It moves you from output to legacy, from individual excellence to system that runs, and that is a sustainable model. Now so what does recalibration requires?

Very often, I get this question asked by most of the senior leaders. Preeti, all this sounds right, but how do I do without adding one more load to the plate? And this is the right question. So the model here of this three shift is designed to take something off of your plate and not to add to it. One, make fewer decision. Take a look at it who below you or two level below you can make that decision. This is not delegation failure. It is decision inflation, and it is more expensive habit at the executive level. Be predictable. When your team can predict how you will react, they'll stop spending the energy managing you and start spending it on the work. You be felt.

Your presence in the room should matter more than the replies on the thread. The work is to architect it. So fewer decision, predictable presence, the room, not the inbox, matters a lot. Now I would like I want all of you to do something here. Take around ten seconds and look at which of these archetypes that you resonate the most. Not not the one that you wish to, but the not the one which you were you were demonstrating in this quarter. And what I would like you to do is finish the sentence. I'm going to read out the sentence. I want you to write down and finish it. The one shift that you strengthen my transformation work, dash, without adding to my cognitive or emotional load is dash.

The one shift that would strengthen my transformation work, dash, without adding to my cognitive or emotional load is dash. Take few seconds and fill it. You do not have to share it. You just have to name it because executive level shift you need is rarely a new skill. It is almost always a reduction. A thing that you can stop, a poster you can stop holding. Next time you find yourself hard in this moment, please look at what you could shift. The future of the work, it will not it belongs to the leader who can bring clarity, the leader who can combine strategic thinking with emotional maturity, who can drive transformation without creating organization, fragility, or personal burnout. And the leaders who understand that AI enabled organization, human behavior, is still shaping technology outcome. The future of work will not reward just the authority alone. It will reward the intentional influence because impact, not the authority, is the new currency. A little bit about me as we have come to the end of the session.

I'm I'm a certified coach with twenty five years of corporate experience. I'm a community builder and a social impact person as well. I am also in the advisory board of Lean and Org for, NLP programs for women community globally. The QR code here would help you to follow me across the social media channels. And if this resonate with you, I would want to let you know, that I generally work with senior technology leaders, mostly women at c suite or two layers below on strategic presence that we spoke about and sustainable influence. My clients are typically navigating an e AI dream transformation or major scaling moment, and they want to lead it without breaking themselves or the organization process. I write about the executive presence a lot on LinkedIn, and this is my LinkedIn connect if you would like to connect me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for being with me and listening to, these sessions. Any questions?