Executive Presence Lessons from the Lionesses. Part 1: Instinct and Intuition
“Lions and lionesses, when training their cubs to survive and thrive in hostile habitats, focus on three things: instinct, observation and preparation.”
Patrick Dunne’s recent article ‘Stimulating Simulations’ struck a powerful chord.
In the wild, these are life-saving skills. In a group and the boardroom, they’re the bedrock of executive presence. But as I reflect on my own leadership journey, I see even more: the transformative power of education, the courage to invest in people, the discernment to choose your battles, and the relentless drive to succeed.
Lionesses lead with clarity, confidence, and care—whether in a nascent market, the African savannah or Europe’s football pitches. Just look at England’s women’s football team: a modern embodiment of strength, resilience, and unity, winning hearts and headlines with their grit and grace.
In a five-part series I draw on the lioness archetype to explore the foundations of executive presence and effective leadership. From trusting your intuition and reading the room, to preparing for high-stakes moments and mentoring with purpose, each part offers reflective insights and real-world examples to help the willing woman cultivate gravitas, authenticity, and resilience.
Whether navigating a crisis, shaping a team, or preparing for your next leadership leap, lionesses across continents and domains share a common thread: a fierce commitment to excellence and an instinct to uplift those around them.
This is your invitation to make your mark with clarity, confidence, and impact—just like a lioness in her prime.
Part 1: Instinct and Intuition – Leading from the Gut
Summary:
In this first article in the series I explore how instinct, when cultivated through experience and reflection, becomes a powerful tool for leadership. It shows how trusting your gut – especially in uncertain or pioneering environments – can guide decisive action and build executive presence.
Lions and leaders have lots in common. In the wild, lionesses teach their cubs three survival essentials – follow instinct, observe their surroundings, and be prepared. These same traits can make or break leaders in the corporate jungle.
Lessons from the Wild:
As someone who has navigated a raw and often hostile habitat of an emerging digital market, I recognised those same three qualities as crucial in one’s leadership journey. In any business environment, much like on the savannah, following our instinct, noticing what’s going on around us, and being prepared are vital for survival and success.
Going deeper in the value dimensions, the differentiation for success comes from education, investing in people, the discernment to choose one’s battles, and the drive, i.e the “wanting” – which is an almost primal perseverance to succeed, and to provide for others.
Making sense of such complex data, in a timely fashion, is what separates the wheat from the chaff.
We’ll look at how these values play out in real-world leadership experiences, and how they connect to developing a strong executive presence. Firstly, instinct and intuition – trusting your gut as a leader – and how honing that instinct can enhance one’s executive presence.
Instinct: Trusting Intuition and Taming Fear
In the wild, instinct can mean the difference between life and death. It’s the lioness’s gut feeling to move her cubs out of danger or to pursue a prey at the right moment. In business and leadership, instinct is that informed gut feeling that guides timely decisions. It’s not random guesswork – true professional instincts are honed through experience, learning, and self-awareness.
Early in my career, when I was helping build an embryonic data science market in the early 1990s, my team and I often had to rely on instinct in uncharted territory. We were a small location-based data analytics start-up trying to convince established organisations of the value of data-driven insights. Prospective corporate clients (banks, insurers, retailers, telcos – you name it) would insist on “Show me, with my data” before they’d agree to buy our solution: consultancy had to be offered ‘free’ and the ‘solution’ could only be the most visible i.e. made by hardware and software, in precisely that order. But data (both internal and external) and its customisation, the training and the insights, the intelligent information, was the most valuable as they could not only solve problems (some less visible than others!) but also transform the outcomes.
We faced repetitive nightmares of being asked to create bespoke demo after demo, using each client’s own data to prove our solution’s worth. This could easily have been discouraging – it was a resource-draining, unpaid path with no guaranteed payoff. People wanted it and our task was to make them need it for the benefits it was bringing.
Instinctively, however, we reframed the situation. Rather than seeing it simply as exploitation or an endless pre-sales slog, we told ourselves we were in the business of education. Our gut sense was that if we could teach the executives and the Boards of these companies something new – show them insights from their data that they’d never seen before – we would create a genuine appetite for our portfolio of products and services. We wrapped our approach in layers of tact, perseverance and positive thinking (notwithstanding our solid competence which was a non-negotiable foundation) and forged ahead. That instinct to reframe an existential challenge as an opportunity to educate made all the difference. It kept us motivated and creative where others might have given up. In retrospect, our tactful persistence was an embodiment of instinct in leadership: a mix of intuition and optimism that told us “This is tough, but it will pay off if we do the right thing”. And indeed, it did – those tough early days eventually paid off by nurturing and expanding a market that hadn’t existed before. We essentially “created the customer” by teaching them what to aspire to, giving them what they needed, from simple to complex: a clear competitive advantage powered by data.
Importantly, trusting my instincts did not mean acting on impulse alone. It also meant having the courage to act despite fear when experience told me something was right. For instance, I’ve often had to make decisions or voice ideas that went against the grain. In those moments, leaning on intuition – informed intuition – provided the gravitas needed to carry others with me.
One hallmark of executive presence is the ability to appear decisive and confident even in uncertain situations. People often ascribe a kind of “sixth sense” to strong leaders, when in truth it’s cultivated instinct. As leadership author Selena Rezvani notes, “A lot of the credibility we associate with leaders boils down to their ability to think quickly… and remain calm, even when they lack preparation.” In other words, what looks like natural, unruffled instinct is usually backed by years of preparation and experience (a point we’ll return to later on).
Cultivated or not, instinct is a leader’s early-warning system and quick-response engine. By trusting our well-trained gut feelings – and being brave enough to act on them – we can navigate uncharted waters with confidence. It builds credibility: people learn that when you follow your intuition, you often steer in the right direction. By listening to that inner lion/lioness’s roar and balancing it with wisdom, a leader lays a foundation for executive presence.
In the next part of this series, we’ll explore the next lioness lesson: the power of observation and awareness.