You build executive presence in a scientist by treating it as a translation problem, not a personality problem. Their own expertise hides how their explanation lands with a CFO, a commercial lead or a board member, so the fix is repeated practice in front of real executive audiences, with coached feedback on what those listeners actually took away. A presentation skills workshop polishes delivery. It doesn't close the gap between what the scientist knows and what the room heard.
Here's the scenario most life sciences L&D leaders know well. Your strongest principal investigator gets promoted to director or VP. A couple of quarters later, the feedback starts coming back from commercial, finance and the executive team. Brilliant, but too in the weeds. Takes fifteen minutes to get to the point. We still don't know what she wants us to decide. Nobody doubts the science. They just stop inviting her to the meetings where decisions get made.
What Executive Presence Means for a Scientist
Executive presence gets talked about like charisma, something you either have or you don't. The research says otherwise. In Sylvia Ann Hewlett's work with the Center for Talent Innovation, published in her 2014 book Executive Presence, senior executives broke it into three parts: gravitas, communication and appearance.
Notice what's missing from that list. Nobody said "knows the most." Expertise is the price of admission, not the thing that reads as presence. For a scientist that's disorienting, because expertise is exactly what got them promoted.
Translate Hewlett's pillars into a biotech boardroom and they look like this. Gravitas is the ability to stand behind a recommendation when the data isn't complete. Communication is the ability to make a non-scientist understand what the data means for the business, fast. Both run against how scientists were trained.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
The standard advice for new technical leaders is some version of "lead with the bottom line" and "know your audience." It's good advice. It rarely works, and the reason is worth understanding before you spend budget on executive presence training.
Scientists spend a decade or more learning to communicate in a specific order. Research papers follow IMRaD: introduction, methods, results and discussion. You set context, show your work, present the data and only then interpret it. Caveats come early and often, because overclaiming is the cardinal sin. That order is how you earn credibility with other scientists.
Executive audiences need nearly the opposite. They want the conclusion first, the business implication second, your confidence level third and the supporting evidence only if they ask for it. When a new scientific leader opens a portfolio review with assay methodology and three limitations, the CFO doesn't hear rigor. She hears someone who hasn't decided what they think.
So the scientist gets the feedback, nods and agrees. Then they walk into the next meeting and do the same thing. Not because they're stubborn. Because from inside their own head, the explanation feels clear and every detail feels necessary. They genuinely can't hear what's missing.
What's Actually Going On
The mechanism has a name. Economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber called it the curse of knowledge in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Political Economy. Once you know something, you can't reliably simulate the mind of someone who doesn't. In their experiments, better-informed participants couldn't set aside what they knew when predicting what less-informed people would think.
The clearest demonstration came a year later. In 1990, Stanford psychology graduate student Elizabeth Newton split people into tappers and listeners. Tappers picked a well-known song and tapped its rhythm on a table. Listeners tried to name it. Before seeing the results, tappers predicted listeners would get it right about half the time.
The tappers weren't bad communicators. They could hear the melody in their heads while they tapped. The listeners got knocking. That's what happens when a newly promoted scientist presents to the executive team. They hear the whole song: the mechanism, the dose-response curve, why the secondary endpoint matters. The room hears knocking. It's the same reason your top sales reps often can't teach what they do.
Here's the part that matters most for L&D leaders. The gap tends to grow with expertise. In a 1999 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Stanford's Pamela Hinds found that experts underestimated how hard a task would be for novices, and that people with intermediate experience predicted novice performance more accurately than the experts did. Your most accomplished scientists, the ones you're most eager to promote, can carry the biggest translation gap.
It also explains why awareness alone doesn't fix it. Tell a scientist about the curse of knowledge and they'll find it fascinating. They'll still overexplain on Thursday, because the bias isn't a gap in information. It's a gap in perspective, and you can't see your own perspective from the inside. Camerer's team saw the same stubbornness: even with money on the line for accurate predictions, participants stayed biased, and market trading only cut the effect roughly in half. The correction has to come from outside the scientist's head, from real listeners saying what they actually heard.
What to Do About It
If executive presence for scientists is a translation problem hidden by expertise, development has to do three things. Make the gap visible. Give the scientist a new structure to replace the IMRaD reflex. Build the habit through repetition with real audiences. Here's what that looks like.
Replace self-assessment with a listener readback
After a real executive update, ask one or two listeners three questions. What decision is being asked of you? What's the business impact? How confident is the presenter? Then compare their answers to what the scientist meant to communicate. The distance between those two sets of answers is the curriculum. It's specific, it's hard to argue with, and it comes from the audience instead of a trainer's opinion. Our guide to the science of feedback covers how to deliver it so it lands.
Teach an executive order to replace the scientific one
Give new leaders a simple sequence for any executive conversation. Start with the decision or recommendation. Then what it means for the business. Then how confident they are and what would change their mind. Hold the evidence in reserve. The IMRaD instinct doesn't disappear. It moves to the back of the conversation, where it's ready when an executive wants to probe.
Turn caveats into confidence statements
Scientists signal rigor by listing limitations. Executives read a list of limitations as a lack of conviction. The fix isn't hiding uncertainty. It's framing uncertainty as a decision. Instead of five caveats, try this: "We're confident enough to commit to this trial design. The one thing that would change our view is the interim safety read next quarter." That's gravitas in Hewlett's sense, and it's more honest about uncertainty, not less.
Rehearse with listeners who don't know the song
Most scientists rehearse executive presentations with other scientists, which is the worst possible audience for this problem. Fellow experts hear the melody too. Rehearse with a commercial partner, a finance lead or a program manager instead. Hinds's work suggests a useful nuance here: people with intermediate knowledge, close enough to follow and far enough to feel the gaps, often make better translation partners than peers or total outsiders.
Coach the reps, not the event
A one-day workshop gives a new leader a framework and a good afternoon. Presence gets built across dozens of real conversations: the portfolio review, the budget ask, the board prep session. Pair each high-stakes meeting with a short debrief within a day, focused on what landed and what didn't. Spacing that practice over months is what turns a new structure into a default. Our piece on why easier training fails explains the learning science behind that.
This is the heart of how Dan Docherty, Braintrust's Chief Coaching Officer and author of NeuroCoaching, approaches leader development. A good coach doesn't hand the leader a script. They ask the questions that help the leader see what they can't see alone, then hold them to practicing the new behavior until it's theirs. For a scientist, the thing they can't see alone is the listener.
Signs You Need More Than This
Some organizations can run this playbook internally with a strong L&D team and willing executive sponsors. Others need outside help. You've probably hit that point if you've promoted several scientists into leadership in the same year and the same feedback is coming back on all of them. Or your executives have started routing around a scientific leader instead of coaching them. Or your new leaders already sat through presentation skills training and nothing changed.
Another signal is easy to miss. The people giving the feedback, your commercial and finance leaders, often know something is off but can't coach the fix. They critique. If that's your situation, the problem is structural, not individual, and it belongs in how you build your leadership pipeline, not in a one-off intervention.
That's where a coaching methodology built for behavior change earns its place in biotech leadership development. Braintrust's NeuroCoaching program trains leaders to coach through questions instead of directives, and our life sciences work spans commercial, medical affairs, market access and operations leadership.
The Bottom Line for L&D Leaders
Your newly promoted scientist doesn't lack presence. They're tapping out a song only they can hear. Senior executives in Hewlett's research said executive presence accounts for 26% of what it takes to get the next promotion, so leaving it to chance is expensive for them and for you.
Build leadership development for scientists around the listener. Practice with real executive audiences. Coach the reps. Do that, and the expertise that got them promoted starts to read as leadership instead of detail. Worth a conversation? Start a Conversation with our team about developing scientific leaders who can move a room.
