What Exactly is "CEO Energy"?

Photo by Andrea Lightfoot

A white colleague told me recently that I don't have "CEO energy." I asked what she meant. She said I wasn't extroverted enough. Not visible enough in the room.

I sat with that for a minute because I recognized the comment immediately. I'd heard versions of it my whole career. You're so quiet in meetings. You should speak up more. Have you thought about being more assertive?

Where We Got the Idea That Leaders Are Loud

When people say "CEO energy," they're describing a performance: command the room, dominate the conversation, project certainty even when you don't have it, take up space by default. It's loud. It's fast. It's extroverted by definition.

That definition didn't come from nowhere. White supremacy culture — as Tema Okun and others have named it — gave us the idea that worth is measured by output, visibility, and dominance. That the person talking the most is the person leading. That urgency and assertiveness are signs of competence, and stillness is a sign you don't have anything to offer.

Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking pushes back on part of this. Her central argument is powerful: extroversion became the cultural ideal in the twentieth century, and we built our institutions — schools, offices, leadership pipelines — around that ideal, sidelining people who think, process, and lead differently. She's right that quiet doesn't mean weak, and that some of our most effective leaders build influence through depth rather than volume.

But Cain's book is written primarily through the lens of white professionals navigating a white corporate culture that already has room for them — just not the loud kind of room. Even her chapter on Asian American "soft power," the part of the book most directly engaging with race, has been widely critiqued for leaning on stereotype rather than offering a real analysis of how race and introversion intersect. The book doesn't fully grapple with what happens when you're already operating in a space that questions whether you belong there at all, and you're not performing the expected register on top of it.

For a Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) leader, "you're too quiet" rarely lands as neutral feedback about communication style. It lands as: you have to prove yourself to be here, and right now you're not doing enough of that. And for a Black woman specifically, the read often isn't even "too quiet" — it's the opposite. Speak up, and you're too angry. Hold your ground, and you're not trustworthy. The feedback shifts depending on which stereotype is more convenient in the moment, but the conclusion is always the same: something about how you're showing up disqualifies you.

Quiet Leadership Isn't New. It's Been Renamed.

History is full of leaders who never performed "CEO energy" — and whose impact came precisely because they didn't.

Rosa Parks described herself as an introvert. The image most people carry of her — a quiet, dignified woman who simply refused to move — wasn't a single moment of spontaneous defiance. It was the visible tip of years of careful, behind-the-scenes organizing work as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter. Her power wasn't in commanding a room. It was in the relationships and infrastructure she'd built long before anyone was watching — the network that turned one refusal into a 381-day boycott.

Puanani Burgess — Auntie Pua to generations of community organizers in Hawai'i and in the Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities — built her life's work around a process called "Building the Beloved Community," rooted in storytelling, ceremony, and circles. One of her core exercises asks people to share the story of their gifts, not their titles or credentials, because in many cultures naming your own accomplishments is considered inappropriate. Her leadership looked like listening, like facilitation, like decades of quiet relationship-building between communities in conflict. It also looked like negotiating directly with developers and government leaders on behalf of the Wai'anae coast — because Auntie Pua understood that real change happens at the level of relationship.

Neither of these leaders lacked confidence, clarity, or strategic vision. What they lacked was the performance. And what they had instead — relational depth, long-game thinking, the trust of the people closest to the work — doesn't show up in a 30-second read of "energy" in a meeting. It shows up over years, in whether people actually follow you when it counts.

The Real Question Nobody's Asking

When someone tells a BIPOC leader they don't have "CEO energy," the unspoken question underneath is usually: Can you perform whiteness convincingly enough to be trusted with power?

That's not a question about leadership capability. It's a question about comfort — specifically, the comfort of people who've never had to question whether their natural communication style would be read as a liability.

And here's what gets lost when organizations filter for performance over substance. Quiet leadership in a nonprofit context often looks like:

• The chief executive officer/executive director who spends the first six months in a new role listening before changing anything, and as a result keeps staff who would have walked under someone faster-moving.

• The program director who never raises their voice in a tense meeting, and whose calm is the reason the room doesn't escalate.

• The leader who waits to speak last in a strategy session — and whose synthesis, because it came after everyone else's, is the thing the room actually organizes around.

None of that reads as "CEO energy" in the moment. All of it is leadership doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

There's also a tension a lot of us carry that rarely gets named directly. As BIPOC leaders working inside a nonprofit sector still shaped by white supremacy culture, we're often navigating two sets of expectations at once. The sector wants visibility, confidence, a certain kind of polish — the performance Cain is describing, just with higher stakes for us if we get it wrong.

But if you're serving your own community, that community often expects something else entirely: humility, deference to elders, leadership that doesn't center itself, leadership that asks before it tells. Auntie Pua's entire framework — don't lead with your title, lead with your story, lead with relationship — is the kind of leadership many BIPOC communities recognize and trust immediately.

So you end up code-switching not just your language, but your entire theory of what leadership is — depending on which room you're in. And then someone in the white-led room tells you the version that works in the other room isn't "CEO energy." As if the thing your community trusts you for is the thing disqualifying you here.

🔥 Firebrand Challenge

Think about the last time you — or someone on your team — described a colleague as lacking "presence," or "leadership energy."

Now ask: what were they actually describing? Was it a real gap in judgment, strategy, or follow-through? Or was it a mismatch between how that person communicates and what your organization has been trained to recognize as leadership?

If it's the latter, the gap isn't in them. It's in your definition. And that definition is worth examining — because it's quietly deciding who gets developed, who gets promoted, and who gets passed over, long before anyone admits that's what's happening.