Presence and Listening: The Two Leadership Skills Hiding Inside the ICF PCC

Ask executives what makes a great leader, and the list comes fast: vision, decisiveness, results. Almost no one says presence or listening. Yet, ask those same executives to describe the absolute best leader they ever worked for, and they invariably reach for those exact two qualities.

Both sit at the heart of the International Coaching Federation's Professional Certified Coach (PCC) standard. Among the eight ICF Core Competencies, two matter most for senior leadership: Maintains Presence and Listens Actively.

While usually treated as separate skills, they are actually two halves of a single coin. Presence is the inner stance that makes real listening possible. Listening is what presence looks like from the outside.

Presence: The Inner Stance

The ICF describes presence as being fully conscious and present, employing a style that is open, flexible, grounded, and confident. Strip away the formal competency language, and it is the capacity to stay here, with this person, instead of drifting into your own next thought.

The PCC markers point exactly to this discipline:

• Staying grounded when emotion rises.

• Sitting comfortably in silence rather than rushing to fill it.

• Trusting the other person enough to follow their lead rather than steer.

Presence is what remains when you stop performing competence and simply pay attention.

Consider a manager who walks into a meeting already irritated. A colleague opens with a sharp remark: "The deadline was never realistic anyway." The natural corporate instinct is to defend the plan or assert authority. Presence is setting that aside—the irritation, the urge to win the point—and staying anchored to the person.

When a leader does that, the words change shape. "The deadline was never realistic" stops being an attack and becomes a signal: I felt set up, and no one had my back. By staying present, the manager connects this moment to a larger pattern: the colleague going quiet in recent meetings or turning down a bigger project last month.

None of this surfaces if the leader takes the bait. It surfaces because the leader chose calm—and calm is what creates psychological safety. People open up to calm, not to pressure. Only then does the colleague reveal the real issue: they are overwhelmed, and afraid that admitting it looks like failure.

Listening: The Outward Attention

Most leaders believe they are good listeners. Most are wrong. What usually passes for listening - waiting politely for your turn to reply - is not what the profession means.

The competency Listens Actively demands attention to both what someone is saying and what they are leaving unsaid.

• Ordinary listening processes content: the problem, the request, the data.

• Active listening attends to the whole person: the sudden shift in energy, the word chosen and then corrected, the critical issue carefully stepped around.

The PCC markers specifically reward noticing these shifts in energy, mood, and language, and reflecting them back to prove you caught the underlying meaning, not just the transcript.

Picture a teammate who notes that a project is "on track," but adds that they "may need another week." A leader listening only for content hears a simple schedule update and responds tactically: Can we compress the timeline?

A leader who is truly present hears the hedge in "may need," the uncharacteristic flatness in a voice that usually carries energy, and the fact that reassurance came before the truth. That leader asks a different question entirely, opening up the conversation hiding underneath.

The cost of missing these cues is invisible but high: the update was given, the meeting ended on time, but the real business risk stayed unspoken. Teams rarely withhold the truth out of dishonesty; they withhold it because no one was present enough to make it safe to speak.

When leaders consistently create this kind of psychological safety through presence and listening, they begin to shape something much larger than individual conversations—a coaching culture within the organization.

In his book How to Know a Person, David Brooks notes that the single skill at the center of any healthy relationship or team is the ability to make people feel seen, heard, and understood. Yet, most of us struggle to do it.

Why Leaders Lose Both Skills as They Rise

Paradoxically, presence and listening get harder with seniority due to three distinct corporate traps:

1. Expertise Interrupts: You recognize a problem within three sentences and immediately start composing the answer, stopping just as the person reaches the hardest part of what they need to say.

2. Power Distorts: People naturally edit and sanitize themselves in front of an executive who can affect their career trajectory.

3. Speed Punishes: A calendar carved into rigid thirty-minute blocks trains you to grab the quick action item and move on. It feels highly efficient, but it inadvertently teaches your team to wait for instructions rather than think for themselves.

Borrowing the PCC Standard

You do not need an ICF coaching credential to use the standard. You can begin practicing these markers immediately:

• Stay grounded when emotion rises instead of rushing to fix it.

• Let silence work. The most critical sentence often arrives only when you give it space to breathe.

• Reflect back what you heard before you respond. Watch how often a person says, "Well, not exactly..." and then proceeds to tell you the real story.

• Resist the reflex to solve. The urge to fix is the ultimate enemy of hearing.

This is the fundamental shift I work on with the leaders I coach: the passage from doing to being.

Listening for content is doing—a transaction to complete. Being present to the person is being—a quality of attention that trusts deep understanding to come first. The ICF PCC standard describes a coach who can hold that space under pressure, with anyone. And it also happens to be the exact description of the kind of leader people trust, grow under, and choose to follow.

FAQs

What is the ICF PCC certification?

The ICF PCC certification (Professional Certified Coach) is a credential awarded by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). It recognizes coaches who demonstrate a defined level of coaching competence, experience, and mastery of the ICF Core Competencies.

What are the ICF PCC Core Competencies?

The PCC standard is built around eight ICF Core Competencies that guide professional coaching practice. These competencies cover areas such as ethical practice, cultivating trust, maintaining presence, active listening, evoking awareness, and facilitating client growth.

Do you need an ICF PCC certification to use these leadership skills?

No. While the competencies are part of the ICF PCC certification framework, leaders can apply skills such as presence and active listening without pursuing a formal credential. Many organizations use coaching-based leadership approaches regardless of whether managers hold a certification.

How does an ICF PCC coach differ from a traditional manager?

An ICF PCC coach is trained to create awareness, encourage reflection, and help individuals discover their own solutions rather than immediately providing answers. Many effective leaders borrow these coaching skills to develop stronger, more empowered teams.

What should I look for in ICF PCC training?

Quality ICF PCC training should provide opportunities to practice coaching conversations, receive feedback, develop mastery of the ICF Core Competencies, and prepare for the requirements associated with PCC ICF certification.

Why are Presence and Active Listening important in PCC coaching certification?

Presence and Active Listening are foundational coaching skills because they help coaches understand what clients are saying, what they may be leaving unsaid, and what truly matters beneath the surface. These competencies also translate directly into stronger leadership and communication in the workplace.

Reference: David Brooks, "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen" (Random House, 2023). Featured on the unleashtheyou.com reading list.

Dr. Shrini Susarla is an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and founder of unleashtheyou.com, where he works with founders and corporate leaders navigating the passage from doing to being.