Executive presence is a vague term covering something real: whether people in a room treat what you say as authoritative. Second-language professionals often assume theirs is limited by their English, and usually the limiting factors are three habits that have nothing to do with vocabulary.
It isn't your accent
Worth stating first, because a great many people believe otherwise.
Accent affects comprehensibility, which matters — but once someone can be understood, accent has very little to do with whether they're taken seriously. Senior people with strong accents are everywhere in English-speaking business.
What does affect it: speed, volume, and whether the ends of your sentences stay audible. Those are mechanical and fixable.
Habit one: over-qualifying
The most costly one.
I might be wrong about this, and I haven't looked at it in detail, but I think perhaps we could maybe consider —
By the time the idea arrives, it's been pre-dismissed by its own introduction. The speaker is being careful and is heard as uncertain.
I think we should consider X is the same thought and lands entirely differently. If you genuinely need a caveat, one is plenty, and it goes after the point rather than in front of it.
Habit two: over-explaining
A second-language habit with an understandable origin — if you're not certain the first version was clear, you say it again differently.
The effect is that your point gets weaker with each repetition, and the room's attention moves on. Senior speakers tend to say something once and stop.
Habit three: filling silence
Pauses are where authority lives, and they're uncomfortable in a second language because silence feels like searching for a word.
The fix is to pause deliberately in places where you aren't stuck — after making a point, before answering a question. A pause that you chose sounds like thinking. Continuous speech with um in the gaps sounds like struggling, even when the content is identical.
What actually builds it
Brevity. The shortest clear version of your point. Easier in a second language than fluency, and more effective.
Specifics. Revenue is down eleven per cent in that segment carries weight that performance has been somewhat disappointing does not — and specifics are mostly vocabulary you already have.
Not retreating when questioned. If someone challenges your point, Can you say more about your concern? holds the position. Immediately conceding gives it away, and second-language speakers do this more often than they need to because being questioned feels like being caught out.
Volume. Unglamorous and genuinely significant. Quiet speech is read as tentative regardless of content, and many people speaking a second language are quieter than they realise.
The encouraging part
None of this requires more English. It requires using less of it, more deliberately — shorter sentences, fewer qualifications, more pauses, stated specifics.
That's a smaller gap than most people assume they're facing, and it's the kind of thing that improves noticeably within a few weeks of attention.