Personal Executive Presence
MORE ABOUT ME
My expertise in Personal Executive Presence is grounded in my personal journey of developing myself and others through leadership positions in academia and biotech. Care to follow me through some of the defining moments?
I was born and raised in the small farm town of Biddinghuizen in the Netherlands. From an early age I had a keen interest in biology and science. I was inspired and encouraged to study by my father, who worked as a township landscaper, and my mother who worked at home as a hairdresser and pedicure technician while caring for me and my three younger brothers. They taught me the value of work but left me free to decide what profession I wanted to pursue, for which I am forever grateful.
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In elementary school I was bookish, socially awkward ("sometimes a bit different", as my teacher kindly wrote on my report card), chubby, wore glasses, didn't play any sports, and wore hand-me downs from my cousins. My personal presence was, to put it mildly, not positively memorable.
Personal
Elementary School
Presence
When I moved to high school "in the big city" the mismatch with my more worldly class mates became immediately clear and it forced me to find and develop my own style. Who did I want to be and how did I want to move through the world? It was quite a search but I slowly found myself growing into my own authentic, by now tall and leaner, skin.
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Meanwhile I was working weekend and summer jobs in agriculture, pulling weeds, picking apples, sorting tulip bulbs. I had enough rainy bike rides of contemplation to realize that hands-on agriculture wasn't my passion. Instead, I decided to one day create new medicines for people with diseases for which there were none. I also felt a calling to be a leader so I could make an impact and help others. Yet in my immediate working-class environment I did not find anyone to tell me how I could make that a reality.
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It was during my Master's studies in Medical Biology at Utrecht University that I saw the first examples of leaders with Executive Presence. As a student organization board member working with teaching professors, I saw some of them exercise their leadership with poise, confidence and warmth and the inspiring impression on me that these women and men would inevitably get their job done. This was Executive Presence, and it was evident who had it and who didn't.
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Meanwhile I was paying for college through a weekend job at a market research agency. I would ring every doorbell in an assigned residential neighborhoods and ask whoever opened the door to try a new kind of potato chip, or laundry detergent, or vitamin supplement. With the sample came a product questionnaire to fill out and for which I would come back a week later. It was not an easy job but incredibly educational. I had to learn to really listen, to read and understand each person's individual mood, mindset, values and concerns. To first seek to understand before seeking to be understood.
In my many experiments to build rapport, feedback was immediate. After a while it became a fun challenge to enthuse anyone to participate, from the gruff, sleep-deprived dad with two kids hanging on each leg to the sophisticated socialite who looked long and pensively at my zero-calorie sweetener before finally sighing that "she never thought in her life she would agree to hitch a ride on this train". Besides paying for college, the work taught me how to listen deeply and how to speak with confidence. It gave me a taste of relating to people from all different walks of life through attuned communication and authentic empathy.
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After obtaining my Master's degree I crossed the ocean to undertake my PhD studies at the National Cancer Institute, part of the world-renowned National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Here I published my first works on novel therapeutics that stimulated the immune response against cancer. And again I became impressed by the wide range of effectiveness between different lead investigators. I experienced the different visceral reactions in my body when working with leaders who ruled from title and power and those who practiced servant leadership. Inspired, I began to study leadership literature and deliberately practice elements of my own Executive Presence.
In the lab at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam
Addressing the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer at their Annual Meeting
As I advanced through the academic ranks I noticed that many of my peers and mentees struggled to understand why mere scientific excellence didn't lead to automatic career advancement, or what else was required. After discussion with the institution's department of Faculty Development, they asked me to develop and deliver the course that became "Getting to Tenure". It turned out to serve a hidden, deep need and resulted in many additional 1:1 consultations from aspiring scientific leaders.
One person at a time, I began to teach the hard-won principles that I had learned over the years from making my own mistakes and the generous feedback of my mentors. My mentees came to see that there was little correlation between someone's intelligence and expertise on the one hand, and their ability to impress and inspire as a high-functioning leader on the other. Many were lacking the "X-factor" for leadership - Executive Presence.
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During the moments I was not directing my research group at MD Anderson, I continued to delve deeper into my personal development. I engaged in a variety of personal and spiritual growth modalities, including Landmark Worldwide, Zen Buddhism, and the Diamond Approach. The latter is particularly powerful due to its use of both modern psychological understanding and ancient spiritual wisdom, and after years as a student I undertook the 12-year training to become an ordained Diamond Approach teacher. I now pass on the gifts of this work to individual students, supporting their recognition, development and expression of their deepest capacities and authentic self. One of these deepest capacities is the Personal Presence. And its connection with Executive Presence was unmistakable from the start.
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I began to look for other avenues to bring what I had learned to people who might benefit. I taught meditation at a Houston public high school and learned how to relate to 13-year inner city kids and their, shall we say, mildly suspicious principal and teachers. Color me surprised when I found that all of the above had some among them who found themselves growing ever more interested in the workings of their own mind and the tools to settle it!
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After 14 years of leading my laboratory, I felt a call to shift my focus from academic research to directly bringing new anti-cancer medicines to the patients who so desperately needed them. At the time, one of my scientific collaborations was with Nektar Therapeutics, a rapidly growing biotech firm that was developing medicines based on cytokines, which are natural growth factors that increase the number and cancer-killing ability of specific immune cells. I had personally seen the power of their lead medicine, bempegaldesleukin (Bempeg for friends), to massively increase the killing of cancer cells by immune cells. I was convinced that it was the first of an entirely new class of anti-cancer medicines.
​A few months later I left the security of my tenured professorship for the new role of Vice President of Oncology Research at Nektar Therapeutics in San Francisco, CA. There, I continued the research and development of Bempeg. Biotech is a completely different beast from academia, and the learning curve for corporate goals, reorganizations, leadership changes and, yes, office politics was steep. But it was an outstanding place to study the impact of what I now called Personal Executive Presence, and further refine my own. I also returned to sharing one of the supports for my own Presence, meditation, in a company-sponsored program of weekly meditation for employees.
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Experiencing first-hand the powerful impact of Personal Executive Presence (or lack thereof!) in myself and others in academia and industry, I was clear about the need for a personalized approach to its deliberate development. This prompted me to reinvent my work once more. Sourced in my experience as a business leader and spiritual coach, I now consult to seasoned and aspiring leaders on the development of their own Personal Executive Presence.
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If an impactful, well-rounded Personal Executive Presence is also your goal, allow me to help you grow it. It would be my privilege.
Once I received my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from The George Washington University, I returned home to continue my work at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam as head of a small research group. It was here that my research paper detailing my work over the past 5 years was summarily rejected by a top-tier scientific journal.
The prospect of a 5-year publication gap that might severely damage my career trajectory plunged me into an identity crisis that precipitated a simple realization: While immersed in the highly competitive academic lifestyle I had completely forgotten my original, authentic reason for entering it in the first place. I wasn't here to become celebrated, famous, rich or powerful. I was here to create new medicines for patients who didn't have any. It was a powerful moment of waking up that spurred me into other fields of study including human personal development, depth psychology and Eastern and Western wisdom traditions.
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No long after this turning point I received a call that resulted in the third ocean-crossing, towards my appointment at the No. 1 ranked US Cancer Research Institute and Hospital, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. As a professor of Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy, I served 14 years as director of MD Anderson's Cancer Vaccine and Immunotherapy laboratory. Here, my team studied the immune response against cancer, focusing on treatments that harness the body's own immune cells to seek out and destroy cancer cells. In this role, I personally taught classes in the graduate school and mentored dozens of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and junior faculty in their scientific studies. I also noticed that many of them struggled with their personal career development and that the graduate school provided no guidance in this aspect of their growth. Drawing on my own experience, I began to deliberately mentor my protégés in their personal career development.