Carl DuPont has always enjoyed an audience. In elementary school, he couldn’t resist being the kid who raised his hand to answer a question the moment his teacher asked it.
“I love to talk,” he says, smiling.
An innate drive to share his voice propelled his career as an internationally renowned opera singer. It also sparked a more unconventional path for a musician: business school instructor and author.
Last November, DuPont and Alexa Chilcutt, a professor in the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School’s Executive Education program, published The Presence Principle: Embodying Executive Presence to Lead with Impact (Routledge). The duo was inspired by a question they constantly get at the end of their popular three-day Executive Presence course: What’s next?
Carl DuPont has always enjoyed an audience. In elementary school, he couldn’t resist being the kid who raised his hand to answer a question the moment his teacher asked it.
“I love to talk,” he says, smiling.
An innate drive to share his voice propelled his career as an internationally renowned opera singer. It also sparked a more unconventional path for a musician: business school instructor and author.
Last November, DuPont and Alexa Chilcutt, a professor in the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School’s Executive Education program, published The Presence Principle: Embodying Executive Presence to Lead with Impact (Routledge). The duo was inspired by a question they constantly get at the end of their popular three-day Executive Presence course: What’s next?
“We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a resource that people could go home with so they could continue the work of their executive presence transformation?’” DuPont recalls.
The blending of conservatory expertise with business education is rare across American professional development programs—and that’s a mistake, DuPont says.
“At most business schools, the ‘art’ is really lacking,” DuPont says. “Peabody’s approach helps Careystand apart.”
DuPont has always been interested in how the human voice works and why. While pursuing his DMA at the University of Miami, he completed an internship with David Rosow, an otolaryngologist/head and neck surgeon at the university’s Miller School of Medicine. There, he learned about the anatomy and physiology of the voice—knowledge applicable not only to singing, but also public speaking.
In DuPont and Chilcutt’s course, participants are encouraged to experiment with different verbal and nonverbal communication skills. Learning the basics and finding the combination of skills that suits their strengths can elevate students’ executive presence, allowing them to engage, align, and inspire other people to action.
“The students love it,” he says. “Creativity allows them to see what resources they have inside, that they maybe haven’t tapped just yet.”
The end of the workshop is just the beginning of a participant’s journey. To sharpen their executive presence, students must be intentional about practicing the skills they’ve learned every day—just as musicians do. But, as DuPont has learned in his years teaching musicians, not everyone knows how to practice the right way. The Presence Principle is designed to help. It addresses contemporary issues like building a presence in virtual environments and on social media, and it provides practical strategies and real-world exercises to help readers identify their core values in order to be true to themselves rather than pretend to be someone else.
“The skills that one needs in order to improve their executive presence, we wrote them down so that each person could have an opportunity to stay on track,” he says.
Although the book has only been out for a few months, it’s getting rave reviews. In February, DuPont was on a Zoom call with one of his executive coaching clients to start planning a retreat for their executive team. The client held up a copy of The Presence Principle, with dozens of sticky notes poking out from between the covers.
“As someone who underlines the heck out of every book that I read, I loved the fact that our book was not just a museum piece,” DuPont says. “This book is working as it was designed: To be interactive and to spark ideas.”