Leader as a performer.
A leader has to hold attention, tell a relatable story and create a room where people speak up, which is exactly a performer's work. Three days, residential, ending in a performed piece where every participant runs an actor's full cycle: entry, recital, exit.
What happens.
Most leadership communication training works on the script. This works on the instrument, on the grounds that a leader with a good script and no presence is a person reading, and everyone in the room can tell.
The first day is the body. Awareness, weight, breath and movement drawn from Kalari, from Capoeira and from animal movement. Senior people are not usually asked to move, and the first hours are the most uncomfortable of the three days. They are also where the largest change happens, because posture and breath are where authority is actually read from, well before anybody parses a sentence.
The second day is voice and story. Not public speaking technique, but the older question of what a story is for and why some accounts of the same facts land while others slide off. Participants build material from their own working lives, which means they are rehearsing the thing they will actually have to say in three weeks.
The third day is an intensive theatre process ending in a performed piece. Every participant runs an actor's full cycle: entry, recital, exit. Entry and exit matter as much as the recital, because leaders lose rooms in exactly those two places, walking in unprepared and leaving without landing.
Leaders lose a room walking in and walking out, not in the middle.
Underneath the three days is a claim about the craft. Holding a room, reading its mood and moving it through an arc is the performer's work, and it is also, exactly, what leadership has always needed. One craft, exercised in different rooms under different names.
At a glance.
| Learning need | The performer inside every senior manager. In a budget line: leadership presence, executive communication and manager capability. |
| Who it is for | Senior management. Also adapted, in a shortened format, for college students. |
| Format | 3 days, residential. |
| Group size | 12 to 25. Small enough that every participant performs and is seen. |
| Where | A residential venue with a hall. We help you find one if you do not have one. |
| Prior experience | None. Nothing is graded. |
What we measure
Named behaviours rated by direct reports or peers, thirty to sixty days later: does this person hold a room, and do people speak up in meetings they run?
Psychological safety on the seven item team scale, run with each participant's own team rather than with the cohort.
What we do not claim
We do not claim that three days makes anybody a performer, or that presence is finished at the end of a residential. It is a practice with a technique, and three days is where the technique starts.
We do not claim measurable effects on business performance. We claim a capacity, and we invite the check.
The full evidence base, including the claims we have retired, is published here.
Presence is a craft with a technique, and technique can be taught.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.