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The Executive Speakers' Club
You run the business.
You still have to win the room.
An exclusive group of senior leaders, meeting monthly around a board table, working on the communication that leadership demands.
What we work on
The communication that leadership demands
In every session you learn how to improve one area of communication, from speaking and leading to giving feedback. You deliver to the room and get feedback on it, and you practise the interpersonal skills that go with it.
Over the year, the room covers the following:
Why a room of peers
The feedback you stopped getting
Senior leaders are expected to give feedback. Very few of them still receive any.
Your team won’t tell you that your presentation didn’t land. Your board will comment on the numbers rather than on how you held the room. The more senior you become, the more careful everybody around you gets, and the harder it is to find out how you actually come across.
This room is the exception. Everybody in it carries comparable responsibility, nobody reports to anybody else, and nobody is managing a relationship with you. You deliver, and you are told the truth about it.
How it runs
Around a table, once a month
Format
In person, around a board table.
Frequency
Monthly, nine until twelve.
The group
No more than ten, so the room knows your business and your voice.
You learn
A taught framework in every session, from the work Sarina delivers to senior leaders and organisations. How to present and lead a team. How to give feedback. How to hold a difficult conversation.
You deliver
You deliver in the room and get feedback on it, from Sarina and from people carrying comparable responsibility.
You apply it
You bring the situation you are actually facing, work out how to handle it, and leave knowing how to use it.
Specialists
Outside specialists brought in as the room needs them, in other areas of communication such as conflict resolution.
One to one
A private session with Sarina each quarter.
Term
Twelve months.
Confidentiality
Nothing leaves the room
This only works when members can bring the real situation, with the real names and the real numbers.
The conditions of the room
- Nothing discussed is repeated outside it.
- No photographs, no filming, no recording.
- Nothing is posted. Not the sessions, not the venue, not the membership.
- What you bring can be genuinely live, including what has not been announced.
The other Breakthrough Public Speaking clubs are built partly around capturing material that members can use publicly. This one is the opposite, on purpose.
The room
Who's in it
The composition of the group matters as much as the content, so every place is agreed in conversation with Sarina first.
- Chief executives, managing directors and C-suite directors.
- Founders of established businesses, past the stage of doing everything themselves.
- Senior leaders with genuine responsibility for people and for outcomes.
- People who are already able communicators, and who know that is not the same as being finished.
practicalities
When do we meet?
The club meets in the conference room of a hotel on the second Tuesday of the month, from 9am – 12pm, followed by lunch.
Next step
A conversation, before anything else
The next step is a private conversation with Sarina about where you are, what you are facing, and whether this particular room is the right one for you. No obligation on either side.
Practical questions
Before you decide
In large part, yes. Speaking is a substantial part of leadership, and presenting and high-stakes rooms sit at the front of the programme. The rest of the year covers the other communication a senior role demands: feedback, disagreement and the conversations that are hard to open.
It assumes you are. Everybody in the room got there by being able to hold their own. The work is on the harder end of the craft, and on the situations where being naturally capable stops being enough.
Each session teaches a framework, then puts it straight to work. You practise it, you deliver in front of the room, and you get feedback from Sarina and from people carrying comparable responsibility. Members also bring live situations they are facing and work on those properly.
By the conditions set out above, agreed by every member on joining.
It happens at this level and it is not a problem. The sessions are not sequential, so missing one does not leave you behind.
