Chicago, Illinois

Executive Communication Coaching in Chicago

For leaders whose audience is often in another building, another state, or on a call that started before they joined it.

30years: Coaching executives and their teams since the 1990s
15,000+clients: Across biotech, healthcare, finance and technology
3books: Published, the first two translated internationally
Top 15coaches in Boston: Voted by Influence Digest

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Laurie reads every inquiry personally and generally replies within one business day.

Coaching in Chicago

We should start with what this page is not. There is no office here, nobody on the team lives here, and we are not going to pretend that a coaching practice founded in Massachusetts has some special insight into this city. Every session described below happens on video unless a company brings us out, and if you want a coach who will meet you for coffee on Wacker Drive, that is a reasonable thing to want and we are not it.

What the coaching does understand is a structural feature of working life in a city like this one, which is that an unusual proportion of very senior people are answerable to somebody in a different place. Divisional presidents, regional heads, plant and operations leadership, national sales organizations: the decision-shaping presentation is frequently made to a head office in another state or another country, in a meeting where you are a rectangle on a screen among rectangles, and where the person who actually decides has said nothing for eleven minutes.

That changes the craft in specific ways. You cannot read a room you cannot see, so the checks that a good speaker runs continuously — is this landing, should I compress — have to be built into the structure of what you say rather than improvised from the faces. Second, the opening carries far more weight, because attention on a video call is lost early and rarely comes back. Third, being interesting stops being a nicety: on a call, the alternative to your presentation is a second monitor, and it is winning more often than anyone admits.

How the sessions run

Everything runs over video, and we think that is a feature rather than an apology here, because video is also the medium most of these presentations are actually delivered in. Practicing the thing in the medium it happens in beats practicing it in a conference room and hoping the skill transfers. Sessions are recorded when you want them to be, so you can watch the version of yourself that other people are watching.

Two shapes this usually takes

The first is a leadership cohort — a divisional team, a functional group, a sales organization — put through presentation skills coaching as three to six ninety-minute sessions. Group work suits this pattern well, because most of what goes wrong is shared: the same over-long build-up, the same reluctance to say the conclusion first.

The second is one person, usually newly promoted into a role where the audience got considerably more senior overnight. That is executive communication coaching, and it is competency twenty-five of the system — speaking to the executive level — more often than anything else on the list.

Business colleagues crossing a plaza between tall buildings on a bright, windy Chicago day.

Why people choose us for work that matters

A named system, published in full
Twenty-six competencies with names, grouped into five categories. You can read the whole thing before you spend anything — most firms will not show you their method.
See the Presence26© System
Thirty years, and the receipts
The Today Show, Oprah, the Wall Street Journal and Women’s Health. Three published books, all of them translated. Fifteen thousand clients.
See the press record
Other firms send us their coaches
The Train the Presentation Coach Certificate Program is one of the few of its kind — organisations pay to have their own HR and L&D people trained and credentialed by us.
About the Certificate Program
The prices are on the website
No discovery call required to find out what it costs. Both programme structures and the rates are published, along with what happens if those numbers are a problem.
See how an engagement runs