The managing partner gets through his speech for the fourth time without a single stumble.
It's a good speech. Three points, a story in the middle, a pause before the last line exactly where his presentation trainer told him to leave one. On Thursday he'll give it to three hundred engineers, the morning after his firm's merger with a larger one is announced.
Folasade, his coach, has been sitting at the far end of an empty meeting room in Dubai Silicon Oasis while he rehearses. When he finishes, she slides a card across the table. It's one of the anonymous questions his staff sent in, copied out by hand: "Will the people who built this place still have a place in it?"
He reads it, and for the first time in four sessions he answers in a voice she hasn't heard from him. Quieter, slower, with no structure at all. He talks about the two founders, and the year they nearly closed, and how he doesn't know the answer and hates not knowing it.
Then he stops, picks up his cards again, and says, "I can't say it like that on Thursday."
Folasade and her client are composites. That last sentence is where this kind of coaching starts.
What is executive communication coaching?
Executive communication coaching works with how a senior person speaks when it counts: to a board, a team, a room waiting for difficult news. Presentation training improves the delivery. Communication coaching works with the person doing the delivering, and with what happens in them once the prepared version stops being enough.
Many coaches arrive in this specialism by accident. A leadership client mentions a speech, and the sessions turn into rehearsals. The question is what a coach does then.
If coaching senior people through moments like Thursday's is where you'd like to take your practice, a free call on Google Meet with an RS Method Master Practitioner is a good place to test whether our training fits that plan. The apply page sets aside "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes" for it. Visit the apply page. Or read on.
How is presentation training different from communication coaching?
They work on different things, and both are worth having.
Presentation training works on the talk. It teaches structure, so an audience can follow. It works on voice, pace and stance, on slides and questions, and on rehearsal until the material is second nature. For a capable person who has never been shown how to build a talk, a few good days of it can change a great deal, and a coach who sends that client to a skilled trainer is doing them a favour.
Communication coaching works on the speaker. It's for the person who already has the skills and finds them deserting him at particular moments: in front of a certain chairman, on a certain subject, in a room where he suspects someone wants him to fail. Folasade's client is word perfect. His trainer did a fine job. What the card brought out has nothing to do with his pace.
A useful question for a first session is whether the trouble travels. If a client struggles to build or deliver any talk, to anyone, training will meet it. If the struggle waits for one room, one listener or one topic, more training is unlikely to be what helps. We've looked at a version of this with athletes and leaders in high performance coaching.
In our experience, senior people often arrive asking for the first kind of help and needing the second. The coach's first job is to notice which is which, and to say so.
Why do capable speakers lose their voice when it matters?
Because the performance is doing a job, and the job isn't communication.
Folasade's client is an engineer. Twenty-two years ago, in his first design review, he said a site team was exhausted and the schedule would hurt someone. A senior partner looked at him over his glasses and said, "We do numbers here, not feelings," and the room laughed. He put his pen down and didn't pick it up again. He remembers nothing else about that day.
Since then, whenever a conversation turns towards people, something in him steps behind a lectern. There's no lectern, of course. It's a way of standing behind his own words: a lower register, more figures, a structure with no gaps where a feeling could show.
For a minute, the question about the founders got round the side of the lectern, and he spoke from in front. Then the review room caught up with him, and the cards went back into his hand.
That minute is what we mean by presence in a speaker. It's whoever is still standing there once the performance runs out, and it's what three hundred engineers will be listening for on the morning after a merger.
The sting of that laugh can be taken out where it went in, back in the review room, so that a question about people stops landing the way that morning did. After that, stepping out from behind his words stops needing a decision.
None of that predicts how Thursday will sound. It describes where the work goes.
What does communication coaching ask of the coach?
More than knowing what good speaking looks like. That knowledge can be the problem.
Folasade came to coaching from eleven years of presenting business news on regional television. She knows exactly how to fix a talk. When her client finished his fourth run-through, her first impulse was a note about pace, and her second was a note about where he looked at the end. Both notes were right, and both would have kept the session on the lectern.
A coach in this specialism has to be able to sit with a client's plain voice, unfinished and a little shaky, without reaching to improve it. If the coach needs polish, because polish once earned them their place, the client will feel it and hand them polish. The session turns into two people performing politely for each other.
We've written about what presence asks of a coach in coaching presence, and about the wider route into senior work in how to become an executive coach in Dubai.
What a coach carries into the room counts as much as anything the client does, and RSCI trains with that in mind: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. A trainee's own need to sound good is met in training, with a supervisor watching, before any client's speech is in their hands.
Better to meet a reflex like Folasade's in your own training than in a client's rehearsal. The free call is where you can ask whether ours is the right training for the coach you'd like to become. Book the call.
How do you coach a leader to speak without the script?
Try a second telling. It takes about forty minutes of a session and works with any prepared talk.
- Hear the prepared version through once. Don't interrupt, and don't make notes on delivery. Let them finish, and thank them.
- Ask who in the audience they're most worried about. One person, by role if not by name. Write it down.
- Hand them the real question. One their audience has asked, or would ask, in the plainest words you can find. Put it on paper so they can hold it.
- Ask them to answer it to you, with the notes face down. Two minutes. Tell them beforehand that you won't comment on how it sounds.
- Ask what was different. Their words first, not yours. In our experience, people often notice the change in their own voice before the coach mentions it.
- Ask what the second telling risks. "What could happen if you spoke like that on the day?" Listen for the room behind the answer, and don't hurry towards reassurance.
- Agree one moment to keep. Not the whole talk. One place in the prepared version where they'll set the notes down and say a sentence from the second telling.
Afterwards, notice what step 4 did to you. If you were itching to give notes, that's useful information about your own work.
Nerves before a big talk are common, and most of them belong in coaching. If the fear comes with panic that doesn't settle, or it's keeping someone from work they need to do, suggest they also talk to a doctor or a qualified mental health professional.
What should a training give you before senior people bring you their hardest talks?
Three things, and RSCI's programmes are built with each of them.
- Your own voice, worked on first. RS Method Coach lists a "Personal inner-work component", and RS Method Complete lists "Personal transformation and practitioner development". You meet your own lectern before you meet a client's.
- Live practice, with someone correcting you. Among the people our training page says RSCI is for are those who "value live practice and correction". RS Method Coach includes two days of live practitioner training, and RS Method Complete includes five days of live training in Dubai.
- An ICF route inside the price. RS Method Coach includes the ICF Level 1 education pathway, toward the ACC. RS Method Complete includes Level 2, toward the ACC or the PCC. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
RS Method Coach is priced at AED 18,000, with ICF education included; RS Method Complete is priced at AED 35,000, with ICF education included.
Whatever a client brings into a session, the coach's part stays the same. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Among the RS Method's client stories is Talya Whitaker's: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being."
Our life coach training page lists everything inside RS Method Coach and RS Method Complete, item by item.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Folasade's first instinct after the fourth run-through was a note about pace. If coaching speakers is the work you want, the life coach training page shows where an instinct like hers gets worked on.