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Executive Leadership Programs.

Perform on the world stage

Our Executive Leadership Programs are designed for present and future business executives to build skills that will have a direct impact on their performance in the corporate world.

Based on techniques taught in the world's leading acting schools, our leadership courses and coaching services translate what it takes to make award-winning theatrical productions into a business context, providing executives the opportunity to hone their creativity, thereby giving themselves and their teams a competitive edge.

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Become a better leader

Actors and business leaders share many of the same goals: both want to confidently command audiences, to be brilliant and persuasive communicators, to speak with authority and authenticity, to be able to solve problems creatively, and to lead others toward a common vision.

Through experiential exercises that are both fun and powerful learning tools, our programs provide business leaders with new approaches and skills to help them strengthen their leadership abilities. The sessions are interactive and energetic and quickly help participants stretch themselves out of their comfort zones, take risks and change their perspectives for a meaningful and impactful learning experience. We work with each client individually to customize each program.

Clients leverage our tailored training modules to prepare for board presentations, public speaking opportunities, TV appearances, team-building events, change management initiatives, and more.

Format(s): In-person, Online (depending on module)

Language(s): English, French, German

Schedule an appointment today to discuss any or all of the modules described below.

Leadership workshops

Leadership presence

How to be a present and authentic communicator

This workshop will demystify the building blocks of presence, developing leaders who communicate with passion, purpose, persuasiveness, and potency.

90 minutes - 4 hours

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Learn to stand out when you speak up

True presence is a highly sought-after and crucially important skill for the modern executive. Successful leaders in every field have that rare combination of confidence, charisma, self-awareness, and inspiration. Actors also search for a strong "stage presence". Easily seen and difficult to describe, stage presence or leadership presence is an attribute that we all feel is something that would make us better leaders. It is the ability to authentically connect with and engage audiences.

Presence is a skill that we need in one-on-one encounters as well as when presenting to 1000 people. True presence allows us to read the room and lift audiences away from the many distractions that are a part of everyday life in order to inspire, persuade and build momentum toward a strong vision. It brings people from the ordinary into the extraordinary. While some might argue that presence is an innate quality, this workshop will prove otherwise as we demystify the building blocks of presence and train ourselves to strengthen our own engagement with audiences.

By learning to be more “present,” participants will understand how to be more motivational as a leader, more convincing as a negotiator, and more open and honest as a team member. This workshop develops a practical toolkit for leaders to continue working on their presence and their ability to communicate their vision and their story long after the workshop has ended.

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Leader as storyteller

How to tell an unforgettable story

Each participant will examine and share transformational moments from their lives, moments of incredible impact and learning, success and failure, that have shaped who they are as leaders. Participants will be given a storytelling toolkit to help with both the form and content of what makes for a great story.

2 hours - full day

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Awaken your audience, bring values to life

Before there was spoken language, there were stories. Human interactions center on stories; we buy products, choose friends, rally behind leaders, and express our core values with stories. Telling a story that exemplifies an essential message is a far more effective communication tool than simply supporting a message with facts, charts, graphs, and any material that lacks emotion and fails to connect on a human level. Stories also help those needed statistics come to life. We remember stories; they impact us. Stories are memorable because they reflect life, are composed of images rather than ideas, emotions rather than facts, and principles rather than cliche phrases.

Business leaders understand the power of a great story. A story can motivate, inspire, change our thinking and, most importantly, rally others to action. Being a great storyteller also means being an astute listener, being able to read an audience, and speak directly to them, with confidence, charisma, and depth of character.

The Leader as Storyteller workshop asks participants to consider their own stories and experiences to understand the core beliefs that guide their lives. This set of values becomes the leadership pinnacles that are communicated to others. Each participant will examine and share transformational moments from their lives, moments of incredible impact and learning, success and failure, that have shaped who they are as leaders. Participants will be given a storytelling toolkit to help with both the form and content of what makes for a great story. We will pay considerable attention to a story's use and place in a business context, providing powerful tools that can regularly be applied to connect to and influence stakeholders.

Individuals will walk away having found, developed, and told a personal story that is meaningful and connects to the audience. Additionally, participants will begin a process of personal reflection that is necessary to find and share stories that motivate, entertain, and inspire.

The innovative leader

How to unleash your creativity and effect change

This workshop inspires business leaders to unleash their own creative selves, utilizing many different exercises from the world of theatre-making meant to spark unexpected thinking, disrupt patterns that are inhibiting growth, and enable true collaboration to foster new ideas.

2-4 hour session

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Disrupt, dare, break the patterns, and shatter the norms

The process of devising theatre requires an immense amount of artistic space, and this workshop utilizes many different exercises meant to spark creativity and innovation in business leaders. Like many things, one's creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to realize its full potential.

This program trains business leaders to analyze problems from many different angles, to change their perspective in order to expand beyond the normal thinking channels, to utilize group brainstorming, and to value wild ideas as a first step toward innovation. The program leads participants through an innovation process that begins with experimentation, continues on to observation, framing and assumptions, and concludes with presentation.

Improvisation for the business executive

How to think on your feet

Leaders find comfort in the unknown, the unexpected. They are skilled in improvising, in “thinking on their feet”.

The goal of the workshop is to enable individuals to grow as leaders by practicing improvisation and learning its key principles:

Saying “yes and…” to open up new creative pathways and to actively build on others’ ideas
Active listening and active collaboration
Dealing with the unexpected with poise and confidence
Exercising the creative and intuitive side of the brain

2 hours - full day

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Build resilience and gain confidence in the unknown

Life is an improvisation. There is no script. We are constantly making decisions in real-time that affect the course of our futures. This workshop focuses on developing the skills of improvisation, thinking on your feet, and gaining comfort, confidence, and presence in the face of adversity.

Improvisation is a vital tool for actors to learn to be “in the moment” and to become acute listeners. Business leaders are often in situations that require improvisational skills, whether meeting with clients and answering questions, negotiating with a business, or creatively brainstorming a new vision for the business. The goal of the workshop is to enable individuals to grow as leaders and as presenters and to learn improvisational skills that will benefit them in many aspects of their working life.

Filmmaking Odyssey and Play in a Day team-building exercises

How to create an original work

We bring our team of expert collaborators, including designers and facilitators, to the program to help participants realize the vision of their film or play. The program ends with a performance or red-carpet screening of the original works and a wrap-up discussion to extract the key individual and team learnings and to translate these learnings into the individuals’ organizational environment.

Best as a full 8-10 hour session. Can be offered as a condensed 4-hour session.

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Build high-performance teams

These two modules take a team through a creative challenge: in the course of a single day, develop, storyboard, rehearse, and premiere an original play or film, moving from the seed of an idea through to the opening night performance.

Individuals learn to align as a team, establish clear roles, communicate powerfully using a story as a means to share a set of values, and break down a complex project into small steps.

This one-of-a-kind team-building experience has a direct correlation to the business world, including: group ownership over a vision, the value in differentiating roles in order to build a successful product, trust, empathy, the value in generating extraordinarily high goals and reaching them, valuing all team members’ contributions, the importance of creating a clear and transparent structure within which everyone can excel.

This is an unforgettable day, bonding teams together for years.

One-on-one coaching

Photo: Photographer Jean-Jacques Halans / TED

Sharpen your edge, prepare for primetime

This coaching is meant for mid-level to senior leaders who are increasingly in the public eye and need to develop their skills as presenters, storytellers, and influencers.

Individual sessions are devoted to enabling the individual to be seen and to see themself as a key leader and decision-maker within their organization. The coaching work is both practical and expansive, working directly on rehearsing and preparing for high-stakes events such as the TED stage, Davos, earnings calls, a company’s Town Hall, or a Board presentation about a new strategic direction, as well as long-term leadership presence work.

Coaching engagements vary based on a needs assessment and mutually agreed-upon outcomes.

About the facilitator

Quinn Bauriedel

Actor, Director, Scholar, Coach

Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the two-time OBIE Award-winning Pig Iron Theatre Company, Quinn has toured around the world with his productions and has taught workshops throughout the U.S. and abroad.

In 2016 he was named a USA Eisenhower Fellow. He has also been awarded a Henry Luce Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, a Fox Foundation Actor Fellowship (one of 6 awards given out nationally), a USA Knight Fellowship, and an Independence Foundation Fellowship.

He has led leadership workshops for many Fortune 500 companies, including Johnson & Johnson, CitiBank, Pfizer, Spotify, CreditSuisse, KPMG, PwC, Danisco, Exelis, USTrust, FINRA, and NovoNordisk, among many others. He regularly teaches at Wharton Business School, including in the Executive Education’s flagship Advanced Management Program. Additionally, Quinn has taught courses and workshops at every Ivy League university (except Cornell!), UVA, Georgetown, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Stanford, among many others.

Quinn has two decades of experience working with business leaders and works with each client to assess needs and customize the programs to ensure a strong fit. He brings fresh insights and cutting-edge thinking to all of the workshops he offers.