CvB & Associates was founded by Christopher von Baeyer, who began his research and professional practice over 35 years ago as an undergraduate at Harvard University. He has since developed an international reputation as a thought leader and expert practitioner in the field of Leadership Presence. Currently based Toronto, he has designed and delivered arts-based programming in leadership and professional communication for hundreds of clients across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, including BASF, Dolby, Duke Corporate Education, Rogers Communication, Enbridge, Société Générale, Deloitte & Touche, Boston Consulting Group, the Canadian government and the Hearst Corporation. He has served as a consultant and contributing partner to the Queens/Smith Professional Development faculty for over 15 years.

Over the course of his career he has coached thousands of men and women in the art of leadership presence, emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication, Shakespeare, and voice. As a founding principal at The Ariel Group, the industry-leading international corporate training skills firm from Boston, he served as VP of Client Solutions where he managed the company’s highest revenue-generating clients for over 10 years. He has taught at the Harvard Business School, Emerson College, Boston College, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago and the Columbia University Senior Executive Program in New York. He has served on the faculty and Advisory Board for Leadership Development at the Banff Centre in Alberta, as well as the board of the Centre for Playback Theatre in New York. In 2014 he returned from a two-year work sabbatical traveling and living between Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bangkok, Bali Province, Indonesia and Berlin, Germany.

Chris is deeply committed to employing the arts as a creative tool for promoting dialogue on issues of social and civic concern. He recently completed an intensive training with Al Gore to become certified as a member of the Climate Reality Leaderships Corps. For 10 years he served as the Artistic Director for Toronto Playback Theatre, which he founded with the mission of providing improvisational and audience-interactive theatre for diverse communities the Toronto area. He currently serves as Chairman of the Board of the Dharma Centre of Canada, one of the oldest meditation centres in North America. He holds a BA in English and American literature from Harvard University and an M.A. in Theatre Arts and Vocal Communication from Lesley University Graduate School. He currently resides in Toronto and is the proud father of a university-aged son.

Cara Barrineau has an extensive background in communications, business, and the arts. She brings over 15 years of coaching experience, 11 years of virtual experience and 23 years of professional acting experience to her role as a trainer and coach. She is passionate about creating a supportive and challenging environment to help each participant build awareness and take risks.

Cara has worked extensively with a wide range of business segments, including technology, entertainment, government, and the financial industry. Select clients include Executive Education Programs of Harvard & Columbia, Federal Reserve Bank, CIA, American Express, Citibank, IBM, Oliver Wyman, Johnson & Johnson, Hearst, Proctor & Gamble, Disney, Time Warner.

Richard Richards is originally from the UK and currently lives in Spain. He has lived and worked outside the UK (Germany, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Nicaragua) for most of the last 45 years of which 23 were in the USA (Chicago and Boston). He carries both UK and US passports and his rich, overseas experiences have given him a deep appreciation for the world and its many peoples. While almost all his paid work is with people at the top of the world’s pyramid, his spirit gravitates to those at the foundation, or to those who actively include them. He coaches and facilitates in English and in Spanish.

Richard has worked in all four roles of the typical client/training provider relationship: client, consultant, designer, and facilitator. As a client, he spent almost 20 years working for Hyatt International, in Human Resources and Learning and Development. He subsequently had his own training and consulting practice. That experience, and his graduate work at DePaul University, led to him to work as Vice President of Learning Design for an experiential training company, before branching out again in his own consulting practice.

Along the way, he studied improvisation at Second City in Chicago, spent two years teaching at a leadership institute on the border of Honduras in Nicaragua, and has worked as a professional actor in the US on stage, in voice-over and in film. The latter was the inspiration for his MA in Applied Learning and still informs much of his approach in working experientially with clients.

As a coach and facilitator, he focuses on those aspects of leadership that can sometimes be overlooked in the tactical demands of meeting targets, solving problems, and delivering strategic outcomes in an ever more rapidly moving world. That is, an executive’s personal and leadership presence, essential to inspiring and motivating their colleagues, shareholders, employees and other key stakeholders.

He is equally at home working with clients and participants in-person or virtually. He brings the same passion, energy and integrity to virtual instructor-led trainings (or VILTs) as he does to an in-person classroom, creating valuable, co-created learning experiences.

He has facilitated and designed leadership and communication workshops for clients all over the world and across many industries. This has included financial services companies (Citi, American Express, The Acumen Fund, Wellington Management), pharmaceuticals (Abbott, Bayer, IDEXX), technology (Accenture, Cognizant, Nos, Stripe), universities (Duke, Harvard, Bath, IHEID, Darden) and consulting firms (Boston Consulting, Oliver Wyman), among others.