Developing Your Leadership Presence

Personal Benefits

• Inspire, motivate, and lead more effectively
• Build more positive relationships
• Deliver succinct, clear, and articulate messages
• Get more buy-in from your team, colleagues, and clients
• Learn how to use your authentic, unique personality to connect more strongly to those around you
• Learn how to be persuasive and influential

Organizational benefits

• More effective and inspiring leaders
• Improved motivation amongst employees
• More authentic communicators in your leadership team

Module 1

Honing Personal Style for Projecting Confidence and Competence

• Deepen your awareness and skills with practice and personal coaching in emotion, imagination, spontaneity, passion, and energy to develop a powerful and authentic leadership presence brand and style
• Experience our best-in-class immersive, entertaining, and interactive social learning curriculum
• Identify and explore your own professional communication goals and aspirations that will form the blue-print of your learning journey

Building Trust and Relationship through Self-Reflection, Listening, and Empathy

• Explore and identify your own personal and professional values in order to build a foundation for your leadership communication brand
• Learn and practice a toolkit of techniques for managing work-life balance, personal energy, and authentic social engagement
• Strengthen your ability to listen deeply and build authentic relationships with clients and customers, internal teams, and external stakeholders in order to facilitate engaged and collaborative creative processes

Module 2

Narrative Intelligence, Business Storytelling and Consultative Dialogue with Clients and Teams

• Refine your use of dynamic and creative language choices as an effective tool for sharing personal experiences and building relationships, as well as for delivering analytical information in a compelling way
• Engage in the practice of employing storytelling skills such as the use of vivid images, speaking in snapshots, recognizing the need for strong beginnings and endings, and using body and voice to convey key messages
• Develop the art of consultation, collaboration, and coaching with your colleagues in order to more effectively drive change and influence your clients and teams 

Application Clinic: Feedback and Coaching on Applying Presence and Communication Skills to Real Workplace Scenarios

• Practice the skills of communicating in high-stakes, challenging internal and client situations that require careful problem-solving techniques and solutions grounded in emotional intelligence
• Work closely with your learning team to apply skills, rehearse scenarios and receive individualized coaching and feedback on your style and effectiveness and a team leader in your own real-time situations
• Envision a future learning path for your growth and mastery of Leadership Presence as a set of skills that will support your evolution and success in your life and career

In-Person Learning

Learn alongside fellow participants from across the country, discovering best practices that span industries and sectors.

Our in-person programs include classroom learning sessions led by award-winning Smith School of Business professors and industry experts. Practice new skills in breakout sessions, projects and simulations, and apply your learning toward real-world case studies.

Queen’s Health and Safety protocols for in-person programs are evolving and may change by the program date. View the campus operating guidelines (opens in a new tab).

Session Leaders

Session leaders include senior professors from Smith School of Business and knowledgeable experts from industry. These outstanding teachers are constantly in touch with today's business world through real-world business experience, Board memberships and their own consulting practices.

Christopher von Baeyer

Communication Coach
Queen's Executive Education

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 in 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 Queen's/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 travelling 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 in 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.