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When Leaders Communicate Well, Everything Works Better
Communicate to Connect is a two-day in-house workshop for leaders in financial services, legal, and professional services.
This programme gives you the communication and relationship skills that most professional development programmes leave out.
CISI CPD Endorsed: up to 10 hours per participant
The leadership communication gap is costing you more than you think
You probably already know which conversations are not happening in your firm. The feedback that keeps getting postponed. The difficult message that gets softened until it means nothing. The team member who has quietly disengaged but nobody has quite found the right moment to address. The meeting that ends with general agreement and produces no change whatsoever.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the symptoms of a communication culture and in financial and professional services, where everything depends on trust, they have a direct cost.
Clients who sense that a relationship manager is not fully present. Senior leaders who receive polished updates rather than honest ones. Junior professionals who cannot raise a problem until it has become a crisis. Teams that are technically capable but humanly disconnected.
None of this is the result of bad intentions. It is the result of leaders who were never taught the specific communication skills that create trust, safety, and genuine collaboration because those skills were assumed to arrive naturally, or to be someone else's responsibility. They are not natural, and they are not someone else's responsibility. They are learnable. And two focused days can change the way your leadership team communicates for years.
What your leaders will leave with...
The programme runs across two full days and covers four interconnected areas of leadership communication. Every element is experiential, participants do not watch training videos; they practise, receive structured feedback, and apply what they have learned in the room before they leave it.
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Connection and Presence. The first moments of any professional relationship, the handshake, the eye contact, the quality of attention determine whether trust is possible. Leaders learn what their minds are doing through the specific, repeatable behaviours that signal presence, warmth, and genuine interest from the first second of contact.
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The handshake and the hello. How the first seven seconds are won or lost
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Eye contact that signals. Genuine attention rather than performance
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Empathetic listening. The practice of attending rather than merely hearing
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The goodbye. Closing a conversation so the other person wants to return.
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Team Leadership and Psychological Safety. Trust does not happen by accident in a team. It is created or destroyed by thousands of small daily communication choices. Leaders learn what psychological safety is, how their own behaviour creates or erodes it, and the specific tools that shift a team from compliance to genuine collaboration.
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Influence and Upward Communication. Many leaders are excellent with their teams but struggle to communicate with the clarity and confidence that senior leaders and clients need. The programme teaches the specific frameworks that make upward communication and high-stakes client communication consistently effective.
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Managing upwards. Communicating with confidence to senior leaders
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Self-awareness. The gap between how you think you come across and how you actually come across
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Presenting and Speaking to Groups and Larger Audiences. For many professionals, the prospect of presenting feels emotionally charged in a way that their technical confidence does not. The programme addresses the root of that discomfort directly and then builds a genuine and lasting speaking capability through structured practice, peer feedback, and live delivery.
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Why presenting feels emotionally charged. How to change that relationship with it permanently
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Developing a three-minute professional delivery. With demonstrations and peer feedback
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Stage work. Slide decks, screens, lecterns, posture, voice projection, and where to place your eyes
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Delivering for real. Live delivery with structured audience feedback in a safe environment.
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This programme
is for...
Leaders who;
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Lead a firm, a division, or a team directly or remotely
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Face clients, investors, regulators, or stakeholders in high-stakes meetings
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Are finding that hybrid working has eroded the informal trust-building that used to happen naturally
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Want to give their leaders the communication skills that compliance training and technical CPD leave out
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Need verifiable, independently endorsed CPD for a regulated workforce
CISI CPD Endorsed: Up to 10 hours per participant
Both days of the programme are formally endorsed by the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment as Continuing Professional Development.
Each participant receives a CPD attendance certificate at the end of the programme.
For regulated firms in financial services and legal services, this means the programme satisfies both the human development obligation and the professional compliance requirement simultaneously.
Up to 10 hours of CISI soft-skills CPD per participant. Applicable toward individual CPD records and firm-wide CPD reporting.
Your Facilitator,
Christopher Jones-Warner Chartered FCSI
I have spent my professional life in the rooms where trust and rapport determine outcomes as an Army officer, as a private client wealth manager, and for the past twenty years as a facilitator and coach working with financial professionals at every level.
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Former Army officer trained at RMA Sandhurst
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Twenty-one years as a private client wealth manager
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Founding Chairman of the CISI Wealth Management Forum
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CISI CPD contributor since 2012 — teaching communication, leadership, and behavioural skills to financial professionals
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Certified Level 1 Ananda Meditation Teacher
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Teaching and coaching since 2007
Information
This workshop is a two day, in-person, in-house, interactive, experiential communication and leadership workout:
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In-person, on-site
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10 hours CISI CPD available.
Book a Discovery Call to discuss details or to make a booking.
“I have heard nothing but excellent feedback from the communication course you kindly ran for us on Friday. I know that many of the attendees needed help, and they really appreciated your confidence building measures. You clearly were effective because they have returned, buzzing and ready to try it for real. That’s a great result.”
