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Your Team is Technically Brilliant, But Can They Connect?
A two-day in-house communicate to connect workshop for teams in financial services, legal, and professional services. Built for the post-COVID, hybrid-working, screen-saturated workplace.
CISI CPD Endorsed: up to 10 hours per participant
The skills pandemic took away and hybrid working has not given back
You can probably picture the specific moments. The new graduate who is brilliant on paper but visibly uncomfortable in a client meeting unsure where to look, uncertain how to open or close a conversation, more at ease on a screen than in a room.
The team member who sends an excellent email but stumbles when the same client calls unexpectedly. The capable professional who sits through a meeting contributing nothing, not because they have nothing to offer, but because nobody taught them how to enter a conversation with confidence.
These are not rare exceptions. In most financial and professional services firms, they are a quiet, persistent pattern, particularly in teams that have spent the past five years doing most of their communicating through screens. The informal moments in which previous generations learned these skills, the shared lunch, the client visit, the corridor conversation after a difficult meeting simply did not happen. And what was not learned then is not automatically present now.
The result is teams where the technical capability is high and the human capability has quietly fallen behind, where people know their subject but struggle to make a client feel genuinely heard, to give a colleague honest feedback, or to walk into a room and own it. These are not personality traits and they are not permanent. They are skills. And two focused days can change the way your team communicates with clients, colleagues, and senior leaders for years.
What your team will leave with...
The programme runs across two full days and covers four interconnected areas of professional communication. Every element is experiential, participants 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 skills that make a client feel genuinely valued and a colleague feel genuinely heard are not personality traits. They are learnable disciplines, and they begin with the first moment of contact.
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The handshake and the hello. How the first seven seconds of any professional meeting are won or lost
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Eye contact and presence. The quality of attention that distinguishes a trusted professional from a capable one
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Empathetic listening. The practice of attending rather than merely hearing, which clients feel immediately
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The goodbye. Closing a conversation so the other person wants to return
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Team dynamics and communication. Teams do not become high-performing by accident. Psychological safety, the shared belief that it is safe to speak up, ask questions, and admit uncertainty is the single strongest predictor of team performance. These modules teach team members what it is, why it matters, and specifically how to create it in every interaction.
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Operating in climates of fear versus psychological safety and every team member's role in creating the latter
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Engaging people face-to-face and remotely: integrity, accountability, straight talk, and boundary setting
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Feedback that actually works The SBI method for giving and receiving feedback without defensiveness or damage to the relationship
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Collaboration across generations Understanding what colleagues at different career stages need from communication, and how to bridge the gap.
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Professional Effectiveness. Two of the most important communication skills for any team member and the two most rarely taught in formal professional development are how to manage upwards and how to know how you actually come across.
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Managing upwards. How junior and mid-level professionals can communicate with senior leaders clearly, confidently, and with genuine impact
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Self-awareness. The gap between how you think you come across and how colleagues, clients, and senior leaders actually experience you
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Presenting and speaking. For many early-career professionals, the prospect of presenting or speaking in a professional setting feels disproportionately frightening. This programme addresses that discomfort directly and builds a genuine speaking capability through structured practice, peer feedback, and live delivery in a safe environment.
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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 audience feedback in a safe, supportive environment
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Developing a three-minute professional delivery with demonstrations and structured peer feedback
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Why presenting feels emotionally charged. And the specific cause that can be addressed and resolved
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This programme is for your Team if...
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Your people are client-facing and need to build trust and rapport quickly and reliably
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You have early-career or Gen Z team members whose technical skills are strong but whose in-person communication needs development
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Your team has been working hybrid or remote and the informal connection has eroded
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You want a programme that works equally well for experienced professionals and those new to the workplace
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You need verifiable, independently endorsed CPD for a regulated workforce
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The programme is designed for mixed groups. It works as powerfully for experienced professionals refreshing and extending their skills as for early-career team members building them for the first time.
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 the past twenty years working with financial professionals on the specific communication and relationship skills that technical training programmes leave out.
I understand your world, the client relationships, the regulatory environment, the hybrid working challenges, and the generational dynamics that make team communication more complex than it has ever been.
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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 2007
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Certified Level 1 Ananda Meditation Teacher
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Teaching and coaching since 2007
Information
The programme is delivered in-house at your offices, in your environment, with your team.
Every engagement begins with a twenty-minute discovery call to discuss your firm's specific context, the size and composition of the group, and the right programme configuration.
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In-person, on-site
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Up to 10 hours CISI CPD.
Book a Discovery Call to discuss details or make a booking.
“Christopher was very engaging and in such a short period of time has dispelled years of nerves. Whilst only early in my career, he has given me a lifelong tool that I can use in focusing on ‘being present’. His interactive session pushed me out of my comfort zone but empowered me to strive forward.”
