We work with leaders to help them discover, develop, and deepen their leadership abilities and impact.
Our clients are a mix of business leaders (ranging from C-suite executives at leading global corporations to founders of high-tech start-ups) and non-traditional leaders, including philanthropists, celebrities, journalists and other thought leaders.
They come from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines, and their different experiences and personalities mean that they lead in different ways. But what all our clients have in common—what all successful leaders have in common—is that they understand that leaders make things happen.
In fact, our work with clients begins with this very question: What do you want to make happen? The answer is rarely straightforward, even for seasoned, strategic leaders. But fully unpacking this question, and examining the ramifications of your answers to it, are the powerful first steps to becoming an even stronger leader.
Successful leaders inspire, persuade, and teach. They create trust and drive change. We are dedicated to helping our clients express their vision, share their knowledge, reflect their values, and tell their story effectively and powerfully.
Kim Cooper Associates is a boutique leadership consultancy founded in Boston in 1998. We work with leaders and their organizations in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia, in a wide range of industries, including banking, pharmaceuticals, high-tech, media/entertainment, and venture capital.
Leadership Presence
A leader who enters a boardroom or steps up to the microphone may win over (or lose) the audience before uttering a single word.
Leaders need presence: they must project credibility and authority, and they must inspire confidence and trust. Their audience must feel that the leader has integrity—that he or she is not only honest, but real.
These qualities cannot be communicated merely by practicing public speaking or body language techniques.
Leadership presence is, of course, affected by how a person speaks and listens, by the facial and physical gestures that we make in moments of confrontation or high pressure—people constantly make character judgments based on these external cues. But when the focus of leadership presence training is exclusively on these verbal and non-verbal cues, communicators often seem unnatural, and audiences can sense the effort they are making to modify their behavior. The result is that leaders can seem to be trying to display their leadership—and that is precisely the opposite of what leadership presence is all about.
Our Leadership Presence program takes a different approach, working from the inside out, drawing out of the leader the qualities that they already possess but have not fully developed. At the same time, we help the leader see how others perceive them, and why. Based on the techniques of the best actors (who don’t “pretend” but rather find within themselves the qualities they need to express in their role), as well as our 5 Principles methodology and our expertise with leaders from across a wide range of fields and cultures, we help clients express their true, strong, authentic leadership presence.
Leadership Communication
For leaders to be effective, they need to have vision—a clear picture of where they want their organization to go—and a strategy for getting there.
But even the best strategy will not make the vision a reality if the leader is unable to motivate and inspire. Leadership communication is not simply about enthusiastically delivering a message about financial targets or growth trajectories (although ambitious goals can be motivating). It is about letting your audience see what you see, dream what you dream.
What will your organization look like when your vision is achieved? Why are you the person to lead the organization to a better future? If you are asking people to embrace change, what will inspire them to take the risk and make the leap with you? And looking beyond your organization, what impact will realizing your vision have on the world?
These are questions to which the leader must provide answers—implicitly or explicitly. But the answers are not going to be found in charts and graphs, and they will need to be expressed differently for each audience: boards will want to be reassured that their confidence in the leader’s ability to carry out the organization’s strategy is not misplaced; managers will need to overcome any reservations they may have if they are to execute on the strategy with enthusiasm and convey the vision to others within the organization; employees will need to understand their contribution to the larger picture and how their lives will be affected by change; a cynical market will need to be convinced that the leader can deliver.
Our Leadership Communication program helps leaders to:
- Craft the compelling arguments and the shared stories that drive change.
- Uncover within themselves the clarity, power and authentic voice that are essential for effective leadership.
The Synergistic Team
Leadership teams drive innovation, define strategy, capture opportunities, and meet challenges head on. To succeed, members of the team must be able to test new ideas, engage in vigorous debate, encourage dissent, create trust, and motivate one another. In other words, communications within the team must be at the highest level.
But even a group whose members all have strong leadership qualities and communication skills will not necessarily function as a cohesive leadership team that can get the job done. Our Synergistic Team program identifies the patterns of interaction and engagement that limit the team’s effectiveness, and helps the team create a virtuous circle of improved communications, increased group synergy, and higher impact and effectiveness.
What’s Your Story?
All great leaders — whether they run a company or a country — persuade and inspire people by engaging them on two levels: the head (reason) and the heart (emotion).
Most business people are understandably more comfortable with the former: presenting data, analyzing trends, outlining objectives. These are all essential components in any credible business presentation. But on their own they are not enough. Most of us have experienced first-hand the frustration of communications that are not fully effective: you develop and articulate a clear, well-organized rational argument and your audience seems to be following along; but when you get to the critical moment — securing buy-in — your audience is not with you.
- Your audience may ‘get’ your vision, but not internalize it.
- They may understand the separate elements of your strategy, but not see how they interconnect.
- They may agree that your objective is reasonable, but not feel motivated to work hard or take risks to make it a reality.
Stories provide communicators with another route to achieving understanding. They vividly illustrate cause and effect, action and consequence. They imprint powerful mental images. They create coherence and meaning by connecting the past to the present, and the present to a future we can envision and understand.
Our What’s Your Story? program is designed to help business people harness the power of stories to become more effective communicators. We draw on the approaches and techniques that the best professional story-tellers — novelists and screenwriters — use to pull their audiences in, make them care, and create lasting impact. What’s Your Story? will teach you how to use these “soft” skills to tell a true story about your business and achieve your “hard” business goals.
What’s Your Story? for Organizations
All successful organizations have a compelling story to tell — whether or not they know it.
Every organization was founded for a specific purpose, and has a vision for making the world a better place (though in some cases this is not necessarily obvious and stakeholders need to be reminded of just how the organization does this). Every organization has faced major obstacles, struggled against competitors, adapted itself to changes in the industry, and experienced “moments of truth” where decisions had to be made that would impact the organization and all its stakeholders in dramatic ways. These are all elements of a powerful story.
In this program we help you develop and articulate the true, cohesive, and compelling story of your organization. We work with you to identify the most powerful and inspirational elements of this story and — based on your organization’s strategic needs — to create a framework for incorporating this story into all of your organization’s key communications.
Leader Up!™
Developing leadership abilities should not be a privilege that is only for successful leaders who have the resources to continuously improve themselves.
Instead, learning to think and act like a leader should be something that everyone focuses on as a fundamental skill.
The goal of Leader Up!™ is to “democratize leadership”—to bring to the broadest possible audience core leadership skills that we work on with our corporate clients.
To learn more about Leader Up!™ go to leaderup.com.
About Us
Kim Cooper, Founder
Kim founded Kim Cooper Associates, a boutique leadership and communications consultancy, in 1998, with the vision of enabling organizations and their leaders to communicate at the top of their game.
Kim and her team have worked with organizations in a wide range of industries, including banking, pharmaceuticals, high-tech, media/entertainment, and venture capital. Kim established KCA while teaching at Harvard, where she also developed The 5 Principles, KCA's core methodology.
Before leaving Harvard to devote herself full time to consulting, Kim taught writing and communications for 10 years, receiving Harvard's university-wide teaching award every year she taught. She also served as a consultant for members of the Harvard community, including from Harvard Business School and the Department of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Kim received her B.A. in Literature and Philosophy from the University Professors Program at Boston University.
Adam Vital
Adam works with KCA clients on developing and deepening their impact as leaders. He also works with organizations and individuals to develop strategic approaches to the creation and implementation of critical communications.
Prior to joining KCA, Adam was an independent consultant based in Paris, where he worked with executives at leading European and global companies.
Before forming his consulting practice, Adam worked as a lawyer in Washington D.C., New York, and London, where his clients included Fortune 100 companies and leading investment banks. Adam has a Ph.D. from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.