When the CEO is the only senior leader who can communicate well under pressure, the company has a single point of failure. The earnings call is fine. The all-hands is fine. The press cycle, when the press cycle is gentle, is fine. Then the moment arrives when the CFO has to face the board alone, the COO has to handle a regulator, or the CHRO has to lead an internal restructure announcement, and the gap between the CEO's communication skill and everyone else's is suddenly visible to everyone in the room.
Success In Media's leadership communication training closes that gap. We work with senior leadership teams to build the same communication skills the CEO already has. Clear messaging when the cameras are on. Calm presence when the questions are tough. Stories that move audiences to act. The result is a leadership team that can speak with one voice, not because they have memorized one script, but because they have been trained on one set of skills.
We've Lived It
We have trained senior leadership teams at AIG, the United Nations, Land Rover, State Street, American Express, AARP, and across additional Fortune 500 organizations. We also work with senior teams at trade and professional associations, mid-market companies in pre-IPO and growth-stage windows, and nonprofit leadership groups in capital-campaign or transition years. Most engagements are private.
"It's hard to walk away from Jess Todtfeld's training without 'aha' moments and valuable pointers for improving communication."
Vanessa Lowry, Director of Communications, Global Advertising and Brand Management, American Express
"I stopped dreading board meetings. That alone was worth the engagement."
Division President, Fortune 500 Healthcare Company
"Thank you so much for your work with our entire team. We saw noticeable results and were able to make on-the-spot adjustments. I look forward to receiving your post-training materials and seeing what you have in store for us."
Tim Wollerman, Vice President, Outreach, AARP
Why train the leadership team, not just the CEO
It is the question we do not get asked often enough: why train the people who sit just below the CEO and the top team? The pattern we see is clear. We work with the top team first, and they realize, often during the training itself, that the leaders just below them need this training too.
The reason is simple. This work eliminates the meetings where senior people read PowerPoint to each other or talk endlessly without landing a decision. Nobody needs more meetings. The leadership team that can communicate with clarity and conviction wins the time back, persuades stakeholders and investors and colleagues to move, and turns intent into action.
Most people are still communicating like it is 1997. Technology and AI have moved fast, and that has added a new layer of complexity, not removed it. Every audience now has to wonder whether what they are hearing was thought through by a human or generated by a machine. Senior leaders have to be ten steps ahead. They need consistent, reliable communication practices that hold up across the calendar, not just on the days when the CEO is on stage.
Top leaders know that consistency of voice across every level of the organization, and a high level of communication skill in the moments when those skills are needed most, can make all the difference.
What a leadership team engagement looks like
We run training programs at every scale. One-on-one. Small group. Larger group. The right shape comes down to what you want to accomplish and how important it is for the skill to show up consistently across your team.
It is intuitive that one-on-one training delivers the most coach-to-leader focus, the most reps, and the most personalized feedback. That is why the sweet spot for leadership team training is either a single leader or a group of fewer than six or eight. Can we accommodate larger groups? Yes, and we will, but the right format is something to talk about early in the conversation. Part of our job is to be a guide, customizing training around your team and the change you want to create.
There is a pre-training process, but it is intentionally light. Instead of long forms, we run a short Zoom call with your team and ask one simple question: what would make this training an absolute success? Defining the result up front gets everyone talking, builds buy-in, and turns your team into co-creators of the day. When the actual training arrives, no one is wasting time figuring out what to focus on. Everyone hits the ground running.
After the training, every leader in the leadership team has access to our 365-Day Solution: a full year of ongoing support, included as standard. When you support people in getting better over time, everybody wins.
A note on the politics of training peers together. This is a conversation we have in advance every time. Some CEOs are comfortable making mistakes in front of subordinates. Some mid-level leaders worry about looking imperfect in front of their peers and want to opt out. When we surface this concern up front, the tension usually dissolves quickly, because we explain that the training day is the time NOT to be perfect. It is the time to make mistakes, try new things, and see what happens.
The reason this works is that we do more practice exercises in a single training than most companies do across a whole engagement. People watch themselves get better in real time. The change is not the trainer telling them they improved. The change is them realizing the work is paying off.
What's included
Every leadership communication training engagement includes:
- A pre-engagement strategy call with the program owner (typically VP People, CHRO, or Head of L&D) to define what good looks like for this team
- Custom agenda design built around the leadership team's real upcoming moments
- On-camera reps for every leader, with structured playback
- A written summary for each leader with their two or three priority development areas
- A leadership-team-level summary highlighting cross-cutting strengths and gaps
- One full year of post-training support for every leader in the leadership team at no additional cost
The year of support includes quarterly group assessments, individual short-notice reach-outs, multimedia learning library access refreshed every ten days, and an option to retake the core training online.
Who this is for
- VP People, CHRO, and Head of L&D leaders building leadership-development tracks
- Mid-market growth-stage companies preparing the senior team for the next funding or M&A cycle
- Fortune 500 corporate communications and public affairs functions standardizing communication skill across spokesperson-eligible leaders
- Trade and professional associations investing in incoming presidents, executive directors, and committee chairs
- Founder-led companies where the leadership team needs to sound less founder-dependent over time
For entry-level programs, sales-skills training, or general communication-skills workshops, we offer different formats and partner referrals. Inquire here and we will help you find the right one.
A CEO Who Showed Real Leadership Communication
A few years ago we worked with a major and prominent New York City nonprofit. The CEO put herself in the hot seat in front of her colleagues during the training. The leadership team was about six people total. Because nonprofits' finances are public, our training combined media training and presentation training, with practice exercises on the kinds of questions she might face from press or at conferences.
I highlighted the fact that her salary was six hundred thousand dollars (which, again, is publicly disclosed) and asked why somebody leading a nonprofit should make that much money. Was it an uncomfortable question? Yes. Could she be asked it on camera or at an event? Absolutely. She knew it was one she had to work on.
The answers we crafted together were direct: she was uniquely qualified to manage the organization's one-hundred-eighty-five-million-dollar budget, her compensation was in line with CEOs at organizations of similar scale, and she was directly responsible for adding roughly eighty-five million dollars in growth from the budget she inherited.
Here is what I did not expect. Instead of being embarrassed to work on this in front of her team, the opposite happened. The team started generating ideas for how she should land the messaging. Everyone got involved. Everyone helped each other.
The single thing I hear most often after a leadership team engagement, and I heard it from this group too, is that it doubled as an unbelievable team-building experience. They enjoyed collaborating. They enjoyed watching their peers, and themselves, get better in real time. The room felt like a safe space to try something new without worrying about looking bad.
The best feedback I get on a leadership team engagement comes one or two years later, when the team tells me they have kept themselves accountable and continued to raise the bar on each other. That is the real return on this kind of training.