Case Study
John Lewis: Building Presence in High-Stakes Rooms
Between November 2025 and February 2026, we worked with 169 people across six teams from John Lewis Retail, Waitrose and the Partnership’s Democratic Vitality function.
These were capable, experienced professionals whose roles increasingly asked them to present, influence and hold the room in high-stakes settings. The aim was to make their delivery match their expertise, so that in every meeting, forum and stakeholder conversation, their ideas landed with the clarity and confidence they deserved.
31
Average confidence growth across the programme
5
100% of participates rated their coach
169
Participants across 6 teams
100
Net Promoter Score
The Challenge
Confidence in a one-to-one or a familiar team often behaves differently once the room grows and the stakes rise. Many of the participants were assured in day-to-day conversation, yet wanted their presence to hold just as steadily in the settings that mattered most: senior forums, town halls, and the high-stakes meetings where influence is won or lost.
The common threads were familiar ones. Points that lost their shape under pressure. Delivery that leaned towards informing rather than inspiring. The pull of old speaking habits, fillers and rushing, when the attention in the room intensified.
We measured each participant’s starting point through the Impact Framework, capturing confidence, clarity and capability before the work began. Across the teams, the Commercial Optimisation cohort started from the lowest baseline, which makes what happened next all the more worth reading.
The Solution
We brought two of our most-loved half-day workshops together, a pairing that consistently lands with leadership and senior communicators: Owning the Room, and Transformative Public Speaking.
Owning the Room builds visible presence and authority, working through body, voice, eye contact, filler reduction and structured delivery. Transformative Public Speaking equips people to inspire at any level, with storytelling frameworks, narrative structure, energy, and the confidence to hold a Q&A and manage nerves. Together they move people from delivering information to genuinely moving an audience.
Built on the Serlin Method®, the approach was 80% practical. Participants brought 60 to 120 seconds of their own business-relevant material, so every technique was applied to the real presentations they’d soon be giving. We filmed before and after, offering structured feedback through our ACE model, which looks at Authenticity, Connection and Empowerment, so people could see their own growth rather than simply be told about it.
Areas of Focus
Owning the Room
Pausing
Narrative Structure
Q&A Authority
Owning the Room
Pausing
Narrative Structure
Q&A Authority
The Result
The teams left with clearer, more structured presentations, and with something harder to measure but just as real: greater influence in the high-stakes meetings, forums and stakeholder conversations where it counts.
The numbers tell the story plainly. Confidence grew by an average of 31% across the programme. The Commercial Optimisation cohort, who started from the lowest baseline, grew the most of all, by 48%, and the single largest individual goal growth reached 57%. Behind each of those figures sits a person who now walks into the room differently.
Content was rated between 4.6 and 4.8 out of 5, coaches were rated up to a full 5.0, and the Net Promoter Score reached 100. Every participant, in other words, would recommend it to a colleague.
An outstanding experience that will help me be a better communicator everyday at work
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Each programme is bespoke for your team.
Shree Thakker
Head of Sales
