Savvas Trichas
Senior leaders are read before they are heard. A board pitch, a town hall, a negotiation across the table, each turns on micro-signals that the speaker rarely controls and the audience rarely articulates. Most leadership development sidesteps this surface, training argument and strategy while leaving the channel that actually carries them unexamined.
Savvas Trichas is a behavioural scientist and keynote speaker who shows leaders how nonverbal communication, persuasion, and negotiation determine whether their message is trusted.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Savvas Trichas
- A working academic record in the field he speaks on: peer-reviewed publication in The Leadership Quarterly on how facial expression shapes leadership perception, co-authored with Birgit Schyns.
- Certified coder in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), one of a small group qualified to read facial muscle activity to research standard, applied to executive communication.
- Guest lecturer for the FBI National Academy Associates Cyprus chapter on deception detection, giving leaders a credible voice on lie detection that does not rely on stage tricks.
- A practitioner’s grasp of negotiation drawn from Harvard and MIT-tradition material, paired with a researcher’s discipline on what the body signals during a deal.
- Material is built for boards and executive teams that already know what to say and want to know why they are not being heard.
Biography highlights
- PhD in Human Resource Management and Marketing.
- Co-author, “The face of leadership: perceiving leaders from facial expression,” The Leadership Quarterly, 2012.
- Three-time TEDx speaker (Las Vegas, Lausanne, Athens).
- Certified coder, Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
- Manuscript reviewer, The Leadership Quarterly.
- Guest lecturer, FBI National Academy Associates Cyprus Police, on management, communication, and deception detection.
Biography
Most leadership training teaches what to say. Trichas works on the harder question of why audiences accept it. His peer-reviewed research with Birgit Schyns in The Leadership Quarterly examined how a leader’s facial expression shapes followers’ trust and judgements of effectiveness, a finding that sits underneath every senior communication moment, from a board update to a negotiation.
That research base separates him from most communication speakers. He is a certified coder in the Facial Action Coding System, the anatomical method developed for the precise analysis of facial muscle movement, and he reviews manuscripts for The Leadership Quarterly. The science is not a credential dropped into a keynote; it is the source of the material.
The applied work runs across persuasion, storytelling, negotiation, and deception detection. Trichas lectures for the FBI National Academy Associates Cyprus chapter on communication and deception, and has built a parallel track on negotiation drawn from the Harvard and MIT canon. Three TEDx appearances and a bestseller, “The Power of Communication,” sit alongside corporate work for organisations including PwC, Coca-Cola, and MDRT.
The argument he offers a board is unfashionable and useful. Strategy and message are necessary but not sufficient. Whether a leader is trusted, whether a negotiation closes, whether a transformation lands, often turns on signals that operate below the words, and those signals are now well enough understood to teach.
Key speaking topics
- Nonverbal communication and leadership perception
- Negotiation and persuasion
- Executive presence and credibility
- Storytelling for senior leaders
- Deception detection in business contexts
- Servant leadership and empathy
- Public speaking for executives
- Leading transformation through communication
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams preparing for high-stakes external communication: investor updates, M&A, regulatory testimony.
- CHROs and leadership development heads designing programmes for newly senior leaders on presence and credibility.
- CCOs, heads of negotiation, and commercial leaders responsible for high-value deals.
- Sales leadership conferences where persuasion and trust signals carry commercial outcomes.
Audience outcomes
- A research-grounded view of how leaders are read, not just heard, in board and town hall settings.
- Specific cues from the Facial Action Coding System tradition that leaders can use to read counterparts in negotiation and meetings.
- A working framework for credibility that separates persuasion, narrative, and nonverbal channels rather than collapsing them into “communication skills.”
- A more disciplined view of deception detection, what the evidence supports and what it does not, useful for interviewing, due diligence, and negotiation.
- Confidence that the speaker’s claims rest on peer-reviewed research and applied work with law enforcement, not stage technique.
Talks
A keynote on how nonverbal communication shapes whether leaders are trusted and followed, drawn from the speaker’s peer-reviewed research on facial expression and leadership perception.
Key takeaways:
- The specific facial and postural signals that drive perceptions of leader credibility.
- Why senior leaders are read before they are heard, and what to do about it.
- How to align verbal message with the channel that actually carries it.
A keynote on negotiation as value creation rather than positional bargaining, paired with applied work on reading counterparts in real time.
Key takeaways:
- Frameworks from the Harvard and MIT negotiation tradition adapted for executive deal-making.
- What the face and body reveal during negotiation that words conceal.
- How to prepare and structure high-stakes negotiations to expand, not split, value.
A keynote on deception detection for senior leaders, separating evidence from folklore.
Key takeaways:
- What the research actually supports about detecting deception in interviews and meetings.
- Common myths leaders rely on that produce false confidence.
- Practical signals worth attending to in hiring, due diligence, and negotiation contexts.