Nicholas Janni
Organisations can train a leader to think more strategically and still end up with someone whose team does not truly follow them. The problem is not capability – it is the narrowing of perception that comes from prioritising rational analysis and output over awareness, presence and inner coherence. A leader operating from this narrow bandwidth can articulate a strategy and still fail to create the conditions in which people do their best work.
Where most executive development builds cognitive capability, Nicholas Janni addresses the dimension it typically leaves out – presence, emotional coherence and inner capacity – as Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School and author of Leader as Healer (Business Book of the Year 2023).
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Nicholas Janni
- His Leader as Healer framework provides a named, structured diagnosis – the dominant “leader-as-executor” model produces measurable fragmentation in organisations – and a practical developmental map for what replaces it, validated by a major book award and embedded in IMD executive programmes.
- His background as a RADA-trained theatre director is the methodological foundation of his work, not a biographical detail – it is why his approach to embodied leadership presence and performance under pressure has a rigour that purely cognitive or academic development lacks.
- He bridges executive education at one of the world’s leading business schools (IMD) and direct coaching with senior leadership teams, reaching the level of intellectual rigour and applied practice that board-level audiences require.
- He addresses the specific failure mode that formal leadership development typically cannot: the gap between a leader’s strategic intelligence and their actual capacity to create trust, genuine engagement and high performance in a room.
Biography highlights
- Author of Leader as Healer (LID Publishing, 2022), winner of Business Book of the Year and Leadership Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2023, selected from over 300 nominated titles
- Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School, Lausanne; previously Associate Fellow at Oxford Said Business School (2010-15); continues to teach regularly at Oxford Said
- Former theatre director who taught acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), London
- Co-founded Olivier Mythodrama (2001), an arts-based leadership development consultancy; founded CORE PRESENCE (2013); co-founded Matrix Development (2023)
- Previous Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management
- Clients have included Rolls-Royce, Swiss Re, Intel, Microsoft, FedEx and senior UK government figures including Permanent Secretaries
Biography
Leadership competence and leadership presence are not the same thing. Organisations invest heavily in the former – analytical capability, strategic clarity, execution discipline – and then discover that the latter is what determines whether a team actually performs. This gap is the problem Nicholas Janni has spent his career addressing.
His book Leader as Healer (LID Publishing) was named Business Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2023. It makes a specific argument: the dominant “leader-as-executor” model, built around rational analysis and transactional relationships, produces fragmentation rather than coherence. The antidote is not softer management but a more complete form of leadership – one that integrates “being” with “doing”, emotional intelligence with analytical rigour, presence with performance.
As Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School, Janni works with senior executives inside some of the world’s most demanding executive education programmes. His methodology draws on 30 years of research into peak performance and human potential. It began in his first career as a theatre director: he taught acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and directed his own company, developing a rigorous, practical understanding of presence and performance that he has since applied directly to executive leadership.
The practical result is a distinctive approach to developing leaders – one that expands perceptual bandwidth, emotional coherence and depth of presence alongside strategic capability. He co-founded Olivier Mythodrama, a pioneering arts-based leadership consultancy, before building CORE PRESENCE and, most recently, co-founding Matrix Development, a practice dedicated to transformational executive coaching and coach training.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership presence and embodied performance
- The Leader as Healer framework
- Transformational leadership and inner development
- Emotional intelligence and regulation in leadership
- Peak performance and the integration of being and doing
- Mindfulness and presence practices for executive audiences
- Building high-performance team cultures
- Creativity and the conditions for innovation
Ideal for
- C-suite executives and senior leadership teams seeking to develop the inner dimensions of leadership performance
- CHROs and executive development leads designing high-level leadership programmes
- Business school executive education programmes and corporate leadership academies
- Organisations navigating sustained complexity where the quality of leadership presence is a performance-critical factor
Audience outcomes
- A clear understanding of the “leader-as-executor” versus “leader-as-healer” distinction, and what it means practically for their own leadership approach
- Practical techniques for developing presence, deep listening and emotional coherence in high-stakes leadership contexts
- A framework for distinguishing between “doing” and “being” as leadership modes, and how integrating both drives sustained performance
- Greater self-awareness of how personal perceptual and emotional patterns affect team culture, trust and decision quality
- Specific practices drawn from Janni’s work that can be applied independently after the session
Talks
An exploration of multi-level presence and the integration of being and doing, focused on embodiment, expanded perception and deeper connection to self, others and purpose.
Key takeaways:
- How to understand and develop multi-level presence as a leadership discipline
- Expanding perceptual bandwidth and depth of listening capacity
- Connecting presence to individual purpose and organisational impact
A reframing of emotional intelligence that examines the full emotional composition of the leader and the role of regulation and relational safety in enabling authentic performance.
Key takeaways:
- How to reconceive the function of both positive and negative emotion in leadership
- The relationship between emotional regulation and suppressed capacity
- Building the relational safety that enables honest communication and high performance
A framework for developing team presence, connection and alignment to support authentic communication, trust and collective innovation.
Key takeaways:
- Creating the conditions for genuine connection, energy and shared values in a team
- Establishing psychological safety that enables authentic communication
- Developing team capacity for sustained innovation and collaborative performance
A practical examination of the creativity cycle and the organisational conditions required to support innovation at individual and group level.
Key takeaways:
- Understanding the creativity cycle and how new ideas emerge
- Building the receptivity and tolerance for uncertainty that innovation requires
- Knowing when to act and when to allow ideas to develop through deeper processing
An exploration of trauma at individual and societal levels and the practices that support restoration and integration.
Key takeaways:
- Understanding the nature and societal effects of unintegrated trauma
- Restoring individual and collective nervous systems
- Developing group capacity to engage with difficult experiences through spiritual practice