Are you a CEO who feels like you’ve lost the room?

You have the operational track record, the strategy is sound, and the numbers add up – yet something is off.

  • Your Minister or Board is impatient.

  • Your senior leaders communicate as individuals rather than a unified front.

  • Your workforce is executing a completely different plan from the one you devised.

  • Your entity is getting bad press.

  • Worse still, your staff simply no longer trust your direction.

Brilliant operational capability cannot repair a broken relational signal.

When trust erodes, delegating or outsourcing your strategic communication superpower to comms teams or agencies only deepens cynicism.

At Claire Robinson + Associates, we treat communication as a core leadership skill and an exact, research-backed science – not a defensive PR exercise or spin. We help leaders reclaim the room, restore institutional trust, and bridge the strategy-execution gap across three pou:

  • Proxemic Presence + Spatial Authority: Mastering a CEO’s relational communication: the visual, spatial, and relational dynamics of leadership presence across your complete influence ecosystem – from 1-on-1s and boardrooms to digital media and public stages.

  • Senior Leadership Alignment: Eliminating fragmented messaging across the SLT. We align your senior leaders around a single, persuasive narrative that restores organisational relations and momentum.

  • Cross-Cultural Narrative + Execution: Bridging the distance between strategy and the diverse workforces of Aotearoa New Zealand. By gaining proficiency in relational trust and bicultural fluency, cultural complexity becomes a driver of workforce alignment and productivity.

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Translating the science of communication design and decades of executive practice into actionable, high-impact leadership influence for CEOs and senior leadership teams.

Why work with us?

When you partner with Claire Robinson + Associates, you work directly with Dr Claire Robinson – supported by a network of specialist associates in narrative architecture/storylining and te Tiriti/Treaty governance.

Dr Claire Robinson is a leadership facilitator, communication strategist and political communications expert. She brings a rare 360° perspective to leadership influence as:

  • A Leader: 20 years in senior leadership roles with direct responsibility for managing major, high-profile communication portfolios.

  • A Commentator: Decades standing in front of broadcast cameras and writing national column centimetres on the uses and abuses of political power.

  • A Scholar: 30 years studying how leaders win and lose the room, distilled into PXL – a proprietary proxemic leadership methodology grounded in a PhD and a professorship in communication design.

  • A Cross-Cultural Practitioner: Over a decade leading diverse and bicultural teams, building relational leadership frameworks suited to Aotearoa New Zealand's operating environment.

Services

  • Kaupapa: Personalised, confidential coaching for the CEO to rebuild personal authority and trust, master proxemic presence, and manage high-stress communication environments.

    Format: Delivered as a half-day Leadership Intensive.

    May include a rapid, objective assessment of a CEO’s influence ecosystem to pinpoint where trust, clarity, or message control is breaking down.

    Can be adapted for individual SLT members.

    Deliverable: A CEO who commands the room, controls the message, and has restored institutional authority and trust.

  • Kaupapa: Rebuild high-trust, cohesive messaging across the senior leadership team to project a unified, strategically aligned voice that cascades down to all business units and out to external stakeholders.

    Format:

    (i) Two focused 2- to 3-hour executive workshops for the CEO and direct reports (4–8 participants) and/or

    (ii) Immersive: A half-day session incorporating an Alignment Stress Test diagnostic simulation followed by strategic messaging synthesis.

    Focus Areas:

    • The Cost of Fragmentation: Quantifying how individual executive comms styles dilute corporate strategy and erode workforce trust.

    • Shared Understanding: Establishing collective framing principles and messaging boundaries across business units.

    • Cascading Intent: Mastering techniques to translate top-down strategy throughout the organisation.

    Deliverable: A shared communication understanding that eliminates message dilution across the entity.

  • Kaupapa: Bridge the strategy-execution gap by equipping CEOs and SLTs with the cultural and relational fluency required to lead diverse workforces and engage key stakeholders with authentic understanding.

    Format:  Delivered as a one-day intensive workshop.

    Focus Areas:

    • Cultural Framing: Navigating tikanga, stakeholder consultations, and public forums with genuine respect and interest – moving beyond pronunciation into deep relational fluency.

    • Relational Proxemics: Understanding how power, hierarchy, and spatial distance are perceived across cultures to establish psychological safety

    • Strategy-Execution Translation: Redesigning internal comms architecture so corporate strategy integrates the voice of diverse workforce cohorts, driving collective ownership over top-down KPIs.

    • Dual-Value Governance: Unifying commercial directives, cross cultural and Treaty obligations into a seamless narrative and strategy.

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