Engineering Executive Presence: A Women’s Leadership Intensive
A two-day, fully experiential leadership intensive engineering executive presence for Mobilink Bank’s women leaders.
The mandate
Mobilink Bank did not commission a public-speaking course. It commissioned a change in how its most capable women are heard. In a fast-moving fintech and microfinance environment, technical mastery is abundant; what determines influence is the capacity to convert it into decisions, buy-in, and momentum. For women leaders, that conversion is complicated by a familiar double-bind: directness reads as abrasive, warmth as unassertive. The instinctive response, hedging, over-qualifying, seeking permission, quietly erodes hard-earned authority. We were asked to dismantle that dynamic at its root: no posture correction, no “speak up and smile,” but a rigorous intervention targeting the structural and rhetorical habits that obscure a leader’s substance.
Our approach
We treat communication as an engineering problem, not a personality trait. Presence is a set of learnable, observable behaviours, linguistic, structural, vocal, and spatial, that can be practised under load and calibrated in real time. The intensive ran on a single commitment: pressure first, meaning second. Every session generated genuine load through simulation, then converted it into transferable insight through structured debrief. Leaders felt the failure of one-way communication before they were given the vocabulary to name it.
Inside the programme
The design moved deliberately from the individual leader to the team she must mobilise. The first arc sharpened the individual voice: a drawing simulation, The Blind Canvas, exposed the gulf between one-way instruction and genuine dialogue; leaders mapped their working styles across a four-point compass, action, relationship, vision, analysis, and learned to argue in a counterpart’s register rather than their own; a module on self-minimising language taught them to catch and cut habitual hedges and rebuild their assertions to be direct without forfeiting warmth. The arc closed on structure and delivery: the Minto Pyramid for executive recommendations, rehearsed under a red-card/green-card drill, alongside work on pacing, strategic silence, and commanding presence both in the room and on camera. The second arc turned outward to collective execution through a sequence of experiential, often blindfolded simulations, each tied to a named behaviour in the Mobilink Bank Manifesto, closing on a reflective capstone in which each leader mapped her own journey and committed to a single behaviour to carry forward, with a named peer to hold her to it.
Outcomes
Every leader left with a personal roadmap of three concrete commitments, a verbal minimiser to retire, a proposal to restructure using the Minto Pyramid, and a feedback habit to adopt, each underwritten by a peer for accountability.
This was my first training session with Mobilink. All the trainers were amazing, but the best of all was Ghazi Taimoor. Our final session at PC Bhurban was also with him, and it was truly insightful and very interactive. Overall, I would say it was a mesmerising experience.
Narjis Bangash, Assistant Manager, Talent & Culture, Mobilink Bank
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