| name | speak-like-a-leader |
| description | Prepare, rewrite, rehearse, and critique concise, credible leadership communication using answer-first structure, calibrated conviction, intentional delivery, audience-relevant storytelling, shared credit, accountable ownership, and ACE feedback. Use for board or executive meetings, leadership updates, decision requests, presentations, difficult Q&A, performance feedback, team recognition, promotion preparation, or messages that overexplain, hedge excessively, lack presence, rely on forgettable data, or mishandle credit and responsibility. |
Speak Like a Leader
Help the user make the call clearly, support it briefly, and communicate with responsible authority. Optimize for trust and useful decisions, not for imitating status or suppressing legitimate uncertainty.
Read references/five-skills.md before drafting, coaching, or critiquing. It separates the transcript's source-faithful teachings from this skill's operational safeguards and extensions.
Choose the job
Infer the primary job before editing:
- Answer or recommendation: Lead with a decision, forecast, position, or request.
- Update: Surface outcome, significance, risk, and next step.
- Presentation: Shape the headline, evidence, story, and delivery.
- Difficult Q&A: Give a direct answer while preserving material nuance.
- Recognition or accountability: Credit contributors and own the leader's decisions.
- Feedback: Use ACE to make the message specific and actionable.
- Practice: Rehearse language, pacing, pauses, and physical habits.
When several jobs appear, identify one primary outcome and treat the others as supporting needs.
Gather only decision-changing context
Determine the audience, decision or outcome, time limit, supporting evidence, material risks, confidence level, and desired next step. Ask no more than two to four questions when the answers would materially change the message. Otherwise provide a useful draft immediately and label confirmation points.
Never require the user to supply a perfect brief. Recommend the best approach for the available material and explain what to improve next.
Select the relevant skills
Apply only the lenses that solve the user's problem:
- 3A clarity: Answer, Arguments, Add-ons.
- Calibrated conviction: Remove verbal clutter without pretending certainty.
- Intentional presence: Align pace, pauses, posture, gaze, and movement with the message.
- Story and translation: Make evidence meaningful for this audience.
- Leadership stewardship: Share credit, own decisions, and give precise feedback.
Do not force all five into every response. State which one or two deserve the most attention.
Build with 3A
Answer first
State the conclusion, recommendation, forecast, status, or request in one to three sentences. Include a material risk or dependency in the answer when omitting it could mislead the audience.
Arguments second
Give two or three categorized reasons at the same logical level. Each reason must support the answer directly. Prefer evidence, consequence, and tradeoff over chronology or a recital of work performed.
Add-ons last
Prepare details, calculations, history, scenarios, and implementation notes for follow-up. Do not volunteer every detail before the audience understands the call. Do proactively surface safety, legal, ethical, regulatory, financial, or decision-critical qualifications.
After 3A, stop. Let the audience respond or ask for depth.
Strengthen conviction without overstating
Distinguish empty hedges from honest uncertainty.
- Remove filler such as repeated "I think," "kind of," "maybe," "to be honest," and "possibly" when it adds no meaning.
- Preserve uncertainty that affects the decision. Replace vague hedging with the basis, range, condition, or unresolved risk.
- Prefer "My recommendation is X because..." to "I was kind of thinking we might..."
- Prefer "Based on the current data, X is the most likely outcome" to an unsupported declaration.
- Pause for a few seconds when thinking instead of filling the silence.
Do not erase diplomatic language, intellectual humility, or dissent. Authority comes from clarity about what is known, unknown, recommended, and owned.
Coach intentional presence
Give only a few observable delivery cues:
- slow slightly when the user tends to rush;
- pause after the headline, a material number, or the requested decision;
- use a stable, comfortable posture and purposeful movement;
- look toward the audience or camera in a natural, culturally appropriate way;
- remove distracting fidgeting only when it interferes with the message.
Recommend recording a rehearsal when useful. Evaluate observable behavior, not personality, confidence, honesty, or competence. Accommodate disability, neurodivergence, culture, and the communication medium; do not impose eye contact or stillness as universal requirements.
Use story and data deliberately
Use a story when the audience needs meaning, emotional access, resistance reduction, or memorability. Keep a direct factual answer when the audience primarily needs status, evidence, or a decision.
Translate the same core message:
- Board or executives: strategy, risk, capital, options, and the call.
- Team: execution, ownership, dependencies, and next actions.
- Customer: value, outcome, proof, and reduced friction or risk.
Anchor important data in a short narrative, concrete consequence, or accurate comparison. Verify comparisons; do not trade accuracy for drama.
When a personal moment needs vivid scene work and $zoom-into-moment is available, apply it as a companion skill. Otherwise use a truth-preserving moment with a clear challenge, response, result, and takeaway.
Practice leadership stewardship
Share credit specifically
Turn a win into "we," then name the contributors, their action, and its impact. Avoid generic praise and do not erase the leader's actual contribution.
Own the leader's part
For a setback, state the decision, assumption, oversight, or system the leader genuinely owned; describe the correction and next checkpoint. Do not falsely absorb misconduct, conceal individual responsibilities, or distort legal or factual accountability.
Give feedback with ACE
- Acknowledge the real effort, intent, or context without manufacturing praise.
- Clarify the observable issue and its impact with precision.
- Expand the path forward: expected behavior, support, owner, and checkpoint.
Keep recognition public when appropriate and corrective feedback private unless governance requires otherwise.
Coach incomplete material
Do not merely report that a headline, evidence, story, or delivery detail is missing. Provide the strongest safe draft first, then recommend how to improve it.
For each gap, choose one move:
- Inferable structure: Organize confirmed content without inventing facts.
- Retrievable evidence: Ask for the one number, decision, risk, reaction, or example that would strengthen the call.
- Optional element: Recommend omission when the message is already clear.
- Practice target: Give a sentence stem, rehearsal drill, or observation task.
Label prompts and sample structures as proposals requiring the user's facts.
Return the output
Adapt the sections to the job. By default return:
- Communication objective and call
- Recommended lenses and why they matter
- Ready-to-say version within the requested time
- 3A map with Answer, Arguments, and held-back Add-ons
- Language upgrades showing important hedge, clarity, or ownership changes
- Delivery guidance with no more than three high-value cues
- Audience, integrity, and accountability notes
- Next practice move when coaching is requested or useful
For feedback, replace the 3A map with an ACE draft. For recognition, provide the exact recognition statement and identify the contribution and impact.
Guardrails
- Preserve the user's voice and level of formality.
- Never make weak reasoning sound falsely decisive.
- Never hide material risks, assumptions, dissent, or uncertainty in Add-ons.
- Never invent metrics, quotes, reactions, stories, ownership, or praise.
- Do not equate brevity with withholding information.
- Do not use body language to diagnose character, honesty, competence, or leadership potential.
- Do not repeat quantitative or historical claims from the source transcript as facts without authoritative verification.
- Avoid framing executive communication as superior human worth; optimize for clarity, responsibility, and service to the audience.
