As Asia’s senior leaders face growing pressure to be more visible, persuasive and publicly compelling, actress, filmmaker and founder Kristina Pakhomova argues that executive presence, emotional intelligence, and stagecraft matter more than presentation skills alone, and that the qualities which truly command a room are the ones most executives are rarely taught.
Here’s a number worth sitting with. According to research by Harvard Business Publishing, approximately 75% of employers now provide some form of new manager training. Three quarters. An industry with an estimated annual spend in the hundreds of billions of dollars globally, built on the premise that leadership can be developed, packaged and transferred. And yet the same research consistently finds that new leaders, and experienced ones, still continue to struggle most not with the mechanics of management, but with its human dimensions. The ability to read a room, to regulate themselves under pressure, and to communicate in ways that actually land rather than simply transmit.
Evidently, something is missing. Or more precisely, something is being systematically trained out of people: the body awareness, emotional fluency and physical intelligence leaders often arrive with before corporate culture teaches them to suppress it. The result is an enormous investment producing leaders who can think clearly, report accurately and execute reliably, but who cannot always hold a room, perform authority rather than inhabit it, and communicate information, but not conviction.
No one has seen this more clearly than Kristina Pakhomova. Trained at LASALLE College of the Arts, Pakhomova has spent two decades across theatre, film, television and radio, with performances at the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay in productions such as Venus in Fur and Burying Children, screen roles in Hong Kong 1942 and Code of Law, and her own award-winning short film Away, which she wrote, produced and starred in after deciding she was done waiting for the right opportunities to arrive. Her most recent feature, Regina, premiered at the National Gallery Singapore and explored identity, inner complexity and the cost of suppressing the parts of ourselves that do not fit the expected frame—a theme that now runs through the work she brings into corporate boardrooms.
When COVID brought the creative industry to a halt, Pakhomova began running workshops that would eventually evolve into Authentic Transformation Academy. The executives and senior leaders who turned up were not looking for acting classes so much as something the training happened to offer: greater presence, self-awareness and confidence under pressure. What surprised her was not their appetite for the work, but the speed at which it shifted something in people who had never set foot on a stage.
“What I discovered while working with non-actors is that acting is essentially the study of human behaviour,” she tells Beyond the Boardroom. “Actors spend most of their time portraying other human beings, and in order to do that authentically, we must understand a person psychologically, physically and emotionally. But in order to understand another person, we first need to understand ourselves. Acting training constantly develops that awareness. And in many ways, leadership requires a similar ability.”
Pakhomova is far from alone in making this connection. The National Theatre in London has run Theatreworks, a formal corporate training programme drawing on theatrical methodologies, for years, counting global organisations among its clients. Wharton’s McNulty Leadership Program offers improv-based workshops as part of its core leadership curriculum. A 2024 peer-reviewed metasummary published in Behavioural Sciences, reviewing 31 empirical studies on art-based leadership development, found that these methods significantly enhance emotional intelligence, reflective practice and interpersonal competencies, the precise cluster of capabilities that conventional management training has struggled most to move. The academic case, in short, is building and institutional interest is already there. What’s often been missing is a practitioner who can translate it with rigour and without pretension.
The Performance Trap
The conventional response to the executive presence problem has been to teach people how to perform it more convincingly through more controlled gestures, steadier eye contact, and a voice that projects authority rather than uncertainty. These tools are not without value, but as Pakhomova sees it, they operate at the wrong level. Leaders who have been through these programmes often know it instinctively. There remains a persistent and uncomfortable gap between the person who walked in and the more polished version who walked out, and audiences—whether boards, clients or investment committees—are remarkably adept at detecting it.
“Many traditional programmes focus on teaching people what to say, where to look, or what gestures to use in order to appear confident,” Pakhomova explains. “In many ways they offer a checklist of behaviours that help someone seem more convincing. But that approach often encourages people to perform confidence rather than actually develop it.”
Through years of speaking to and working with fellow actors, executives and industry leaders, Pakhomova finds that something deeper is needed than presentation skills or media training alone. While most people focus on the voice itself, she sees it as the output of everything that comes before it. That belief is reflected in her framework: Energy, Emotion, Body, Breath and Voice, in that order. The methodology is built on the idea that what a person brings into a room is shaped long before they speak. Most clients arrive wanting to sound more confident or authoritative, but Pakhomova believes those qualities are ultimately determined by physical awareness, emotional regulation and the ability to remain fully present under pressure.
Pakhomova is clear that this is not therapy, but technique. The pre-verbal register—the quality of attention a person brings into a room before they have said a word, and the physical intelligence that either grounds a presence or undermines it—is often where trust is won or lost. Much of that happens in the first few seconds of an interaction, and largely beneath conscious awareness. Training that skips this layer is not really presence training at all, it’s merely presentation training, and most rooms can tell the difference.
The Real Work Lies Beneath the Surface
Perhaps the strongest case study for presence-led training is the range of people Pakhomova works with. A head of sales in aviation arrives ahead of a high-stakes panel appearance, convinced the challenge is public composure. He leaves with techniques he later describes as immediately practical, and reports that the panel goes exactly as he needs it to. A technology CEO struggling with the anxiety quietly constricting his leadership leaves with tools to regulate his nervous system, not to silence what he is feeling, but to stop it from taking over the room before he does. A C-suite woman in real estate, convinced her most forceful qualities are the problem, discovers through the work that the issue is not the force itself, but the years spent shrinking it.
That last pattern is one Pakhomova returns to often, particularly with senior women who have spent years managing themselves into smaller, more acceptable versions of who they are.
“Many women spend years trying to become who they think they should be rather than asking who they truly are,” she says. “From a very early age, women are often encouraged to be good, polite, accommodating and emotionally pleasant for others. Over time, many learn to hide the parts of themselves that may appear too strong, too direct or too intense. But those parts do not disappear. They remain there, often showing up as frustration, anger or internal conflict. Confidence does not come from forcing ourselves to be someone else. It grows when we begin to understand and accept the different parts of who we are.”
What these clients are really looking for is rarely better projection, stronger eye contact or more polished delivery. More often, they’re seeking for a way back to themselves. Pakhomova argues that confidence, presence and clarity are not qualities people need to manufacture, but qualities they already possess beneath years of fear, tension and self-consciousness. The work as she sees it, is not about teaching people to imitate confidence. It’s about helping them reconnect with the parts of themselves that corporate life, pressure and expectation have taught them to override.
Culture Starts With the Leader
Perhaps the most uncomfortable part of Pakhomova’s argument is that leadership presence is not just personal, it’s also organisational. The internal state of a leader shapes the emotional climate around them far more than most companies are willing to admit. Culture, as most organisations describe it, tends to live in mission statements, values frameworks and slides presented at town halls. But Pakhomova believes that it’s transmitted far more quietly than that—shaped by the tone a leader brings into a room, the way they respond under pressure, the way they listen, the energy they carry into difficult conversations, and the signals they send when things go wrong.
“A leader who is calm, self-aware and emotionally grounded naturally creates a sense of stability and trust,” she points out. “On the other hand, if a leader is constantly stressed, reactive or disconnected from themselves, that tension often spreads throughout the organisation.”
Employees are acutely sensitive to these cues. They observe not only what leaders say, but how they say it, how they react to setbacks, and how they treat people in moments of pressure. Those signals shape whether people feel safe enough to contribute, take initiative and speak honestly. Pakhomova speaks often about what she calls “emotional hygiene”, the daily discipline of checking in with oneself, processing emotions and releasing tension rather than allowing it to build.
“When emotions are ignored or suppressed they tend to build up like pressure in a boiling pot. Eventually that pressure erupts in the form of emotional reactivity. Leaders may suddenly react sharply or defensively because the internal tension has not been processed.”
“In many ways leadership today requires a strong stage presence, yet most leaders were never trained for that,” Pakhomova concludes. “Some leaders naturally develop strong communication skills and charisma through instinct, which is wonderful. But even natural ability can benefit from deeper exploration and training. And for those who do not naturally feel comfortable in those situations, structured techniques can provide guidance and support. That is where acting based training becomes extremely valuable.”