You've been asked to retain and progress your senior women.
Root to Grow helps you unlock - and evidence - the leadership communication capability of senior women in high-consequence roles. Start with a low-risk pilot. Build toward lasting change. A single six-week cohort gives you insight on our approach, feedback from your people, and measurable movement you can take to your board.
Discuss your pilot cohort
The goals are set. The lever is harder to find.
If you lead people, talent or culture, you're accountable for a version of the same board-level goals — and under real pressure to move them:
You have the budgets, mentoring, sponsorship and networks. And still a pattern remains: capable women whose judgement is strong, but whose contribution doesn't always land with the visibility and authority the organisation needs. That gap is where progression stalls, where retention risk builds — and where development has to become more measurable than a good day out.
You've seen this in the feedback.
It rarely arrives as "I can't communicate." It's quieter — in exit interviews, skip-levels, and the talented women who stall just before the step up:
These aren't confidence problems or capability problems. They're signal problems — and they cost you the same talent you're being asked to retain and progress. And the wider data points the same way.
This pattern isn't just yours.
You'll know that research on senior women, retention and progression points the same way year after year - and crucially, it points to career support and development as the lever that moves the numbers.
This is the landscape, not a claim about our own results. What Root to Grow and the Greenhouse pathway is able to influence, we measure directly - and report honestly.
You're not short of talent. You're losing its signal.
The pattern is subtle: a recommendation softened at the critical moment. A concern wrapped in excessive explanation. A difficult conversation delayed. Strong thinking becoming harder to express or hold under scrutiny, hierarchy, politics or pressure.
This isn't simply an individual communication problem. It's often a conditions problem. Leaders communicate inside environments shaped by power, expectation, psychological safety and consequence. Under some conditions, judgement becomes clearer and braver; under others, capable leaders self-edit, over-explain or withdraw signal precisely where it's most needed.
Changing communication under consequence isn't a one-off lesson. It takes structured practice - and attention to the conditions in which signal strengthens or degrades. That's what Root to Grow is built to address, designed by people who've worked inside boardrooms, negotiations and politically complex environments, where communication isn't a soft skill but the operating condition.
The most impactful development doesn't happen in a one-off workshop. It happens over time.
Sustained change is built through practice, repetition and support - long after the teaching is done. So we've designed an honest pathway: a low-risk place to start, and an optional continuation for the change to take hold and last.
We'll be straight with you: no six-week programme permanently rewires how a leader shows up under pressure - and we won't pretend otherwise. Root to Grow lays the foundations and proves the approach on a small footing. The deeper transformation comes through sustained support over time. Start with the pilot. Build the pathway only if it earns its place.
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A six-week foundation cohort.
Delivered in small cohorts of senior women - 10 to 12 per cohort, by design, so the room stays intimate and the work goes deep. Larger groups run as multiple cohorts. It is structured behavioural work - not confidence training, not presence theatre - on how leaders communicate when the conversation carries consequence. Over six weeks, participants build capability in clarity under pressure, stronger recommendations, reducing self-editing, handling challenge, leading difficult conversations, holding authority authentically, and translating judgement into communication that lands.
Is the Root to Grow programme enough on its own? For some, yes. Leaders in healthy teams and supportive conditions often take the foundations away and practise them in real time - the six weeks is genuinely enough to shift how they show up and give them tools for progression. Some participants prefer to progress with some 1 to 1 coaching, to focus on key areas for growth. The Greenhouse earns its place for leaders who need ongoing peer support, a space away from a high-pressure environment, and a room to keep practising the core Voice Intelligence skills once the programme ends. The Root to Grow foundation tells you which of your leaders is which, and allows informed decisions on the next pathway for each.
The Greenhouse - conditions for lasting growth.
Most leadership programmes end just as the real work begins. The programme closes, and leaders return to the same conditions that shaped the original problem. When Root to Grow proves its value, the pathway can continue - an ongoing practice environment to sustain, deepen and operationalise what was built. This is where development becomes practice.
Most development can't show change. This is built to.
The hardest part of commissioning leadership development is rarely the delivery - it's what you report afterwards. Most programmes leave you with satisfaction scores and good intentions, and little you can place in front of the people who approved the spend. Root to Grow is built around measurement from the start, and the Greenhouse pathway lets it compound. For a commissioning sponsor, the measurement isn't an afterthought - it's what turns activity into evidence.
A note on honesty: Voice Intelligence (VQ) is the leadership capability the programme develops and measures. Its wider organisational effects - on retention, progression and related outcomes - are questions we're actively investigating with our pilot partners, not outcomes we promise. We'd rather give you a real instrument to measure change than a claim we can't yet stand behind.
Real-world experience, made into method.
Root to Grow and The Greenhouse are designed and led by Rachel Flower, founder of PowerVox. Rachel has practised as a commercial solicitor since 2001, and PowerVox - with its predecessor company, Serenwood - has been trading for sixteen years, working inside boardrooms, transformation programmes, negotiations and politically complex environments where the wrong word costs a deal, a mandate, a contract. Read more about our team.
That experience is built into a structured pathway, grounded in the PowerVox Voice Ladder™ and Voice Intelligence - the capability of communicating with clarity, authority and resolve when it matters most. Read about our bespoke consultancy.
Leadership capability is not built through intervention alone. It emerges through behavioural ecology - the conditions, practices, relationships and measurement that let change take hold over time.
For organisations where communication shapes outcomes.
Best suited to high-consequence environments where the quality of leadership communication materially affects results - and where retention and progression of senior women are live priorities.
- Legal
- NHS and healthcare leadership
- Professional and financial services
- Technology
- Complex public sector
- Founder and start-up
- Directors and senior managers
- Partners
- Heads of function
- Emerging executives
- Women in roles where communication quality affects outcomes
Start small. Measure properly. Scale only if it earns it.
Root to Grow is available as a private organisational cohort. We're working with a small number of early partner organisations who want to strengthen leadership communication, generate real developmental evidence, and help shape a different model of how capability is built. Start with a cohort, measure movement, and see what holds in your environment. The pathway into The Greenhouse opens when the foundation has proved its worth.
- 10–12 participants per cohort (larger groups run as multiple cohorts)
- Six-week facilitated live delivery - the foundational layer
- The Black Egg™ voice analysis and Power Room™ simulations
- Baseline and post-programme measurement via the VQ Assessment
- Anonymised organisational insight report and sponsor debrief
- An optional pathway into The Greenhouse for sustained growth and tracking
Begin with six weeks. Build something that lasts. The talent is already yours - Root to Grow helps it land, and The Greenhouse helps it stay.
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