The meeting
You can see the answer before the room can. You wait, then step in. The meeting moves. The team learns that the difficult calls still belong to you.
Conference of the Birds · October 2026
Lead without carrying it all.
The job changed when you reached director level. The strategy that built your career—seeing the answer, taking charge, carrying the load—can now keep other people from taking responsibility.
A six-month peer group for directors and senior leaders learning to remain accountable without holding everything themselves.
Explore whether this is your next move
A private conversation with Francisco about what is happening and whether this is the right room. If it is not, we will say so.
Executive peer groupFor directors and aboveGeneva • Bern • Zürich
The leadership trap
Your strength became the bottleneck.
This rarely looks like poor performance. You keep delivering. People trust you with difficult work. Your team knows you will not let it fail.
But more of your time goes into rescuing work, checking decisions and holding things together. Less remains for setting direction, working across the organisation and growing other people’s judgement.
The more responsibility you take on, the more the organisation depends on you. Your job now requires the opposite.
The handover
Someone brings you work that is seventy per cent there. Revising it yourself feels faster than helping them find the missing thirty. So the work returns to your desk.
The pressure
The answer is unclear and the consequences are real. You absorb the uncertainty, keep everything moving, and quietly become the place where responsibility accumulates.
These are not character flaws. They are competent responses that kept working long after the role around them changed.
Where the work begins
The difficult part is staying.
Not staying silent. Not lowering the standard. Staying present while another person thinks, struggles and chooses a route you would not have chosen.
You still answer for the outcome. What changes is that responsibility no longer gives you an automatic reason to control the way there.
The moment you most want to step in is often the moment the pattern becomes visible.
The director-level move
Carry the whole. Not all the work.
You do not become less accountable. You stop proving accountability by being personally involved in every consequential piece of work.
At this level, responsibility changes shape. It means setting a direction other people can use, being clear about what cannot move, and remaining available when the work gets difficult.
It does not require you to be the most useful person in every room. The question is no longer whether you could do the work better. It is whether the organisation becomes more capable when the work no longer depends on you.
Remain responsible for the whole without making the whole depend on you.
Why a group
Patterns happen between people.
A coach can give you undivided attention. A room of peers adds something a private conversation cannot reproduce.
Other directors recognise the pressure from inside the role. There is no boss or reporting line in the room. You cannot rely on rank, take over the work or retreat into being the expert.
The habit becomes visible in how you listen, disagree, advise, hold back—or make room for someone else. The group is not incidental to the work. It is where the work can be seen.
Same room
The same five to eight leaders build enough trust to stop performing certainty.
Real material
Current choices, difficult conversations and moments of pressure enter the room.
No spectators
You learn from what happens between people, not only from talking about leadership.
The experience
Six months. One room.
Meetings combine ideas, personal reflection, guided exercises and honest discussion. There are no recordings. The room depends on everyone being there.
Begin in private
A private conversation with Francisco establishes what is live for you and whether this is the right room.
Meet the same people
Five to eight senior leaders meet online for 90 minutes. Real choices, tensions and conversations enter the room.
Make it your own
Two private 30-minute conversations help you connect what the group reveals to your own work and relationships.
Return differently
The work continues in the situations that first brought you there. The familiar response becomes easier to see before it takes over.
From the room
“I learned a lot about myself and have moved on from where I was in the spring of 2025.”
“The poems, inputs, and notes were not just techniques — they were little mirrors.”
Who belongs in the room
Readiness matters more than rank.
The group is for directors and more senior leaders. The title is necessary; it is not sufficient. There must be a live tension in how you lead that you are willing to examine.
This may be the right room if
- You are succeeding, but the way you succeed has become costly.
- You can see the pattern and still repeat it under pressure.
- You are willing to be known by peers, not merely impressive to them.
- You want a change that reaches beyond another leadership framework.
It is probably not the right room if
- You primarily want techniques, templates or an action-plan course.
- Your organisation is sending you to correct a performance problem.
- You need immediate stabilisation during an acute personal crisis.
- You are not willing to examine your own part in what is happening.
October 2026 cohort
What you need to know.
The programme brief brings the format, outcomes and terms into one document for an internal decision.
Download the programme brief- Starts
- October 2026
- Length
- Six months
- Group meetings
- Six online meetings, 90 minutes each
- Private conversations
- One before the group, plus two during the programme
- Group size
- Five to eight leaders
- Composition
- Different industries, with one participant per company
- Language
- English
- Investment
- €2,950 for one person
- Refund
- Full refund after the first group meeting, with no questions asked
- Decision date
- 30 September 2026
Who holds the room
Francisco Baptista
Francisco has worked with senior leaders since 2011. His work is built for the moment when expertise has stopped being the answer and the person behind the role needs room to think.
He has worked with 324 clients for more than 2,500 hours, across 14 countries and more than 19 industries. Before this work, he spent 13 years at Nestlé in global roles.
He listens for what is already happening rather than arriving with a model to apply. He offers what he sees, keeps every interpretation open to challenge, and leaves the final authority with the person doing the work.
Questions people ask
Before you decide
Who is this for?
Directors and more senior leaders who are doing well, but whose established way of succeeding is no longer enough for the role. The work requires a willingness to examine your own part in what keeps happening. It is not remedial development.
What if I already have a coach?
The group does not need to replace them. It reveals something different from a private conversation: how your habits appear while you listen, disagree, advise, hold back or make room for someone else. The individual conversations with Francisco connect that experience back to your situation.
Can my organisation pay?
Yes. The invoice can go to you or your organisation and can include a purchase-order number. The programme brief is designed for a manager, HR partner or budget approver who needs the facts in one document.
What remains confidential?
What you say in the group and in private conversations stays private. If your organisation pays, it should see the difference in your decisions, conversations and way of sharing responsibility, not receive a report about you.
What if it is not the right group?
Fit is mutual and discussed before you join. After the first group meeting, you may leave and receive a full refund, with no questions asked.
The next group starts in October 2026
What keeps returning to you?
Bring one real situation to a private conversation with Francisco. We will begin there and decide together whether this is the right room.
Explore whether this is your next move
A private conversation with Francisco about what is happening and whether this is the right room. If it is not, we will say so.