Mara · Session · Confidential 2026

A workforce intelligence platform for the people who communicate at high stakes.

Mara is not a coaching app with reporting bolted on. It is a system that measures, predicts, and shifts communication performance at the leadership layer of an organisation, with practitioner trust built into every output.

Built by Jade Matthew

Eighteen years coaching senior leaders at the FTSE 250 tier. BBC Audio Drama Award winner. NLP Master Practitioner. The methodology behind Mara is the ICOP Method, in the room with leaders before it became code. Every protocol that deploys to a team carries her signature.

Interactive performance and communication coach · Evidence based · Data driven
16
Sessions across 90 days
ICOP method, sequenced
5
Systems of Presence
State · Signal · Clarity · Attention · Authority
+1.4
Trajectory movement
10 point scale · entry 5.8 → end 7.2
Jade has coached senior leaders at
Netflix Deutsche Bank Channel 4 Vodafone Hilton Sky Audible BBC
The cost of the problem

Communication failure at the leadership layer is measurably expensive.

Before we explain the platform, here is the size of the gap it is built to close. Four numbers your CFO will already know in their bones.

$62.4M
Per company, per year

Average annual cost of poor communication across 400 surveyed corporations with 100,000 or more employees in the US and UK. Lost deals, board misalignment, productivity loss.

Source: Holmes Report communication cost survey

86%
Of executives

Cite ineffective communication as the underlying cause of workplace failures. Not skill gaps. Not strategy. Communication. Surveyed across 1,400 employees, executives, and educators.

Source: Fierce, Inc. workplace failure survey, 2011

47%
Higher shareholder return

Total returns to shareholders, five year window, at companies whose leaders are rated highly effective communicators, versus peers whose leaders are rated least effective.

Source: Towers Watson Communication ROI Study

3.5x
More likely to outperform

Companies highly effective at change management and communication are 3.5 times more likely to significantly outperform their peers on financial measures.

Source: Towers Watson 2013-2014 Change & Communication ROI Study

Mara closes both gaps. It scales coaching access to the whole cohort. It measures the closure.

The framework

The Five Systems of Presence.

Eighteen years of practice synthesised into five channels through which presence opens or closes. Mara coaches all five. Master all five and presence becomes reliable, not a lucky accident of a good day but a trained, accessible, portable state that can be delivered on demand in any room.

Click each system to read what it covers.

01

State

The nervous system foundation. Everything else stands on this.

The physiological condition of the nervous system in the moment of communication. Social engagement, mobilised threat, or shutdown. State determines what every other system has to work with. The gap between the version of yourself in a relaxed conversation and the version at a board table is the gap state work closes.

02

Signal

What the body sends before and after the words.

Postural, vocal, spatial, facial, and temporal signals. The room reads signal in under a second, long before the words land. Voice under pressure narrows, rises, accelerates. Posture braces or collapses. Signal compresses under activation. Trained signal stays wide.

03

Clarity

The precision with which thinking arrives in the room.

Not intelligence. Not knowledge. The specific skill of making the most important thing land with precision. Point before reason. Direct language without hedge. Three components: structural (sequence of thought), linguistic (the individual sentence), cognitive (the thinking behind the communication).

04

Attention

Where awareness sits in a high stakes moment.

Whether the leader is genuinely present with what is happening in the room or running the communication from a parallel internal narrative. Three dimensions: internal (clean self-read), external (genuine presence with others), contextual (reading the room as a system). Genuine attention is rare. Most communication is primarily self-monitoring.

05

Authority

Unobstructed access to what you already know.

Not confidence. Not seniority. Not volume. The condition in which the leader's access to their competence, experience, and clarity is unobstructed by filtering, apologising, or permission-seeking. Three dimensions: substantive (actual expertise), positional (the role), personal (being genuinely yourself rather than performing the role).

Click any system to expand · all five are coached across the 16 session programme

Mara in action

What an actual coaching response looks like.

Most coaching tools deliver instruction only. "Try the forward placement technique." Useful, sometimes. Skill-shaped. Empty of presence. Mara is built to deliver on three registers simultaneously: observation, interpretation, instruction. That triple structure is what makes the work feel like coaching with Jade rather than coaching with a chatbot.

Simulated session · senior leader rehearsing a board presentation
The member I just ran through my opening for tomorrow. I think it went okay but I felt my voice tighten when I got to the bit about the margin miss. Like I was bracing for them to push back before they'd even said anything.
Mara
Observation

Your voice pulled back at the same point your breath shortened. I heard it in the recording at the four minute mark, the moment you said the word "margin". The sentence ended before it landed.

Interpretation

That is a State pattern, not a Voice pattern. The nervous system is bracing for judgement before the sentence finishes, and the voice is compressing in response. It is one of the most common patterns I see in leaders who perform well but do not yet trust that they have earned the seat.

Instruction

What we are going to do now is move the resonance forward on purpose. Not to fix the fear. To give your body a different physical option while the fear is still there. Ng-ee-ah. Three times. Slow. Notice where the sound sits in your face the third time. Then say the margin sentence again with that resonance still present.

Three registers, one response. Specific to this moment. Grounded in the Five Systems. Embodied. Actionable in the next thirty seconds.

The team layer

Listening to each person, at scale.

Mara reads real meetings your team is already having. Group dynamics for you. Personalised debriefs for each member, in private. One transcript becomes a piece of evidence the whole team can grow from.

01
Upload

Paste, file, or live recording. Any meeting

02
Map

Speakers linked to profiles

03
Read

Group dynamics + per-member analysis

04
Debrief

Personalised, private, lands in each member's space

05
Protocol

Six week intervention sequence, Jade signs

The privacy promise

Why senior leaders actually engage.

The fastest way to kill a programme at this tier is to make participants feel watched. Mara separates engagement from content at the database layer, not as a setting. Participants know this. They engage accordingly.

What you see, and what you do not

You see

Programme engagement. Sessions completed. Practice recency. Cohort trajectory on a ten point scale. Meeting analysis at the group level. Aggregate readiness scores against upcoming events. Anonymised cross client benchmarks.

You do not see

Anything said inside a coaching session. Personal reflections. Individual journal content. The specific exercises a participant was given. Any clinical or psychological labelling, ever.

The member experience

Five rooms. One programme.

Each member moves through five distinct surfaces inside the platform, plus the sixteen session core programme. Short, frequent, real material. Senior leaders finish this one.

01

Coaching room

Executive coaching on a real situation. Ten to twelve minutes.

02

Practise room

Rehearse a pitch, presentation, or public moment with calibrated scenarios.

03

Off the record

Private space for difficult conversations and high-stakes decisions.

04

Breathing

Two to twenty minute somatic reset between meetings.

05

Mindset

Ten minute pre performance warm up before a high stakes moment.

Plus The Programme: sixteen sessions across ninety days, the ICOP Method delivered in sequence. Mara opens each session by referencing the previous one. Continuity is built in.

Layer 1

The longitudinal dataset.

Every practice run produces structured measurement. The platform persists every signal, computes a personal performance score, and over time builds the only dataset of its kind in the senior leadership tier.

01

What gets measured, per practice run

Five signal channels, persisted to a dedicated dataset. The participant never sees raw numbers. The platform uses them to coach, score, and benchmark.

Signal channels captured

Per run

Vocal energy variation, speaking pace, posture stability, shoulder symmetry, head lean. Captured on device. Never raw audio or video stored.

Personal performance score

0 to 100

A single weighted number that travels with the member across sessions. Improvement measured against the member's own session one baseline, not an external standard.

Vocal energy variance 30% · pace consistency 20% · posture stability 25% · session completion quality 25%

Cross client benchmarks

Anonymised

Once your segment qualifies (eight cohorts, sixty participants), your cohort's averages appear next to a baseline of senior leaders at comparable organisations.

Your cohort started at 54, the cross client baseline was 61. Your cohort ended at 78, the baseline ended at 75.

Extended retention

Enterprise tier

Default retention is ninety days. Enterprise contracts can elect twelve or twenty four month retention so longitudinal analysis works across a full talent programme. Stated in the DPA, surfaced in the consent flow.

Layer 2

Predictive readiness scoring.

The buyer's most pressing question is not how a leader performed last session. It is how ready they are for the pitch on Thursday. Mara answers that question explicitly, for individuals and for teams.

02

Knowing before it happens

Register an upcoming event. Mara calculates a readiness score that draws on practice recency, performance trajectory, scenario alignment, and nervous system stability. Score updates after every session.

Event registration

User or admin

Investor pitch, board presentation, all hands, difficult conversation, media interview. Type, date, pressure level (contained, elevated, critical). The event becomes the orientation for everything that follows.

The readiness score

0 to 100

Computed after every session once an event is registered. Four inputs: practice recency, performance trajectory, scenario alignment, nervous system stability.

A score below sixty triggers a Mara recommendation at the start of the next session: a specific focus to close the gap before the event.

Pre event activation

48 hours out

When a registered event is forty eight hours away, the platform changes mode. Mara opens every session with explicit reference to the event. If the member has not opened a session in seventy two hours before a critical event, the platform sends a check in. The system is watching their back.

Team readiness dashboard

Admin view

Registered team events appear as a timeline. Against each event, the average readiness score and a distribution. Members below threshold are flagged. Admin can trigger a recommended session for them with one click.

Layer 3

The team layer doing real work.

Transcripts, group analysis, per member debriefs, Mara drafted protocols with practitioner approval, a six month outcomes report. The renewal conversation lives here.

03

Listening to the team across time

Real meetings uploaded, mapped, analysed. Each member gets a personalised debrief. The team gets a protocol. Jade signs every protocol before it deploys.

Transcript ingestion

Multi format

Upload as text, VTT, SRT, paste, or audio file (mp3, m4a, wav, webm). Live recording inside the platform too. Detected speakers map to profiles or guest labels.

Group level analysis

Per meeting

Mara reads the transcript and produces structured analysis: talk time distribution, interruption patterns, decision arcs, dynamics worth noticing. Visible to L&D. Shared with members only when admin chooses.

Per member personalised debrief

Private to member

Within ten minutes of analysis: a sixty word arc of how they showed up, three timestamped moments with coaching reads, two specific tips, one reflection question. Tone calibrated to the member.

Meeting series tracking

Recurring context

"Leadership team weekly". "Investor relations monthly". Mara tracks communication quality across the series. Talk time, hedging incidence, recovery quality after challenge, vocal authority per speaker. Monthly trend report to admin automatically.

Mara drafted six week protocol

Mara writes, Jade signs

From baseline + meeting analyses, Mara drafts a six week intervention protocol. Diagnostic summary, three to five objectives, eight to twelve sequenced interventions across the team, individuals, and pairs.

The Jade gate

Non negotiable

Every protocol passes through Jade Matthew's approval inbox before it deploys. She sees the draft, the team it is for, the analyses that generated it. Approve, edit, or reject with a note. Only approved protocols reach teams.

The six month outcomes report

Renewal artefact

The platform generates a Programme Outcomes Report as a PDF. Cohort entry versus current scores with a trend line. Three skill areas with largest aggregate improvement. A one paragraph narrative from Mara in operator register. Delivered by email. Forwardable to the CFO.

Layer 4

Integrations that create stickiness.

A platform embedded inside a company's workflow is ten times harder to cancel than one that sits outside it. Each integration is a switching cost. Each one live makes the contract harder to lose.

Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook via OAuth. Read only. Detects upcoming high stakes events and pre registers them as performance events with a readiness score attached.

Calendar titles and descriptions are never stored. Pattern match runs in memory.

A Mara bot sends pre performance nudges, weekly readiness digests to L&D, and session completion pings to individuals.

Coaching content is never sent into a channel. Only logistical signals.

Read only OAuth to deal records. Mara orients the session toward the specific deal closing soonest, with deal name and stage in the opening prompt.

Deal data is fetched at session start, used in session, released. Never stored. Opt in per user.

Sessions and performance scores post to Cornerstone, Workday Learning, or SAP SuccessFactors as xAPI statements. Mara becomes a system of record in your L&D infrastructure.

Coaching content never appears in the LMS. Only completion, score, and event readiness.

Users log in with existing credentials via Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or Google Workspace. Roles resolved from identity provider group claims.

No shadow identity system. SCIM provisioning available as a follow on.

The L&D dashboard

What you actually see, at a glance.

A simulated view of an active enterprise cohort. The boundary between visible and private is stated explicitly inside the dashboard, not buried in a settings page.

Acme Partners · Spring 2026 cohort
Day 47 of 90 · Named contact: Jade Matthew · 12 leaders
Active
Enrolled
12
seats active
Sessions completed
9.1
average of 16
Engagement
82
of 100
Trajectory
+1.6
vs entry
Privacy boundary: engagement and outcome trajectory are visible. Coaching content is private to the member. This is structural, not a setting you can toggle.

Upcoming team events

EventWhenAttendeesAvg readinessBelow threshold
Series B presentation3 Jun · 14:004
78
0
Quarterly board meeting11 Jun · 09:306
64
2
All hands Q3 launch24 Jun · 16:009
71
1

Member register

MemberRoleSessionsEngagementStatus
Priya ShahCFO
14 of 16
91Active
Marcus ReidCOO
12 of 16
78Active
Ana MendozaDirector, Product
9 of 16
62Stalled
Edward ColePartner
16 of 16
94Complete
Layla HassanVP, People
13 of 16
86Active

Cross client baseline

Your cohort is +0.4 points ahead of the senior leader baseline for professional services.

Day 90 renewal pack

Auto generated at day 90. Forward straight to your CFO.

What success looks like

The three numbers that matter.

+1.4
Trajectory movement

Average point movement of senior leaders across the sixteen session programme, on a calibrated ten point scale. Movement is what funds the renewal.

Designed for completion
Why senior leaders finish this one

Short sessions. Three times a week. Ten minutes. Private. Real material from this week, not generic content. The format is engineered for the audience that famously does not finish executive coaching.

90 days
Time to evidence

Pilot to evidence in one quarter. The renewal pack lands in your inbox at day 90. You forward it to your CFO. You do not write a thing.

What makes it different

Four specific things.

A real practitioner behind every protocol

Mara drafts. Jade Matthew signs. Every protocol carries her name. Mara does the volume. The human carries the relationship. No other platform offers both.

The privacy contract is structural

Most platforms ask participants to trust a setting. Mara separates engagement from content at the database layer. Participants know this. They engage accordingly.

Cross client benchmarks no one else can offer

Anonymised trajectory benchmarks drawn from senior leaders at comparable organisations. Once your segment qualifies, the line goes on your renewal slide.

ICOP Method, eighteen years in the room

Built on Jade Matthew's eighteen years working with senior leaders at the FTSE 250 tier. Performance coaching, not wellness theatre.

Engagement journey

From contract to renewal.

Day 0 to 3
Setup and onboarding

Your named contact at Session leads a scoping call. Cohort confirmed, dates locked, DPA signed.

Day 3 to 7
Five Systems baseline

Every member completes their baseline self-assessment. 8 minutes. Calibration point for the whole programme.

Day 7 to 45
Coaching begins

Sessions three times a week. Meetings uploaded. Each member's debrief lands privately within ten minutes of analysis.

Day 45
Mid pilot review

30 minute conversation with your named contact. Engagement, trajectory, course correction if needed.

Day 45 to 90
Protocol deployment

Jade signs the team protocol. Six weeks of sequenced interventions across group, individuals, and pairs.

Day 90
Outcomes report

Renewal pack lands in your inbox. Cohort trajectory, cross client baseline, recommended next phase. CFO ready.

Month 6
Programme Outcomes PDF

Full trend analysis, meeting series report, named member completion rates. The annual renewal artefact.

Month 12
Renewal conversation

Your named contact carries it. Scope expansion if the fit is there. Honest conversation if it is not.

For the enterprise tier

What the platform becomes at scale.

At fifty enterprise contracts, Mara holds the only dataset in the world correlating measured communication behaviour with leadership outcomes in professional contexts. That dataset becomes the foundation for benchmarks, predictive models, and research partnerships no competitor can replicate. Buying Mara at the enterprise tier is buying into the dataset as well as the coaching.

Defensible moat

The data compounds. Every cohort makes the next one more accurate. Competitors entering the market five years from now will face a dataset they cannot catch up to.

Named account management

Every enterprise contract gets a named contact at Session who knows the cohort, attends mid pilot and outcomes reviews, and carries the renewal conversation. Relationship layer on top of the platform.

Custom benchmark segments

Enterprise clients can request custom benchmark segments by industry, function, region. When the segment threshold is met, the dashboard surfaces benchmarks specific to that segment.

Investment shape

Pricing is shaped to the cohort, the cadence, and the scope of the named account work. The full price list is shared on enquiry.

Enquire for the price list
Next step

Bring your team inside the platform.

Seven days. You and up to four colleagues. The same product an enterprise contract runs on. Real coaching, real dashboard, real evidence at the end of the week.

7 day team trial

For HR, Head of People, and L&D.

Apply below and Jade will review your application personally within one working day. If your cohort fits, you and up to four colleagues get full access to the live platform for seven days.

Apply for 7 day access