Find your spotlight. Step into it.

What we believe

It comes down to connection.

We are built to connect. Long before there were slide decks there were people around a fire, telling each other what happened and what it meant. It’s the most natural thing we do – and when we do it well, something passes between us that no document can carry. People feel understood. They decide to trust you. They act.

Then we go to work, and almost everything about the place pulls us away from connection – the screen, the forty slides, the language gone grey. We step out of the light, not because we lack the ability, but because it feels safer in the shadows.

And now the machines can write. Fluency is free. Which means the room – the meeting, the briefing, the pitch – is the one place where a person is genuinely accountable for what they think. That’s where your ideas get tested, and where your people get judged.

This is what we do. We help people step into that room – on a screen when they must, in person whenever they can – and be worth listening to when they get there. That’s what the spotlight actually is: not a stage, but the moment the people in front of you are deciding whether to believe you. We don’t get people there by teaching them to perform. We turn their attention outward, on the audience and on being of value to them rather than evaluated by them. Then we give them a method – three practices, ten archetypes, a lot of practice – so they can do it again on Tuesday, without us.

That’s the short version. Read what we believe, in full.

Who you'll deal with

In short. The Pickering Group is an Auckland-based training company, founded in 2006, teaching presentation skills, business storytelling and influence to teams and leaders across New Zealand and Australia – in-house, in small groups, with Russell in the room. The method is the Three Practices and the ten Archetypes, set out in Step into the Spotlight. Every participant answers a short survey before we meet them, and over seven years the pattern hasn’t moved: three quarters rate themselves average or worse, and three quarters have never had a day of presentation training. The problem is real, and it isn’t talent.

Russell Pickering

— Founder & Managing Director

BA (Waikato) · MFA in Acting (SMU) · MBA (Auckland)

The shortest way to describe what I do: think of me as a cross between an acting coach and a script editor, for people who work in organisations.

I trained as an actor before I trained as anything else – a Bob Hope Scholarship to SMU in Texas, then fifteen years as a professional actor on stages and screens in the United States and New Zealand. Somewhere in there I discovered I was more interested in what happens between a speaker and an audience than in performing, and in 2006 I started teaching that to people who’d never call themselves performers: engineers, lawyers, executives, graduates, the quiet people at the back of the room with the best idea in the building. Twenty years on, that’s still what I do.

Along the way I ran the Auckland consultancy SpeakEasy, did an MBA at the University of Auckland (my research project was on the role of story in business presentations, and most of what we teach started there), and wrote Step into the Spotlight, which is the method in a book.

I grew up in the Waitomo district and live in Auckland. Outside work, as much of life as possible happens on the water or on stage: I’m a qualified Yachtmaster Offshore – we sail the Hauraki Gulf whenever we can, and we’ve sailed the boat to Fiji – and I sing with Jubilation, “a choir with a gospel heart and a rock ‘n’ roll soul.”

Daniel Barnes

— Business Adviser

Daniel founded Barnes, Catmur & Friends, one of New Zealand’s most awarded independent advertising agencies, now part of Dentsu. He has thirty years as a creative entrepreneur and communicator across commercial, government and not-for-profit work, and he advises The Pickering Group on the business and on its senior client relationships.

Stephanie Wilmoth

— Practice Manager

Steph runs the practice – the calendar, the proposals, the logistics, and most of the emails you’ll get from us. If you’ve booked a programme, she’s the person who makes it happen on the day.

She came to us in 2021 after twenty-five years running the offices of people with very full diaries: executive assistant to the chief executive of Fonterra, to the chairman of PGG Wrightson and to the managing director of Rural Portfolio Investments, and before that in the legal and board-secretariat teams at the New Zealand Dairy Board, Crown Law and Clifford Chance in London. She knows how a senior organisation works from the inside, which is why a Pickering Group booking tends to arrive with everything already thought of.