IABC Victoria, in partnership with Hope & Glory, are proud to present this exclusive masterclass with Ben Hart, award-winning journalist, political advisor and communications leader. Join Ben for a bespoke four-hour workshop that will give you a structured methodology for building leadership brands developed at the intersection of brand strategy, trust research, and political communication.
Research tells us that trust in institutional leadership is eroding, with audiences retreating into smaller circles of connection. And it’s personal voices – the influencers and ‘Fake it ‘till you make it’ thought leaders - that are coming out ahead in this new information landscape. They’re often unreliable, but increasingly trusted because people feel they know them.
Many of today’s leaders are struggling to navigate the dynamics of this new communications environment. To win, they need a recognisable voice and a coherent leadership narrative. This can be achieved with the support of communications professionals who treat their identity and story as a strategic asset, and help them build it with the same rigour they bring to any brand.
About the masterclass
Leader as Brand gives communications professionals a structured methodology for building leadership brands - developed at the intersection of brand strategy, trust research, and political communication.
Political communication provides a useful reference point because today’s political leaders are operating at the bleeding edge of this new information economy - politics is the highest-scrutiny environment we have for how the public grants or withdraws trust. As a result, the practice that’s evolving around political messaging is in some important ways more sophisticated than most corporate communications approaches. The tools of political branding - mental mapping, competitive positioning, narrative strategy - transfer directly to any leader who needs to build credibility in a contested environment.
Workshop facilitator Ben Hart developed the political brand strategy for Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp - applying the tools of product and political branding to a leader in one of Australia’s most scrutinised public roles. After leaving Sally Capp’s office, he established Fireside Agency, where he has applied the same approach in leadership narrative work across corporate, NFP, and government contexts.
How it works
The approach is experiential. Every framework in the workshop is applied to participants’ own leadership identity first - so you understand the process from the inside before you take it back and run it with your leaders.
Over four hours, you’ll build and take away:
A diagnosis of your own leadership brand
A leadership narrative grounded in your own story
A ready-to-use piece of content drawn from that narrative
A facilitation guide and AI prompt file for running the process with your leaders.
The workshop structure is underpinned by Ben’s belief - built over 25 years helping leaders tell their stories strategically – that a low-risk approach to leadership storytelling is far from the safest option. It’s a choice that carries significant risks. When something goes wrong, a leader who has built a limited public presence has no reservoir of trust to draw on. The organisations that navigate difficulty best are led by people their audiences already know. You can’t build that the day you need it.
The workshop methodology applies to any leader an organisation positions as a public-facing voice: not only the CEO.
Who should attend
Communications professionals who advise, support, or are trying to influence the leaders in their organisations - and who want a rigorous, practical approach to building leadership brands they can deploy immediately.
Event information
🗓️ Thursday 20 August 2026
⌚️ 9am to 1pm
📍 Melbourne CBD
Investment
$299 - places strictly limited.