I run Dannie-Lu Carr Creative Ltd, a UK-based leadership, communication and culture consultancy. I work with senior and board-level leaders, their teams and their organisations, in the UK and internationally.
My work is about levelling up in leadership: not only how to lead well, but how to operate when situations become complex such as competing interests, incomplete information, high stakes and people who disagree. Four main capabilities run through this: the courage to challenge well, psychological safety that is implemented rather than just claimed, effective resilience under sustained pressure and emotionally intelligent agility in communication (the ability to adjust in the moment rather than deliver one fixed position).
I am an ILM Level 7 qualified Executive Coach, Senior Training Consultant and Executive Speaker Coach with over 19 years in leadership development and behavioural change. My specialism is the human dynamics of leadership: how people read, affect and respond to one another and particularly under pressure. Alongside the consultancy I maintain a continuous practice of original performance and writing made for public audiences, which also functions as ongoing research and development for my work with clients.
The four areas of my work
Executive coaching. Confidential one-to-one coaching for leaders navigating transition, promotion, pressure or personally sensitive situations. I deliver this as sustained packages, typically six sessions and upwards, because the aim is behavioural change that sticks. Focus areas include executive presence, strategic mindset, difficult conversations, resilience and decision-making under pressure, influencing and assertiveness, and burnout.
Leadership and team development. Bespoke programmes for current and emerging leaders, including those stepping into greater scope and complexity, and long-form work with intact teams on trust, psychological safety, accountability, ownership, collaboration, working styles and team dynamics.
Communication, personal impact and speaker coaching. Presentation skills, high-stakes communication, influencing and negotiation, assertiveness, holding a position under challenge, team dynamics and cohesion. I also offer specialist speaker coaching for conference hosts, keynote speakers and senior leaders, including choreographing the flow and narrative arc of full conference days if required.
Inclusion and culture change. Programmes that make hard conversations survivable and productive: practical inclusion for leaders and managers, reproductive and health-related disclosure, reasonable adjustments, psychological safety and belonging. I deliver these under my own banner, and through my gender-parity arm, Flaming Leadership, which works across business, education and charity sectors.
I deliver virtually, in person and internationally.
What is different about my approach
My specialism is people dynamics: what is actually happening between people in a room, in real time, and what to do about it. Most leadership and communication training works on content (the model, the framework, the form of words). Whilst I also use rigorous business frameworks, my distinctive work is on paying attention to human dynamics: what people notice, what they miss, and what changes when they begin responding to the person in front of them rather than to their own assumptions or rules.
That capability is inspired by the Meisner technique, in which I trained for two years and which I taught for well over a decade, within a professional performance practice now spanning three decades. Meisner is a discipline of attention rather than performance. Its entire subject is receiving another person accurately and responding to what they are actually doing, rather than to interpretation. It promotes curiosity and generosity. This is what communication agility rests on: a professional who is genuinely tracking the room can change course mid-sentence, whereas someone delivering a prepared position cannot.
The second element is trying things out. High-stakes communication tends to fail in the body rather than the intellect. Under pressure, breath shortens, listening collapses, status behaviours take over, and prepared words desert people due to cognitive or emotional overwhelm. Resilience of that kind is built by repetition rather than insight, so I also treat the training room as a safe practise space: participants do not only discuss how they might handle a conversation, they run it, without judgement, in a room I have designed to make that safe. Supporting methods sometimes include participants intervening in a simulated situation until they change its outcome, working as one group, uncovering learning organically as this plays out. I hold rooms with warmth and no-nonsense in equal measure and always leave people with some practical things to implement into their work and world straight away.
Where my specialisms come from
Alongside two decades of corporate consultancy, I have three decades of professional theatre and performance practice, working as a Meisner technique specialist, theatre director, actor, published author and recording musician. I trained for two years in the Meisner technique at the Impulse Company in London and taught it at City Lit (2006–2015) and the Giles Foreman Centre for Acting in London and Paris (2016–2022). I wrote Brilliant Assertiveness for Pearson’s Brilliant Lifeskills series (Pearson Education, 2012), contributed to Real Ambition (Capstone, 2016), and gave the TEDx talk “The Inconvenient Truth for Culture” at TEDxNewcastle in 2015. My direction of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love for Compagnie du Vingt-Trois won three Petits Molières awards at the Festival Off d’Avignon in 2019. I also write on organisational culture for professional audiences, including as a regular contributor for Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ Influence magazine.
A working research and development function. My performance, creative and writing practice are where my methods are developed. I build new approaches to the material organisations find hardest to handle, such as challenge, grief, identity, disclosure, and often test them in front of a live audience, at high personal stakes and with no way to avoid the honest result. What holds up evidentially sometimes becomes one of my training room methods and what does not hold up never reaches a client. Because I do the research, design the programme and deliver them in the room myself, nothing is lost in translation between these things and I work to ensure that I always remain agile and responsive in any room.
How I run engagements
My programmes are bespoke by default and built from the organisation or team’s real conditions; I do not resell an off-the-shelf catalogue. I design and deliver coaching, training and consulting personally, so you work directly with me, rather than an associate delivering someone else’s material. This enables sharp and effective results built on trust, safety and accountability. I work with every client engagement through a performance consultant lens before I design any session or enter any room to deliver it.
I believe in getting to know the people I am working with as much as possible and hold every person’s unique strengths, challenges and needs with care, attention and empathy.
