Leaders and experts are different briefs.

Two people can face the same interview and need completely different preparation. I have coached both ends of this many times: senior executives and organisational leaders on one side, subject-matter experts on the other. Treating them the same is one of the most common mistakes in media training, and it shows the moment the camera rolls.

The interview is identical. The person is not, and the preparation has to start from the person, not the topic. Get that starting point wrong and even hours of preparation push people in exactly the wrong direction.

What the expert needs

The subject-matter expert usually knows the content cold. That is not their challenge. Their challenge is compression and permission: deciding what to leave out, and being allowed to leave it out without feeling they have been inaccurate. Their deepest fear is oversimplifying, being made to say something less true than they know it to be, and having a peer see it.

So the work with an expert is about translation and reassurance. Helping them find the accurate-and-accessible version of their answer, and then convincing them it is not a betrayal of the detail. The breakthrough moment is usually when an expert accepts that choosing the most important point is not the same as hiding the others. Once they trust that, their credibility becomes the strongest asset in the interview, because audiences can tell the difference between someone performing authority and someone who genuinely has it.

What the leader needs

The senior leader often has the opposite profile. They are comfortable and fluent, sometimes too comfortable, but they may not hold the technical detail, and they are usually speaking for a whole organisation rather than their own work. Their challenge is authority with accuracy: sounding in command while staying strictly inside what they can actually stand behind.

The work with a leader is about message discipline and risk. What to say, what not to say, how to stay authoritative when they do not know a detail rather than bluffing into trouble, how to handle the question designed to make news at the organisation's expense. A leader's worst interview is rarely the one where they seemed unsure. It is the one where they sounded confident and said something they had to walk back, because confidence plus inaccuracy is how organisations end up in a second, worse story.

The expert has to protect the accuracy while opening up. The leader has to protect the organisation while sounding open.

A worked example of the difference

Picture the same hard question put to both: is this safe? The expert's instinct is to answer with the full distribution of evidence, probabilities and conditions, and to sound hesitant doing it, which reads as doubt even when the science is reassuring. Their preparation is about finding the honest, clear headline that does not overclaim: here is what we know, here is what we are still checking, said plainly.

The leader's instinct is to reassure decisively, which is exactly the reflex that gets an organisation into trouble if the detail does not fully support it. Their preparation is the reverse: how to project calm and responsibility without making a promise the evidence cannot keep. Same question, opposite failure modes, opposite coaching.

Where the two overlap

• Both need three clear points decided in advance, and both are tempted to abandon them under pressure the moment a question pulls sideways.
• Both perform better having practised out loud, not just thought it through. Silent preparation collapses on contact with a real question.
• Both need to know it is fine to not answer the question as asked, and to bridge to what matters instead, without sounding evasive.
• Both are judged on how they handle the hardest question, not the easiest, so that is where the preparation time should go.

Why it matters who is in the chair

A leader coached like an expert gets buried in detail they do not command, and looks less authoritative the harder they try. An expert coached like a leader gets pushed toward slick, confident lines they cannot honestly defend, and loses the credibility that was their whole advantage. Both fail, and both failures were entirely avoidable.

The interview is never really the unit of preparation. The person is. Start by asking who is walking into that room and what they specifically need to protect, and the right preparation follows almost on its own. Start with the topic instead, and you will prepare a generic briefing that helps neither of them.