• Performing Under Pressure - Why Meeting Your Biggest Challenges has Everything to Do with Leading Under Pressure

  Performing Under Pressure - Why Meeting Your Biggest Challenges has Everything to Do with Leading Under Pressure

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  Why Meeting Your Biggest Challenges has Everything to Do with Leading Under Pressure

  Your people are facing the biggest challenge of their careers, yet most continue to rely on their IQ and technical skills to manage through it all. It’s not enough.

  To survive, your organization needs to be agile in the midst of change and challenge, and see opportunities where others do not. Your team needs to learn how to work effectively with others who are, themselves, under pressure.

  In this powerful program, your team members will learn:

  • Specific tools learned from working with high performers under pressure in the NFL, NBA, Olympic teams, Navy SEALs, Goldman Sachs, Intel, among others, to be more adaptable, resilient, collaborative and opportunistic

  • How to manage their brain so they can think, perform and lead effectively under pressure

  • The single most important daily habit that increases focus and decreases burnout

  • Strategies to help their teams perform in the face of the pressure they face

  This program is based on a 12,000-person study conducted for our New York Times best-selling book, Performing Under Pressure, which is available in 65 countries.

  This session can be delivered for sales people and sales teams, focusing on helping them harness emotional intelligence to deal with pressure, build stronger relationships with their clients, collaborate internally and deal with the setbacks and uncertainty that sales people must overcome to be successful.

• Build a High Performance, last 8% culture - The Missing Ingredient Behind Building a Highly Engaged Organizational Culture

  Build a High Performance, last 8% culture - The Missing Ingredient Behind Building a Highly Engaged Organizational Culture

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  The Missing Ingredient Behind Building a Highly Engaged Organizational Culture

  You need to move fast, adapt to a changing environment, and deliver performance, yet your team is moving too slow when it comes to making tough decisions and are avoiding the more challenging conversations that drive results.

  What is at the heart of high performance is culture. Unfortunately, most leaders misunderstand culture; they believe culture exists across the organization; it doesn’t. It exists primarily on teams. Second, they see culture as something that should be owned by the CEO and CHRO, believing it is their job to build the culture across the organization; it isn’t. Most CEO’s and CHRO’s get so overwhelmed when they think of tackling culture, that they avoid it and allow culture to be built haphazardly, which means that good people leave, and goals are not met.

  In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 7,500 leaders that puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture. Your people will learn specific tools to own the culture on their team in the critical moments, the Last 8%, that creates culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid. When leaders feel agency and have skills to lean into the difficult, they build a high-performance culture that becomes a powerful force in your organization.

  In this powerful program, your team will learn:

  • What the two pillars of a high performing culture are: High Connection (psychological safety) and High Courage (ability to do hard things skillfully)

  • How to build the culture on their team with our proprietary approach of Model & Own

  • Specific tools to connect and coach their people to be their best in Last 8% Situations

  • How to influence & engage others who are at a distance and create the conditions to keep the best
    and brightest

• The need for risk in times of uncertainty- How to Use RISK to Navigate Today's Demanding, Complex World

  The need for risk in times of uncertainty- How to Use RISK to Navigate Today's Demanding, Complex World

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  How to Use RISK to Navigate Today’s Demanding, Complex World

  Why do leaders become more risk averse when the world feels uncertain? Biology. Above all else, we’re wired for self-preservation. But in today’s environment, risk aversion is the opposite of what’s needed to operate at the speed required to adapt and win.

  Speed is now the currency of success, in every industry, every function: product development, supply chain, technology, sales, marketing, digital transformation.

  Organizations today don’t need economies of scale, they need economies of speed.

  The organizations leveraging Gen AI most effectively, for instance, are those that have built the conditions for people to take smart risks. When even one person on your team avoids a risk they know they should take, they slow the organization, undermining your ability to adapt to uncertainty and change.

  Our proprietary study of 34,000 people (to be published in Harvard Business Review in 2025) found a measurable gap between the risks people feel in their gut they should take and the risks they actually take: 7.56%. Rounded up, we call this The Last 8%.

  That gap shows up when:

  • People don’t have the full conversation they need to have

  • They delay the hardest decisions

  • They avoid experiments that would help them or the team

  In this program, your team will learn:

  • Concrete tools to manage their brain so they can lead effectively under pressure

  • How to design the environment that gets more of the team taking the right risks—fueling innovation and performance

  • The two biggest cultural barriers to speed (based on a study of 72,000 people) and why 67% of teams aren’t currently built for the level of risk today demands

  • What the top 33% of teams do differently that allows them to move fast without losing control

  • The single shared habit of elite performers—from Olympic athletes and Navy SEALs to Fortune 500 leaders—that lets them thrive in uncertainty
• How to Use Mindfulness To Lead Your Team

  How to Use Mindfulness To Lead Your Team

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  From the moment we wake up, we are bombarded with emails and inundated with requests. Distractions today are stronger and more pervasive than at any other time in human history, diminishing our ‘attentional strength’. Yet leaders are expected to slow down, focus and make thoughtful decisions in a volatile, uncertain world. How is this possible? The answer is Mindfulness.

  Mindfulness is a practice that builds our attentional strength, increases our ability to deal with the ups and downs of work life and increases resilience. In the same way that we go to the gym to build strength and endurance, Mindfulness is like strengthening for our brain. It is the antidote for a multi-tasking world where leaders need to make important decisions, be present to engage people and inspire their teams to the next level of performance.

  In this progressive keynote, your team will learn:

  • The science of the brain under
  • An introduction to the practice of Mindfulness; its performance and health
  • Tools to slow down and be decisive when important decisions need to be
  • How to use Mindfulness to become a more effective leader that others will want to follow.
• All Change Is Personal: The Need to Focus On People During Disruptive Change

  All Change Is Personal: The Need to Focus On People During Disruptive Change

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  If the Hippocratic Oath main directive is ‘first, do no harm,’ then the brain’s is ‘first, keep alive.’ Yet the usual approach most organizations take in managing change and disruption does not take into consideration this neurological reality. Leaders bring their ‘five-point strategies’ or get overly focused on the latest technology and completely miss that real change happens in the mind, and more specifically, in the operating systems (the brains) of their people.

  To get your organization to successfully adapt to external disruption and the new world of work, requires managers and leaders to accept that all change is personal and that until they start managing from this point of view, their people will not step into uncertainty and take the risks required to achieve successful change efforts.

  In this provocative keynote, your team will hear about other organizations that have succeeded in adapting to change and disruption by leveraging the operating system of the brain.

  Your team will learn:

  • How to identify the traps leaders fall into as they attempt to manage the pressure of
  • How to create an environment of risk-taking and learning to adapt to
  • Concrete tools to help leaders manage their emotions, thoughts and conversations to lead more effectively in the face of change and
  • How to help your organization take action and approach the pressure associated with change and disruption with more confidence.
• Emotional Intelligence: The Missing Ingredient In Building a Highly Engaged Culture

  Emotional Intelligence: The Missing Ingredient In Building a Highly Engaged Culture

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  Why would anyone want to be led you? This is the single most important question a manager or leader needs to ask themselves if they want to unlock the potential and creativity of their people. The reason your employees get up in the morning and choose to be engaged and productive has nothing to do with a manager’s level of IQ or technical capabilities, it has everything to do with their manager’s level of Emotional Intelligence (EI).

  The research is clear that Emotional Intelligence is the single most important driver of an engaged, results-driven, highly effective workforce, especially in environments that are undergoing significant change and disruption.

  In this interactive keynote, your team will discover:

  • What the brain does under pressure and specific tools & strategies to effectively manage situations of tension and
  • Self-awareness: understanding the impact of your leadership style and how to win the hearts and minds of your people by connecting to the emotions that drive their
  • Engaging stories from the frontlines of leaders who are stepping up and winning in the most challenging, pressure-filled situations.
• THE ART OF EMPATHY: THE ANTIDOTE TO THE GREAT RESIGNATION

  THE ART OF EMPATHY: THE ANTIDOTE TO THE GREAT RESIGNATION

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  Your people are burning out. After a long, difficult time during the pandemic, they are feeling overworked and underappreciated. This is causing many to question staying in their current position. The most important thing your organization can offer them is not more money (though you need to be paying them fairly) – it is an environment strong in empathy. When an individual doesn’t feel like they have a voice, doesn’t feel valued or doesn’t know where they stand with their manager, they start to disengage, lose energy and contemplate leaving. This is especially true when they face uncertainty and the challenges of remote/hybrid work.

  Equipping your managers (and your whole organization) with empathy not only helps people who are struggling to get though a tough time, it also puts them on the road to achieving great things together. Something they truly desire.

  In this powerful virtual program, your people will learn:

  1. What the single greatest cause of a lack of empathy is.
  2. Why building both Heart and Edge (the ability to care and tune-in, and hold people accountable)
  is so important to getting discretionary effort and building a great culture.
  3. How to inspire their people to do great work.
  4. What the key components are to building an environment of high psychological safety is and
  why it matters to innovation.
  5. How achieve great things, together, in a virtual or hybrid environment.
  
  

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