Tim Sanders Featured Top Innovation Expert ,Technology Pioneer and New York Times Best-Selling Author

Leaders in every industry prioritize innovation but are frustrated with how long it takes to bring breakthroughs to market. According to bestselling author and consultant Tim Sanders, the best way to speed up the innovation process is to promote a culture of collaboration across your organization and externally with partners, customers and competimates.

Over his career, Tim has studied leaders that practice what he terms ‘disruptive collaboration,’ a problem-solving style that leverages surprising alliances along the fault-lines of a company or its market. He’ll reveal how the biggest leaps and turnarounds in history came from collisions of thought, not safe work in our silos of excellence. Tim’s eye-opening keynote will deliver actionable insights and tools that will accelerate the rate of innovation, drive agility and quickly produce breakthrough business outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Why Companies That Practice Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Outperform Rivals
• How to Leverage the Power of Multiple Perspectives to Solve Problems 3X Faster
• How to Bring Multiple Stakeholder Needs From “Me-to-We” in a Collaborative Project
• Why Innovation Requires a Focus on Building a Collaborative Web of Relationships
• How to Connect the Silos, One Collaboration Project at a Time

You’ve likely worked with remote talent before, be they freelancers or full-time employees who have a flexible work arrangement with your company. But today, many of your talents are working remotely from home due to the Covid-19 crisis. More than ever, you need a solid skillset when it comes to managing those who you won’t see face to face in your offices.

That’s why Upwork Vice President of Customer Insights, Tim Sanders, has produced a 45-minute virtual session to give you the best practices in leading remote talents of all types. He’s scoured academic and industrial research as well as interviewed enterprise leaders experienced in remote talent management to create this insightful and actionable program. 

The session will reveal helpful and surprising best practices in remote communications focused on platforms, cadences, nuance, and service level agreements on responsiveness. 

You’ll also learn how to remotely manage: 

• Positive Mental Outlook (the key to engagement)
• Engagement (the key to productivity) 
• Collaboration (the key to innovation and problem solving) 

Long after your employees return to on-premise work, you’ll be able to put this session to use as you manage remote workers and/or independent contractors. It is the key to developing an agile workforce that can drive key initiatives from business growth to digital transformation.

Many of your best people are on the verge of suffering professional burnout. They’ve stepped up the number of working hours, partially due to the new work-from-home environment, but mostly because they need to get more done with less.

Researchers declare that burnout is a threat to companies in 2021—the pandemic’s new world of work is showing collateral damage including turnover, loss of productivity and a lack of creative energy.

The good news is that burnout can be prevented and alleviated in the early stages through designed workstreams and personally managed through the development of boundaries and wellness habits.

In this presentation, Tim provides insights on what it takes to restore work-life integration in 2021. He’ll share the latest research as well as best practices from companies and wellness advisors.

You’ll learn how to:

• Spot the early warning signs of burnout in individuals and groups.
• Design workstreams to ensure load-management of key talents.
• Leverage resources such as the work marketplace to offload tactical burdens.
• Coach others to reduce stress and recharge energies while they work from home.

The Grand Redesign

If you want to increase your company's velocity and competitiveness, embark on The Grand Redesign. This new leadership approach leverages design thinking to improve how the work is delivered and plans are met. 

Tim Sanders, New York Times bestselling author and Upwork executive, offers a stunning collection of insights, statistics and customer stories that illustrate how leaders can tackle today's biggest challenges.

• Deliver a key value proposition to talent: Flexibility. This is emerging as a key to driving productivity, innovation and employee retention. This is done by employing the right design questions that will help leaders craft the perfect hybrid solution for their teams. 
• Solve the top dependency for their most critical projects and programs: Someone with the skills to complete the work on time. This is done by designing the project canvas to ‘taskify’ and skill-source requirements early in the process, leveraging on-demand talent with an eye of building an elastic workforce.
• Lead talent based on outcomes, not attendance or effort. This is the most critical leadership skill because it enables true scale in any working environment. This is done by developing the ability to assign, resource and coach talents to deliver measurable results, regardless of role. 

The last three years have been filled with change from Covid to digital disruption to the economy. Historically, times of great change are the best times to redesign key components of your culture – starting with “how we work now.”