Tim Sanders Featured Upwork's Vice President of Client Strategy; Fellow at D3 Institute at Harvard Business School; NY Times Best-Selling Author

Join us for an enlightening session with Tim Sanders, an authority on driving business growth through Artificial Intelligence. In a landscape inundated with technology enthusiasts, Tim stands out as a pragmatic expert, dedicated to translating AI's potential into tangible returns on investment.

With a global reputation for guiding executives through the complexities of AI strategy, Tim's insights are invaluable for any organization seeking to leverage exponential growth to create value. As an executive fellow at Harvard Business School's Digital Data Design Institute, he spearheads insight development, aimed at democratizing AI for business leaders worldwide.

Tim's approach is not just about adopting AI for the sake of innovation; it's about strategically reframing business challenges as "prediction problems" to ensure maximum return on AI investments. Through engaging dialogue and real-world case studies, he will demystify AI for you and empower you to put it to work in your business.

Drawing from his extensive experience, Tim also sheds light on the often-overlooked pitfalls of AI implementation and shares actionable strategies to mitigate risks and optimize investments. By collaborating closely with meeting stakeholders, Tim tailors his remarks to address specific business challenges and event objectives, leaving attendees equipped with practical insights to drive transformative change within their organizations.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Gain a strategic framework for ensuring Return on AI by reframing business challenges as prediction problems.
• Explore the booming landscape of GenAI and identify high impact use cases for delivering ROI.
• Navigate the hidden costs of AI implementation and learn how to avoid common pitfalls.
• Discover proven strategies to de-risk AI programs, enabling more “swings at the plate.”
• Reveal how managers and leaders can measure the value of AI investments.

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.”

NY Times bestselling author Tim Sanders is the perfect choice to speak to emerging leaders because of his winning perspectives around career readiness and success. Based on his groundbreaking books Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends and The Likeability Factor, he would deliver a high energy talk that would instruct and inspire.

In his view, you best prepare for career success by investing in three attributes. They will help you make the leap from “good option” to “essential ingredient.

1. Your Knowledge

The best way to separate yourself from everyone else is to commit to adding to your knowledge bank daily. Study trends, leadership and personal development books. “Readers are leaders” and “Learners are Earners.”

Find, recruit and retain top quality mentors, who can take you to the next level of your journey. Display purpose and be intentional when it comes to finding and then engaging with them.

Become a mentor and knowledge sharing partner to those you work with and know in your personal life. Help them solve their problems with knowledge and then ready to absorb the feedback they give you in return. “Multiply the value of others and watch your own value grow exponentially.”

2. Your Network

Build your network of personal relationships every week by making connections with those who share common problems, mutual interests and intersecting goals with you. Don’t ask new contacts, “What do you do?” but instead ask them, “What are you working on that you are passionate about?” These types of connections forge deep relationships.

Become a super-connector, putting people together that “should meet.” As you intelligently share your network with others, they will reciprocate and you’ll see your network grow. “Your network is your net worth!”

3. Your Emotional Value Proposition

The old saying that “long after they forget what you did for them, they remember how you made them feel” is not only true – it reveals a path to career success. Develop your emotional value proposition by sharpening your EQ and then combining it with deep generosity.

The Likeability Factor is a measure of your capacity to produce positive emotional experiences in those you spend time with. They will respond by giving you their attention, loyalty and opportunities. Inject friendliness and relevance into every interaction.

Empathy is a superpower in the game of life as well as the world of work. It starts with your ability to recognize the true feelings of others … in person or even on a Zoom call. (Tim will walk attendees through the 7 Faces of Emotion exercise, where they will learn how to spot micro-expressions and decode the emotions of others.)

Treat others’ feelings as facts and give them a sense of community be it for happiness or even sadness. One of our greatest human needs is to be heard and validated for how we see the world and feel at the time.