Shola Kaye

Why organisations work with Shola Kaye

• Her Emotional Audacity™ framework reframes empathy as an organisational capability – not a personal virtue – giving leaders a structured approach to courageous communication that is immediately applicable in high-pressure, high-stakes environments
• She holds an unusual credibility position: a Cambridge and Emory-trained scientist who also performed professionally on four continents. That combination makes her content land differently with technical and analytical audiences who typically resist people-skills programming
• Her work addresses a gap that DEI programmes and EQ training often miss separately: the intersection of speaking up, psychological safety, and inclusive communication as a single, integrated practice
• Her two published books and LinkedIn Learning instructor role mean buyers are extending into a content ecosystem, not just a single keynote
• She has worked across the full range of organisational contexts – from board-level at institutions including The United Nations and Deloitte to company-wide culture programmes – with consistent evidence of rebooking

Biography highlights

• BA Natural Sciences, Cambridge University; PGCE, Oxford University; MSc Analytical Chemistry / Neuropharmacology, Emory University, with postgraduate research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
• Early career in IT management consulting with clients including Goldman Sachs and Prudential Assurance, followed by account director roles in aviation and finance
• Professional entertainer and jazz singer; performed on four continents including BBC appearances
• Author of How to be a D.I.V.A. at Public Speaking (Amazon.com #1 bestseller) and Big Talk, Small Talk and Everything in Between (Callisto Media, 2020)
• Winner of the Jenny Seagrove Speaking Award (2016); Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), Toastmasters International; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA)
• Regular contributor to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management; featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, and BBC; TEDx speaker on empathy in the workplace

Biography

Shola Kaye spent her early career moving between worlds that rarely overlap: neuroscience research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, management consulting at investment banks in New York and London, and professional performance on stages across four continents. That trajectory is not a curiosity: it is the basis of her work. She understands analytically rigorous environments, the dynamics of corporate invisibility, and what it takes to hold a room.

The core tension she addresses is one that organisations consistently underinvest in: the gap between stated inclusion values and the actual behavioural competencies required to make them real. Most people, even experienced leaders, struggle to give honest feedback, speak up under pressure, or navigate difficult conversations without defensiveness. Kaye’s Emotional Audacity™ framework names this gap explicitly: combining empathy, self-regulation, and courageous communication into a single, teachable practice.

Her two books and a TEDx talk on workplace empathy establish the intellectual architecture behind the keynotes. Her contributors to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management position her as a credible voice in the professional management conversation, not only on the conference circuit. Clients including The United Nations, Deloitte, HSBC, Google, and IBM have rebooked or extended her programmes into training formats, evidence that the content holds beyond a single session.

What makes Kaye distinctive in a crowded DEI and communication space is the precise nature of her argument: that empathy, done seriously, is not a softening of leadership but a structural condition for high performance. For organisations navigating transformation, hybrid work, or underrepresentation challenges, that reframe tends to land where other approaches have not.

Key speaking topics

• Empathy at work
• Inclusive leadership
• Psychological safety and communication
• Emotional intelligence
• Courageous workplace communication
• Diversity, equity and belonging
• People-first culture
• Feedback and difficult conversations

Ideal for

• CHROs and People Directors building cultures where psychological safety is a practical reality, not an aspiration
• Leadership development programmes targeting mid-to-senior leaders managing diverse, distributed, or technically-oriented teams
• Organisations running DEI initiatives that need to move beyond awareness into behavioural change
• International Women’s Day and women’s leadership events where communication confidence and visibility are the focus

Audience outcomes

• A named framework (Emotional Audacity™) for integrating empathy, courageous communication, and inclusive behaviour into daily leadership practice
• Practical tools for navigating difficult conversations, delivering constructive feedback, and creating environments where people feel safe to speak up
• Greater understanding of the structural conditions – not just the personal attitudes – that determine whether inclusion is felt in practice
• Specific techniques for communicating with clarity and impact, particularly for those in technical, analytical, or STEM-rooted working environments
• Renewed understanding of how communication behaviours at the manager level directly affect team performance, retention, and innovation output