Strategien zur Talentbindung

Why organisations work with Caitriona Ellis She connects employee financial wellness directly to retention, giving HR and reward leaders a way to frame money support as a workforce outcome rather than a soft benefit. Her credentials as a qualified financial adviser mean the content stands up to scrutiny, which matters when an employer is putting financial guidance in front of staff. She speaks from a first-person recovery from serious financial difficulty, so audiences who feel quietly ashamed about money see someone credible who has been where they are. Her corporate sessions carry no product sales or advice agenda, which lets an employer put financial guidance in front of staff without the conflict of interest that adviser-led content usually brings. Biography highlights Qualified financial adviser with an honours Commerce degree and a career background in the banking sector. Founder of the Financial Wellness Academy, running structured financial wellbeing programmes for individuals and organisations. Buy-to-let property investor who acquired six properties remotely in the North East of England within a single 12-month period. Fellow of the National Estate Agents Association, with a Level 4 qualification in Residential Estate Agency. Delivers keynotes, workshops, and financial wellbeing programmes to employers, behaviour-led and free of any product or advice agenda. Regular speaker and podcast guest on financial wellness, including Institute of Directors International Women’s Day events and International Women Connected. Biography Money is the wellbeing problem most employers leave out. Mental health and physical health have a place in the corporate programme; financial anxiety, which sits underneath both, usually does not. Caitriona Ellis built her work in that gap, founding the Financial Wellness Academy to bring structured financial education to people who carry money stress quietly. Her authority rests on two things that rarely sit together. She is a qualified financial adviser with an honours Commerce degree and a banking background, so the technical content is sound. She has also worked her own way out of serious financial difficulty, which is why audiences who feel exposed about money tend to trust her rather than tune out. That credibility extends into practice. She is an active buy-to-let property investor who acquired six properties remotely in the North East of England inside a year, and a Fellow of the National Estate Agents Association. Her corporate sessions carry no product sales or advice agenda, so an employer can offer staff real financial guidance without the conflict that adviser-led content invites. For an organisation, the argument she makes is concrete: employees who feel in control of their money are easier to keep. She frames financial wellbeing as a retention lever, the part of the employee relationship that engagement surveys miss and exit interviews reveal too late. Key speaking topics Employee financial wellbeing Financial literacy and money confidence Financial wellbeing and staff retention Women and money Personal resilience and financial recovery Property investment and income diversification Ideal for CHROs, reward, and benefits leaders building or reviewing an employee wellbeing programme. Employee resource groups and women’s networks running financial confidence sessions. Organisations whose staff are visibly affected by cost-of-living pressure and financial stress. Audience outcomes Audiences leave able to name the first practical steps to take control of their own finances, regardless of starting point. Employees who felt isolated about money see that the problem is common and addressable, lowering the shame that keeps it hidden. HR and reward attendees leave with a clearer case for treating financial wellbeing as a retention issue, not a perk. Audiences gain a basic working understanding of income diversification and longer-term financial planning.

Why organisations work with Chester Elton His frameworks are grounded in the largest empirical base of any comparable culture speaker: studies of more than one million working adults, anchored by a 300,000-person study conducted with Towers Watson for All In – giving boards and HR leaders data they can defend internally. The Carrot Principle and Anxiety at Work sit at opposite ends of the engagement challenge; his ability to address both recognition strategy and workplace anxiety within a single coherent body of work means organisations do not need two different conversations. As a Thinkers50 Coaching Award winner and member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, his executive coaching practice carries independent third-party validation that extends his value beyond the main stage. His work provides a specific, operational diagnosis – the breakdown between what leaders say they value and what managers actually do day to day – and a toolkit that works at every level of the organisation, not just the C-suite. Named to Inc.’s 2025 Top 50 Leadership & Management Experts and consistently ranked among the world’s top organisational culture authorities by Global Gurus (2017–2025), his standing is validated by named external bodies rather than self-reported credentials. Biography highlights Co-author of five New York Times bestselling books, including The Carrot Principle, All In, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work (Harper Business), co-written with Adrian Gostick Books sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide; translated into more than 30 languages Thinkers50 Coaching Award winner; member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Leadership (SCL) Certified Executive Coach Global Gurus research organisation: ranked consistently among the world’s top leadership and organisational culture experts, 2017–2025 Named to Inc.’s 2025 Top 50 Leadership & Management Experts (October 2025) Co-founder, The Culture Works, a global leadership and culture consultancy Media: NBC Today, CBS 60 Minutes, CNN, ABC; quoted in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fast Company, Financial Times Biography Culture does not fail organisations because leaders lack values. It fails because most managers do not know how to make those values visible in the daily behaviours of their teams. Chester Elton has spent more than two decades building the research base that explains this gap, and identifying what high-performing organisations do differently. His work draws on studies of more than one million working adults, compiled across several large-scale research partnerships. The Carrot Principle established the direct, measurable link between purposeful employee recognition and business outcomes including retention, productivity, and customer satisfaction. All In, produced with research firm Towers Watson, drew on a 300,000-person study to identify the seven practices that generate genuine organisational buy-in. Anxiety at Work – published by Harper Business and the most recent of his five New York Times bestsellers – addressed the other side of the same equation: what happens when uncertainty goes unmanaged and workplace anxiety erodes the culture leaders worked to build. Taken together, these books form one of the most evidence-based frameworks available to executives on how culture is created, sustained, and recovered. Elton is a Thinkers50 Coaching Award winner, a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, and a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Leadership certified executive coach. Global Gurus has ranked him among the world’s top leadership and organisational culture experts every year from 2017 to 2025. Inc. named him to its 2025 Top 50 Leadership & Management Experts list. He is co-founder of The Culture Works and has consulted with organisations including American Express, The World Bank, and the New Jersey Devils. What distinguishes him is the range the research covers. Most speakers in this space address either motivation or stress. Elton’s body of work addresses both, and the connection between them. Key speaking topics Employee recognition and culture-building Organisational culture and high-performance teams Workplace anxiety and psychological safety Leading with gratitude Employee engagement strategy Multigenerational workforce leadership Manager capability and team trust Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing, resetting, or embedding organisational culture programmes CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating workforce anxiety, change, or post-transformation culture repair Talent and leadership development functions seeking research-grounded frameworks for manager effectiveness HR and management associations and industry conferences where practitioner credibility and data-backed content are audience expectations Audience outcomes A diagnostic framework for identifying where culture commitment breaks down between leadership intent and frontline management behaviour Recognition practices tied directly to engagement and retention outcomes, grounded in large-scale empirical research rather than anecdote Practical strategies for identifying workplace anxiety early – before it affects team performance, absenteeism, or attrition A shared organisational vocabulary for discussing culture, gratitude, and psychological safety in operational rather than abstract terms Immediate, actionable steps that managers at any level can apply to strengthen trust and discretionary effort within their teams

Why organisations work with Chris Dyer He ran the experiment before he taught it. PeopleG2 was a fully remote business through five Inc. 5000 listings and fifteen “best place to work” cycles, which means his culture and remote-work models come from operating evidence, not consulting observation. His “7 Pillars” (Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, Mistakes) give an executive team a shared diagnostic vocabulary for culture, replacing the usual mix of values posters and engagement-survey theatre. He works at the intersection of culture and remote design, where most speakers pick a side. Buyers wrestling with hybrid productivity, distributed leadership, and connection in dispersed teams get one voice on both questions. Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his client roster includes NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines, which signals he holds a senior room across regulated, industrial, tech, and consumer settings. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a fully remote background-screening company, five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Author of The Power of Company Culture (Kogan Page) and co-author of Remote Work (Kogan Page). Named #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine; ranked #5 on the LeadersHum Power List. Listed among Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. Forbes Business Council member, Fast Company Executive Board member, and contributor to Inc.com. Keynote clients include NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. Biography Most companies treat culture as something HR runs and leaders endorse. PeopleG2 was built the other way around. Chris Dyer ran the firm as a fully remote operation while it landed on the Inc. 5000 list five times and was repeatedly named a best place to work, which made culture a daily operating decision rather than an annual initiative. That experience produced a specific framework. The Power of Company Culture, published by Kogan Page, sets out seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. The book’s argument is operational. Each pillar maps to behaviours leaders can audit, and the cases used to test it sit inside companies like General Motors, Southwest Airlines, and VaynerMedia. His second book, Remote Work, also with Kogan Page, addresses the harder follow-on question: how do you keep a culture intact when your workforce is distributed. Inc. Magazine subsequently named Dyer the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his keynote work has placed him in front of leadership teams at NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. What buyers tend to take from Dyer is permission to stop treating culture as soft. He gives senior teams a vocabulary, a diagnostic, and a set of operator decisions, grounded in a business he built and ran rather than a model he assembled from interviews. Key speaking topics Company culture as an operating system The 7 Pillars framework Remote and hybrid workforce design Employee engagement and retention Leadership in distributed organisations Future of work and AI integration in the workplace Burnout and recession-period leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of People rebuilding engagement and retention strategy CEOs and executive teams setting the direction on hybrid or fully remote operating models Culture and transformation leads inside organisations carrying out post-restructure rebuilds Leadership development functions designing programmes for distributed managers Audience outcomes A shared diagnostic for which cultural levers in their organisation are actually moving performance A practical view of how to run a distributed or hybrid workforce without losing cohesion An operator’s account of how engagement, retention, and productivity reinforce each other when the right pillars are in place Concrete tactics from a CEO who tested them inside a five-time Inc. 5000 company

Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale. He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition. He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in. HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list. Biography highlights Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes) Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011) Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera Biography UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world. That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021. The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame. The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations Senior team behaviour and executive performance Talent identification and leadership pipelines Employee engagement as an organisational lever Leadership in conditions of uncertainty Human leadership in the AI era Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions Audience outcomes A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100

Why organisations work with Corinna Pommerening Specific authority in the German Mittelstand and regional banking layer, where most international leadership speakers have no credible footprint. Two Springer Gabler and GABAL books arguing a structured thesis on leadership change inside the financial sector, not a generic leadership platform applied to banking. Treats employer brand and leadership culture as one programme rather than two HR projects, which is how regional banks actually experience the talent problem. Customer advisory seat at HASPA, Germany’s largest savings bank, anchors the work in a real institutional setting rather than a consultancy abstraction. Delivers in German and English, with formats from keynote to working session, suited to bank executive committees and supervisory-board offsites. Biography highlights Author of “New Leadership im Finanzsektor,” Springer Gabler, 2020; second edition 2022. Author of “Digitale Regionalokonomie,” GABAL Verlag, 2023. Host of “Leadership neu gedacht!” podcast, 140+ episodes. Co-founder of Ecosystems 4 Business AG. Member of the customer advisory board, Hamburger Sparkasse (HASPA). Certified employer brand manager; guest lecturer at the University of Wismar; Industry Insider with trend-research firm TRENDONE. Biography Most regional banks in Germany are running two redesigns at once. The business model is being rebuilt around digital and platform competition, and the workforce that has to deliver that rebuild is harder to keep and harder to recruit than at any point in the sector’s history. Treating those as separate projects is why so many programmes stall. Corinna Pommerening’s argument, set out in “New Leadership im Finanzsektor” (Springer Gabler, 2020; second edition 2022), is that leadership culture and employer brand are the same problem in a regional bank. Courage and responsibility have to move down from the executive layer, silo working has to give way to networked teams, and the institution has to become legible to the talent it wants. Her second book, “Digitale Regionalokonomie” (GABAL Verlag, 2023), extends the case to the regional economy these banks sit inside. The work has institutional grounding. She sits on the customer advisory board of Hamburger Sparkasse, Germany’s largest savings bank, co-founded Ecosystems 4 Business AG, and runs the “Leadership neu gedacht!” podcast across more than 140 episodes with senior practitioners in the financial sector. A certified employer brand manager and guest lecturer at the University of Wismar, she works in German and English, with formats running from board-level keynote to executive working session. What she gives a Sparkassen, Volksbank, or Mittelstand executive team is rare in the wider speaker market: an authoritative outside voice that already understands the regulatory, cultural and talent context they operate in, and that has written the book on the leadership shift the institution has to make. Key speaking topics New leadership in the financial sector Leadership culture in mid-market and regional banks Employer branding for the Mittelstand Future skills and workforce capability Digital and cultural transformation in regional economies Distributed responsibility and networked working Ideal for Executive boards and supervisory boards of Sparkassen, cooperative banks and regional commercial banks CHROs and HR directors in mid-market financial institutions Mittelstand CEOs running combined leadership and talent agendas Regional economic development bodies and bank-association events Audience outcomes A clearer read on why leadership culture and employer brand fail when run as separate programmes A working model for moving responsibility and decision-making down through a bank’s hierarchy Specific positions to take on future skills, lifelong learning and knowledge-sharing inside the institution A view of the regional bank as part of a regional economic ecosystem, not an isolated operator Language that supervisory boards and executive committees can use to align on the leadership shift

Why organisations work with Cy Wakeman She quantifies the cost of workplace drama in hours and dollars, giving HR and operations leaders a financial case for cultural change that executive committees actually fund. Her Reality-Based Leadership method directly contradicts the dominant engagement-survey playbook, which makes her useful to organisations whose engagement scores rise while performance does not. Four books, including the New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, give her a coherent body of work that scales beyond the keynote into manager training, coaching, and certification. She has been ranked the world’s #1 leadership guru on the Global Gurus list for three consecutive years and is a 2024 inductee into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame, placing her in the top tier of professional platform speakers globally. Her client roster spans Google, Meta, Pfizer, NASA, Bank of America, NBCUniversal, and major US health systems, which gives her language credibility across both highly regulated and high-growth environments. Biography highlights Founder of Reality-Based Leadership, an executive coaching and culture consultancy operating since 2001. Author of Reality-Based Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace (2013), No Ego (2017), and Life’s Messy, Live Happy (2022). Ranked #1 on the Global Gurus Top 30 Leadership Professionals list in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Certified Speaking Professional and 2024 inductee into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame via the Council of Peers Award of Excellence. Regular contributor to Forbes, Success, Huffington Post, and Thrive Global; featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, and SHRM. Clients include Google, Meta, Pfizer, NASA, NBCUniversal, Bank of America, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford Health Care. Biography Most organisations treat engagement as the answer to cultural underperformance. Wakeman’s research argues the opposite. Engagement without accountability produces entitlement, and the cost shows up as emotional waste: gossip, venting, resistance, and rehearsed grievance that her work estimates at roughly two and a half hours per employee per day. That framing is the spine of Reality-Based Leadership, the consultancy she founded in 2001 and the title of her 2010 Jossey-Bass book. The follow-up, The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, reached the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. No Ego in 2017 sharpened the argument: leaders should stop arguing with reality on behalf of their teams and start coaching people to work within it. Her client roster covers the full span where this argument lands hardest. Google, Meta, and NBCUniversal on the high-growth side. Pfizer, NASA, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford Health Care on the regulated and mission-driven side. The work tends to follow a familiar pattern: senior teams that have invested heavily in culture programmes, with strong engagement scores and stubbornly weak performance, retention, or change-readiness. Recognition has tracked the substance. The Global Gurus list ranked her #1 leadership professional in 2021, 2022, and 2023. In 2024 the National Speakers Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame through the Council of Peers Award of Excellence, a designation held by fewer than 300 speakers worldwide. Key speaking topics Reality-Based Leadership Workplace drama and emotional waste Accountability cultures Employee engagement that produces results Change readiness No-ego leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of culture working on the gap between engagement scores and performance. Senior operating leaders dealing with change fatigue and low accountability in their teams. Healthcare, financial services, and regulated-sector executives managing retention and frontline morale at scale. Manager populations being trained out of conflict-avoidance and into direct, accountable conversations. Audience outcomes A concrete language for naming and pricing the cost of workplace drama in their own teams. Practical tools to redirect employee energy from grievance into contribution. A working distinction between engagement and accountability, and why most cultural investment confuses the two. A coaching approach for managers facing resistance to change without escalating conflict. Permission to stop arguing with reality on behalf of their teams and start leading inside it.

Why organisations work with Dan Hunt He has built the performance engine, not just coached inside one. The GB women’s endurance programme he took over in 2005 went from uncompetitive to delivering Olympic medals in under three years. His career is a rare controlled experiment in whether performance infrastructure transfers. He has run it in track cycling, professional road cycling at Team Sky, Premier League academy football, Olympic snow sports, and now GB Surfing. Q Division, the innovation unit he set up at British Ski and Snowboard, is a concrete example of how a small, properly scoped R and D function finds gains a larger organisation would miss. He speaks with specific case material from environments where the scoreboard is public and unforgiving, which is closer to the conditions a senior leadership team actually operates in than most sport-to-business framing allows. Biography highlights Led the turnaround of the Great Britain women’s endurance cycling programme from 2005, contributing to Olympic medals at Beijing 2008. Coached the GB men’s team pursuit to Olympic gold at London 2012. Appointed Sports Director at Team Sky for the 2013 season, during the period of consecutive Tour de France wins. Head of Elite Performance at the Premier League, working on academy performance systems. Performance Director at British Ski and Snowboard across alpine, freestyle, snowboard, cross-country, ski jumping, speed skiing and telemark; founded Q Division, the federation’s innovation unit. Executive Performance Director of GB Surfing from 2023. Biography Most organisations can point to a period of good results. Far fewer can explain why those results held, or why they did not. The distinction matters because the job of a senior leader is rarely to produce a single peak. It is to build the thing that produces peaks repeatedly. That is the problem Hunt has spent his career on. In 2005 he took over a Great Britain women’s endurance cycling programme that was not competitive, and inside three years it was delivering Olympic medals. He then switched to the men’s team pursuit and the group won gold at London 2012. The common thread across both was not a single charismatic intervention. It was an explicit, transferable system for how talent, coaching, data and decision rights fit together. Team Sky appointed him Sports Director for the 2013 season, a period that coincided with consecutive Tour de France wins. He went on to run elite performance at the Premier League, working on academy-stage talent systems, and then joined British Ski and Snowboard as Performance Director. There he built Q Division, a small innovation unit focused on the kind of marginal gains that a federation structure usually cannot produce on its own. In 2023 he took on the Executive Performance Director role at GB Surfing, now building the same architecture in a sport with almost no existing elite infrastructure in Britain. What makes Hunt useful in a boardroom is not a stock set of sport analogies. It is that he has rebuilt performance systems in five very different contexts, and can be specific about what travels, what does not, and why senior teams routinely misread the difference. Key speaking topics High-performance systems design Leadership under competitive pressure Talent pathways and academy development Culture change in medal-winning environments Marginal gains and performance innovation units Coaching teams through succession and reinvention Transfer of elite-sport practice to business leadership Ideal for CEO and board offsites framing a multi-year performance or culture reset CHROs and talent leads rebuilding pathways, academies, or internal development systems Leadership teams under acute competitive pressure where results are public Transformation leads accountable for sustained, not one-off, performance uplift Audience outcomes A sharper distinction between one-off results and a system that produces them repeatedly Specific case material from five elite programmes, not generic sport-to-business analogy A clearer view of how small innovation units earn their keep inside a larger organisation A working mental model for the handover points where high-performance cultures most often break

Why organisations work with Dave Ulrich The four-domain architecture of human capability, talent, leadership, organisation, and the HR function, is Ulrich’s own framework. It gives business and HR leaders a single integrated taxonomy for what is otherwise a sprawl of disconnected people and organisation initiatives, and a structured way to decide which investments will actually move stakeholder outcomes. The Human Resource Competency Study, now in its eighth round across 35 years, has cumulatively drawn on more than 100,000 respondents. Round 7 produced the headline finding that organisational capability has four times the business impact of individual talent. Round 8 sharpens the picture: HR department capability and the organisational capabilities HR helps build have six to eight times the business impact of individual HR competencies. Ulrich brings these findings into the room directly, not via a citation. Ulrich is the originator of the HR Business Partner model that most large organisations still operate today. Engaging him is not external validation of the existing model. It is access to the next-generation architecture, including the Organization Guidance System diagnostic that has now been run inside more than 500 organisations. The Leadership Capital Index reframes leadership quality as a measurable asset that investors and boards can rate the way Moody’s rates credit. For boards under increasing pressure to disclose human capital substance, not narrative, this is one of the few frameworks built explicitly for that conversation. Induction into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, alongside HR Magazine’s «father of modern HR» designation and recognition as the most influential HR thinker of the decade, places him among the small group of figures who have demonstrably shaped a field rather than contributed to one. Biography highlights Rensis Likert Professor Emeritus, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Co-founder and partner, The RBL Group Author of more than 30 books including Human Resource Champions (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), The Leadership Capital Index (Berrett-Koehler, 2015), Victory Through Organization (McGraw-Hill, 2017), and Reinventing the Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019) Editor, Human Resource Management journal, 1990 to 1999; Distinguished Fellow, National Academy of Human Resources Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2017; HR Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award, 2012, source of the «father of modern HR» designation; named most influential HR thinker of the decade by HR Magazine Lead architect of the Human Resource Competency Study (eight rounds, 35-plus years, more than 100,000 cumulative respondents) and the Organization Guidance System diagnostic (more than 500 organisations) Active global platform: more than 400,000 LinkedIn followers and a weekly newsletter with more than 230,000 subscribers, with weekly posts routinely reaching 50,000 to 70,000 views Biography HR is not about HR. The phrase is Ulrich’s own. It captures the through-line of three decades of work: that the HR function exists to deliver value to every stakeholder the organisation touches, not to perfect its own processes. Employees and executives inside. Customers, investors, and communities outside. The discipline he calls human capability is the architecture that connects them. That architecture has four domains, each backed by its own research base. Talent covers how organisations acquire, develop, and retain full contributors, now framed by Ulrich as Talent Advantage = AI × HI, artificial intelligence multiplied by human ingenuity. Organisation treats the company as a set of capabilities: agility, culture, innovation, strategic clarity, collaboration, and customer connection. These can be prioritised through the Organization Guidance System, now deployed in more than 500 companies. Leadership draws on the Leadership Code research with more than 30,000 respondents, and on the Leadership Capital Index, which gives boards and investors a measurable framework for leadership quality. The HR function rests on the 35-year Human Resource Competency Study, with more than 100,000 cumulative respondents, and shapes the operating models, practices, and competencies HR uses today. The practical consequences of this work have shaped how HR is organised. Human Resource Champions (1997) introduced the four-role model, strategic partner, change agent, administrative expert, and employee champion, that became the template for HR business partnering inside Fortune 500 organisations. The Leadership Capital Index (2015) made the case that leadership quality can be rated the way credit is rated. Victory Through Organization (2017) was the empirical headline: organisational capability has roughly four times the business impact of individual talent. Round 8 of the HRCS sharpens that further: the HR department and the organisational capabilities it helps build have six to eight times the business impact of individual HR competencies. Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor Emeritus at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a partner at The RBL Group. He has worked with more than half of the Fortune 200 across more than 80 countries. He was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2017, and was named «father of modern HR» by HR Magazine in its 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award. His weekly LinkedIn posts reach more than 400,000 followers and 230,000 newsletter subscribers. That audience is how much of the global HR and business community engages with his current work in real time. Key speaking topics Stakeholder value through human capability The four domains of HR: talent, leadership, organisation, and the HR function HR transformation and the next-generation HR Business Partner model Organisational capability as competitive advantage Leadership Capital Index and leadership as a board-level asset The HR inflection point: AI, analytics, and the future of the HR function Culture transformation and organisational design Ideal for CEOs and executive teams looking for a single integrated language across talent, leadership, organisational capability, and the HR function CHROs and senior HR teams whose remit now spans stakeholder outcomes across employees, customers, investors, and communities Boards and investors who need a measurable framework for the human capability behind market value Transformation leads redesigning the HR operating model and the cross-functional accountabilities that sit alongside it across business leaders, HR, and employees Audience outcomes The four-domain human capability framework as a single integrated language for talent, leadership, organisation, and HR investment, replacing the disconnected list of HR programmes most teams are working from The empirical case for why organisational and capability investments outperform individual talent investments, drawn directly from HRCS and OGS findings A diagnostic logic for deciding which human capability investments will move customer share, investor confidence, and community standing, not just employee engagement scores A practical model for measuring leadership quality that can be defended in an investor or board conversation A clear position from which CHROs and CEOs can present HR as a leading indicator of business performance rather than a lagging cost

Why organisations work with Debra Corey She built the Engagement Bridge, a ten-element model set out in Build It (Wiley, 2018) and road-tested across Reward Gateway’s client base. It gives HR and executive teams a shared diagnostic for where engagement is actually breaking. Her Bad Bosses Ruin Lives work names ten specific manager archetypes and the behaviours that produce them. It gives senior leaders a way to talk about poor management without it becoming personal. She has sat in the seat, twenty-plus years of senior HR roles at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway. The case studies she uses are operational, not theoretical. HR Magazine ranked her on its Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021, and Inspiring Workplaces has named her on its Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencers list for multiple years running. She writes and speaks as a practitioner. Her six books give leadership teams a common vocabulary for engagement, recognition, values, and HR communication that outlasts the keynote. Biography highlights Author or co-author of six books on engagement, recognition, values, leadership, and HR communication, published with Wiley and Kogan Page among others. Creator of the Engagement Bridge model and the Great Boss Building Block framework. Former senior HR leader at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway. Founder of DebCo HR Ltd (operating as Step It Up HR), established 2019. Ranked on HR Magazine’s HR Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021. Named Employee Benefits Professional of the Year by Employee Benefits Magazine. Biography Most organisations know their engagement scores are soft. Fewer can say where the break is, whether it sits in recognition, in values, in manager behaviour, or in how HR itself communicates. Debra Corey’s working career has been spent inside that diagnostic question. Twenty-plus years in senior HR at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway gave her a view across retail, pharma, manufacturing, hospitality, and HR tech. In 2019 she left corporate life and founded DebCo HR, operating as Step It Up HR, to work on the same problem from the outside. The Engagement Bridge model, set out in Build It: The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement (Wiley, 2018, with Glenn Elliott), is the framework most associated with her. It breaks engagement into ten concrete elements, from purpose and reward through to manager behaviour, and gives HR and executive teams a shared way to identify which element is actually failing. Her later books push into specific pieces of that terrain: Appreciate It! on recognition, Bringing Your Values Out to Play on operationalising values, and Bad Bosses Ruin Lives (2023, with Ken Corey) on the ten archetypes of poor management. HR Magazine placed her on its Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021, and she has featured repeatedly on Inspiring Workplaces’ Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencers list. The through-line across the books, the consultancy, and the speaking is narrow and deliberate: make the gap between HR design and daily behaviour smaller. Key speaking topics Employee engagement and the Engagement Bridge model Employee recognition and appreciation Organisational values in practice Manager effectiveness and the Great Boss Building Block Workplace culture and employee experience HR communication and the IMPACT model Ideal for CHROs, Reward Directors, and People and Culture leads designing or resetting engagement and recognition programmes Executive teams where engagement or culture scores have stalled and the board wants a diagnostic, not a pep talk Organisations rolling out revised values or manager-capability frameworks and needing external credibility behind the launch HR conferences, leadership off-sites, and people-manager summits where the audience is operational, not theoretical Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for engagement rooted in the ten elements of the Engagement Bridge A working view of where recognition programmes typically fail and what a working one looks like A practical read on the ten bad-boss archetypes and the behaviours that produce each A method for moving organisational values from poster to operating practice Named examples from Gap, Honeywell, Merlin Entertainments, Reward Gateway, and the wider client base in her books

Why organisations work with Grace Lordan She runs the only research centre of its kind inside a top-tier university focused on bringing behavioural science to inclusion at firm level, The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, which gives her findings weight that internal DEI teams cannot generate alone. Her work tells senior leaders which interventions actually shift hiring, promotion, and retention data, and which ones look good in a values statement but fail under measurement. She speaks the language of CFOs and boards, linking inclusion to productivity and performance, which is what gets budget approved and kept. She brings a practical behavioural toolkit, nudges, structured decision design, debiased processes, that leaders can install rather than aspire to. Her Penguin book Think Big has built a wide reader base among professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with her frame for individual career design, which makes the organisational material land faster. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science. Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, the research centre she established in 2020. Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science at LSE. Author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want (Penguin Life, 2021). Served on the UK government’s Skills and Productivity Board and the BEIS social mobility taskforce; advisory board member of the Women in Finance Charter. Contributor to Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and Reuters; host of the Work FORCE podcast. Biography Inclusion work inside firms has a credibility problem. Budgets have grown for a decade, yet most leadership teams struggle to show a clean line between their interventions and real movement in who gets hired, promoted, and retained. That is the gap Grace Lordan has built a career around closing. She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and the founding director of The Inclusion Initiative, the LSE research centre she established in 2020 to bring behavioural science into how firms actually design talent decisions. Her research tests which interventions move the numbers and which do not, across hiring screens, promotion processes, and team composition. The work is published in peer-reviewed journals and picked up by Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. She also directs the LSE MSc in Behavioural Science, teaches corporate decision-making to executive students, and has advised the UK government on skills, productivity, and social mobility. Her Penguin book Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want applies the same evidence base to individual career design, which is why professional audiences often encounter her ideas before they meet her in the room. What senior buyers get is someone who can talk to a CHRO about process design, to a CFO about productivity, and to a board about where their inclusion spend is working. The argument is built on evidence from an LSE research centre, not consultancy generalities. Key speaking topics Inclusion as a measurable driver of firm productivity Behavioural science applied to hiring and promotion decisions Designing teams for performance and progression The future of work and skills in a changing labour market Women’s progression and the economics of the gender gap Evidence-based leadership and debiased decision-making Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent responsible for moving measurable inclusion outcomes CEOs and boards allocating budget to DEI and wanting to know what actually works Financial services and professional services leadership teams working under the Women in Finance Charter or equivalent progression commitments Executive audiences across government, policy, and regulated sectors addressing skills and social mobility Audience outcomes A sharper read on which inclusion interventions have evidence behind them and which do not Specific behavioural design moves leaders can apply to hiring, promotion, and team decisions Language that connects inclusion to productivity and performance for CFO and board conversations A clearer view of where the future of work is moving for skills, talent pipelines, and progression Confidence to retire activities that signal good intent but fail on measurement

Why organisations work with Maria Luisa Mariscal de Körner She addresses migrant and diaspora communities as both a workforce question and a consumer market, the two halves most diversity speakers and most marketing speakers each cover only one of. In her work the talent function and the brand function share a single conversation, which is rare. As a German immigration lawyer (Dr. iur.), she advises employers on what changed under the 2026 update to the Skilled Immigration Act: higher EU Blue Card salary thresholds and tighter compliance duties, translated into hiring decisions rather than general legal commentary. Operating experience in market entry, not analysis from outside the process. Her consultancy has advised foreign companies establishing operations in Germany, and German employers recruiting internationally, since 2014. A legally grounded case that cultural difference creates value twice over: in the workforce a company builds and in the market it sells to. Biography highlights Doctorate in law (Dr. iur.) with a focus on economics, diversity, and law, from the University of Würzburg; LL.M. in German and international law (magna cum laude); study in Bolivia and Germany. Teaches ethno-marketing and intercultural management at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences (Kleve), and has lectured since 2008 across nine institutions on three continents. Founder since 2014 of Malu Mariscal, Innovation und Vielfalt, advising on market entry into Germany, international recruiting, and diversity and intercultural management. Author of four specialist and academic books and the bilingual children’s book “Der Herrscher der Berge: Eine unglaubliche Reise”, which addresses prejudice and difference. Co-founder of a migrant women’s network and initiator of free legal-advice services at universities; recognised with the first Bavarian Integration Award (2012) as part of the Würzburg theatre group Tschungulung. Winner of the first Bavarian Integration Award (Bayerischer Integrationspreis, 2012), as part of the Würzburg theatre group Tschungulung, recognised by the Bavarian Landtag and Integration Council. Works with a network of more than 200 advisors and freelancers across three continents; presents in German, English, and Spanish. Biography Most organisations treat migration as one problem: a recruiting and integration task solved once, at the point of hire. But the same communities a company recruits from are also markets it sells to, and the two functions almost never share data or a strategy. Maria Luisa Mariscal de Körner works on that gap. She is a German immigration lawyer and a Dr. iur. from the University of Würzburg, with an LL.M. in German and international law. Her doctorate focused on economics, diversity, and law. She has lectured since 2008 at nine institutions on three continents, and now teaches ethno-marketing and intercultural management at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Kleve. That grounding carries into current practice. The 2026 update to the Skilled Immigration Act raised EU Blue Card salary thresholds and tightened employer compliance, and her consultancy, Malu Mariscal, Innovation und Vielfalt, advises foreign companies entering Germany and German employers recruiting internationally on what those rules mean operationally. She works with a network of more than 200 advisors and freelancers across three continents. Her argument to leaders is concrete: cultural difference creates value in two directions at once, in the workforce a company builds and in the market it sells to. It does so only when the organisation removes the legal and cultural friction that keeps both at the edges. Key speaking topics The diaspora dividend: migration as workforce and as market Skilled-worker immigration law and employer compliance under the 2026 Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz Market entry into Germany: where international companies actually fail Diversity as an innovation lever, not a compliance line Leading multicultural, multigenerational teams in the AI era Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent acquisition internationalising the workforce Marketing and brand leaders weighing diaspora and migrant communities as consumer markets Boards and executive teams in German-speaking markets reviewing international hiring strategy DEI leads who need a partner grounded in legal and economic detail, not awareness training Audience outcomes A single operating view of diaspora communities across talent and marketing, instead of two separate HR and brand problems A read on what the 2026 Skilled Immigration Act changes mean for their own hiring decisions, not just their legal team’s The specific points where international companies fail entering the German market, and the legal and cultural reasons why A legal and economic case for cultural difference as an innovation driver, distinct from a compliance argument

Why organisations work with Eleanor Mills She has built the most detailed evidence base in the UK on ABC1 women aged 45 to 60, including partnership research with HSBC on midlife female entrepreneurs and with Accenture on the economic power of women over 45. She names a category most boardrooms still treat as a footnote, the “Queenager”, and gives employers and brands a working vocabulary for talent retention, marketing strategy and product design aimed at this group. She has 22 years of editorial authority at The Sunday Times, including running the magazine when it won Supplement of the Year at the 2018 Press Awards, which gives her communications work with senior leaders genuine craft behind it. Her book, Much More to Come (HarperCollins, 2024), turns midlife transition into a leadership story about reinvention after redundancy, divorce and caring responsibilities, the same pressures organisations are failing to design around. She convenes a 50,000-strong community at Noon, which means her insight is continually refreshed by the audience itself, not drawn from a one-off study. Biography highlights Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Noon (noon.org.uk), launched 8 March 2021. Former Editorial Director of The Sunday Times and Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, 1998 to 2020. Chair of Women in Journalism, 2013 to 2021. Author of Much More to Come (HarperCollins, 2024), a Sunday Times bestseller; co-editor of Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs (2005). Recipient of the International Alliance for Women World of Difference Award (2012); editor of the Press Awards Supplement of the Year (2018). Research partnerships with HSBC (Fearless and Thriving) and Accenture (The Rise of the Queenager). Biography The most economically active female demographic in Britain is also the one most likely to leave senior roles before reaching the top. Women aged 45 to 60 hold disposable income, household decision-making power and decades of operating experience, yet employers and consumer brands consistently underestimate both their commercial weight and their willingness to stay. This is the gap Eleanor Mills has spent the last five years documenting. After 22 years at Times Newspapers, including running The Sunday Times Magazine when it won Supplement of the Year at the 2018 Press Awards, she left in March 2020 and founded Noon on International Women’s Day 2021. Noon is now a 50,000-strong community and a research platform, with partnership studies for HSBC on midlife female entrepreneurs and Accenture on the economic power of women over 45. Her book Much More to Come (HarperCollins, 2024) extends that argument into the territory of reinvention. It draws on her own redundancy and the pressures her readers describe: menopause, divorce, empty nests, caring for elderly parents, second careers. The book reframes midlife as a productive stage organisations should design around, not write off. For a senior buyer, the value is precise. She gives a board the vocabulary, the data and the editorial sharpness to act on a workforce and consumer segment most strategy decks treat as a rounding error. Key speaking topics Women in midlife as a talent and consumer category Retention of senior women through menopause and caring years Reinvention after redundancy and career disruption Marketing and brand strategy for women over 45 Personal storytelling in leadership communication Resilience in transition Ideal for CHROs and talent leaders designing retention strategies for senior women CMOs and brand leaders targeting the over-45 female consumer Boards reviewing DEI and culture beyond entry and mid-career pipelines Leadership programmes for women navigating career and life transitions in their forties and fifties Audience outcomes A working definition of the Queenager category and what makes it commercially distinct Specific intervention points where organisations lose senior women, and what changes the curve Evidence drawn from named partnership research with HSBC and Accenture, not generic DEI argument A reframing of midlife transition as a leadership and reinvention story rather than a wellness theme