Jennifer Willey
Leaders are tired and teams are out of capacity. The state that everyone keeps calling temporary has become permanent, and most leadership development was not designed for it. Organisations now need leaders who can hold a team together through the fourth restructure as steadily as the first.
Jennifer Willey helps teams keep performing through repeated change, using the five-part Fearless Fundamentals framework set out in her Pearson book, Fearless in 5.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jennifer Willey
- Fewer than 12% of National Speakers Association members hold the Certified Speaking Professional designation, and Jennifer is one of them. It is the NSA’s earned credential for platform delivery.
- The Fearless Fundamentals framework (Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage) comes from Wet Cement’s Fearless@Work Survey and a decade of programme delivery, and clients can keep running it internally after the keynote ends.
- The career arc, from TV news anchor to senior commercial leader at Yahoo, AOL and The Trade Desk to founder of a leadership development firm, gives her credibility with two audiences at once: the people running culture and the people running the business.
- Wet Cement is dual-certified as a Woman-Owned (WBENC) and Disability-Owned (Disability:IN) business and holds SBA Woman-Owned Small Business certification, which satisfies supplier diversity criteria where procurement applies them.
- Fearless in 5 was published by Pearson Business in August 2026. Wet Cement builds the book into its programme delivery, so a cohort keeps working from a shared vocabulary after the keynote.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO, Wet Cement (founded 2017); dual-certified Woman-Owned (WBENC) and Disability-Owned (Disability:IN) business
- Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), National Speakers Association
- Author, Fearless in 5 (Pearson Business, August 2026), built on the Fearless Fundamentals: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage
- Creator of the Fearless in 5 microlearning series and the Advance Women at Work practice; co-founder of WE.DOOH at the Digital Place Based Advertising Association
- More than 20 years across Yahoo, AOL, pwc, WebMD, Sharecare and The Trade Desk; earlier career as a TV news anchor and reporter for ABC and CBS affiliates
- Member of the ad:tech Tokyo advisory board and a four-time speaker there, opening day two as moderator in 2023 and 2024
- Clients include Johnson & Johnson, Nissan, Paramount, Samsung, Genentech, NBCUniversal, Comcast, NPR, Walmart and Wesco
Biography
Wet Cement works with teams on their third or fourth restructure of the year, where composure becomes the binding constraint on performance. Jenn Willey founded the firm in 2017, after more than 20 years leading sales and marketing teams at Yahoo, AOL, pwc, WebMD and The Trade Desk, and an earlier career as a TV news anchor and reporter for ABC and CBS affiliates.
The methodology is the Fearless Fundamentals framework, five capabilities: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage. It draws on Wet Cement’s Fearless@Work Survey, and has been deployed at Johnson & Johnson, Nissan, Paramount, Samsung and Genentech.
Fearless in 5 was published by Pearson Business in August 2026. Its twenty chapters sit under the five capabilities, from evicting the inner impostor to building a personal board of directors and self-advocating under bias. Pearson positions the book for professional women and for the leaders who manage them, and Wet Cement sells it into organisations as a common leadership language for a whole cohort.
Wet Cement is dual-certified as a Woman-Owned (WBENC) and Disability-Owned (Disability:IN) business, and Jenn is a Certified Speaking Professional, the National Speakers Association designation held by fewer than 12% of its members. She sits on the ad:tech Tokyo advisory board and has spoken at the conference four times, opening day two as moderator in 2023 and 2024. Her work in this region includes the Empower and Elevate Training Academy for ethnic-minority-owned businesses in Europe and the UK, delivered with ESDP and MSDUK.
Key speaking topics
- Fearless leadership and team capability under repeated change
- Self-leadership and resilience under sustained pressure
- Executive presence and confident communication for senior leaders
- Inclusive leadership beyond DEI framing
- Women’s leadership and the Advance Women at Work approach
- Career navigation, sponsorship and the personal board of directors
- Generative AI for confident communication, networking and decision-making
Ideal for
- Heads of leadership development and CHROs designing executive and senior-leader programmes for change-fatigued teams
- Executive teams and senior off-sites looking for a speaker who can also run the programme behind the keynote
- Women’s leadership networks, ERGs and high-potential cohorts that need a credible voice on confidence and self-advocacy
- Media, technology, advertising and life sciences organisations where her commercial vocabulary maps directly onto the audience
Audience outcomes
- A working version of the Fearless Fundamentals (Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage) applied to their own context
- Specific behaviours for staying composed and decisive when the brief keeps changing, drawn from the Wet Cement Fearless@Work research
- The vocabulary to coach team members through impostor patterns and self-advocacy
- A case for inclusion as a leadership capability that holds up in organisations that have stopped using DEI as a label
- A method for building and using a personal board of directors, drawn from the chapter on it in Fearless in 5
- Specific AI prompts for drafting a self-assessment, finding a mentor, and auditing their own calendar
- Ways to use generative AI as a rehearsal partner before a difficult conversation or a change announcement
Talks
A keynote arguing that confidence and adaptability are built skills, made from a career that changed direction repeatedly, from child actor on a 1980s television show and the youngest certified fitness instructor in the US to TV news anchor, IT management consultant, and tech and media executive.
Key takeaways:
- What fear costs an organisation when people stay silent and avoid intelligent risks, and the behaviours that shift it
- Methods for deciding and acting before conditions feel settled, including as AI reshapes roles and expectations
- A clearer read of your own value in place of self-doubt, with the humour in the hard parts as part of how it lands
A session for people leaders, from new managers to executives, on holding a team together through repeated change, built on Gartner’s finding that 74% of employees report lower engagement and productivity when they go through change without support.
Key takeaways:
- How fear surfaces in a team as fight, flight, fawn or freeze, and what each one looks like in performance terms
- A repeatable five-part framework for building psychological safety through empathy, structure and impact
- Generative AI applied to change messaging and to the decisions managers make during a restructure
A session on impostor patterns at work, built on Wet Cement research in which 98% of professionals reported some aspect of impostor syndrome, for all employees with a manager version available.
Key takeaways:
- What triggers impostor patterns, and the cost they carry in withheld ideas and passed-up leadership opportunities
- Tools for reframing limiting beliefs and for asking for help without losing standing
- Using AI to build confidence without outsourcing your judgement or your voice, and methods for managers whose people are held back by low confidence rather than low capability
A workshop in which participants build a named network of sponsors, mentors, peers, allies, and protégés, with a plan for approaching each one.
Key takeaways:
- Which relationship types do which work, and where the participant’s own network is thin
- Conversation openers for approaching a potential sponsor or advocate, supported by Center for Talent Innovation research that people with strong networks of mentors, sponsors, and advocates are 23% more likely to advance
- Named prospective board members, identified during the session itself
A hands-on workshop for teams who are using AI as little more than an expensive search engine, covering its use across the Fearless Fundamentals and the safe handling of proprietary information.
Key takeaways:
- Prompts for communicating more assertively, advocating for an idea and working through a complex problem
- Ways to use AI to prioritise, cut low-value work and reduce burnout
- Practice applying it inside their own workflow rather than to generic examples