JP Pawliw-Fry
Most leadership teams handle the easy 92 percent of any difficult conversation, then stop short of what actually matters. Feedback gets softened, decisions get postponed, and risks the gut already flagged go untaken. The cost shows up later as stalled change programmes, weak accountability, and capable people who quietly disengage.
JP Pawliw-Fry is a leadership researcher and bestselling author who helps senior teams close the gap between the conversations they should have under pressure and the ones they actually have.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with JP Pawliw-Fry
- He has named and quantified a problem most executive teams recognise but cannot articulate: the 7.56% of what matters most that people withhold in high-pressure moments, drawn from IHHP research with over 34,000 professionals.
- His Last 8% framework was placed in Harvard Business Review in September 2025, giving senior audiences a model with editorial credibility, not a motivational concept.
- He combines two registers most speakers do not: empirical research at scale (40,000+ surveyed monthly through IHHP) and direct coaching of Olympic athletes, Fortune 100 executives, and U.S. military leaders.
- Performing Under Pressure, co-authored with Hendrie Weisinger, sits as a New York Times bestseller and Inc. Magazine Best Business Book of the Year, and has been used inside Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, IBM and HSBC as a shared language for pressure performance.
- His teaching has been rated among the highest-scoring at Kellogg Executive Education, which means he can hold a room of senior leaders for serious content, not surface delivery.
Biography highlights
- Co-author, Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most (NYT bestseller, Inc. Magazine Best Business Book of the Year, published in 65 countries).
- Author, “The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team,” Harvard Business Review, September 2025.
- Co-founder and President, Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP), founded 1996; recognised as a Profit 100 Fastest Growing Company.
- Highest-rated lecturer at Kellogg School of Management Executive Education, Northwestern University.
- Advisor and keynote speaker for Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, HSBC, Intel, Coca-Cola, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines, NASA, plus NFL and NBA franchises.
- Host of the Last 8% Morning podcast.
Biography
The hardest part of any senior conversation is rarely the 92 percent that gets said. It is the final stretch, the feedback held back, the decision deferred, the risk left on the table. IHHP research with more than 34,000 professionals puts the average gap at 7.56 percent of what matters most. Closing that gap is the work that JP Pawliw-Fry has built his career around.
As co-founder and president of the Institute for Health and Human Potential, he runs an ongoing research programme that surveys more than 40,000 people each month on how leaders behave under pressure. That data set fed Performing Under Pressure, the New York Times bestseller he co-authored with Hendrie Weisinger, named one of Inc. Magazine’s Best Business Books of the Year and now in print across 65 countries.
He is also one of the highest-rated lecturers at Kellogg School of Management’s Executive Education programme. That matters because his audiences are usually executive committees, board offsites, and partner conferences, where the bar is set by what people will repeat in their next 1:1, not by what felt good in the room.
The work has moved on. His September 2025 Harvard Business Review article, “The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team,” set out the Last 8% framework: a model for how courageous organisations combine high accountability with high care, and the cultural conditions that let leaders step into hard conversations rather than around them. The same model now sits behind IHHP work with Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, HSBC, the U.S. Navy and Marines, NASA, and NFL and NBA franchises.
Key speaking topics
- The Last 8 Percent: leadership under pressure
- Performing under pressure
- High-performing teams and psychological safety
- Emotional intelligence in senior leadership
- Courageous conversations and accountability
- Risk-taking and decision-making in high-stakes moments
Ideal for
- Executive committees and board offsites where avoidance and unspoken disagreement are slowing decisions.
- CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior-leader programmes on accountability, feedback culture, and resilience.
- Sales and commercial leadership conferences focused on high-stakes negotiation and performance under pressure.
- Partner and managing director audiences in professional services, banking, and law where the cost of an avoided conversation is large and visible.
Audience outcomes
- A named, testable model for the moment performance breaks down under pressure, drawn from research with more than 34,000 leaders.
- A common language for the 8 percent that goes unsaid, usable inside a leadership team within days.
- Specific behavioural moves leaders can rehearse for the next high-stakes conversation, decision, or piece of feedback.
- A clearer read on how their own organisation balances accountability with care, and where that balance is breaking.
- Renewed permission to take the interpersonal risk most senior leaders know they should be taking.
Talks
A research-backed session on the conversations, decisions, and risks senior leaders avoid, and the cultural conditions that change that.
Key takeaways:
- Why the brain reads pressure as threat, and what that does to candour at the top.
- The two cultural ingredients, high accountability and high care, that separate courageous organisations from polite ones.
- A practical pattern for stepping into the last 8 percent of any conversation.
The keynote built on the NYT bestseller, focused on doing your best work in the moments that count most.
Key takeaways:
- The science of how pressure degrades judgment, attention, and connection.
- Short-form practices used by Olympic athletes and Fortune 100 executives to hold composure under load.
- How leaders can engineer pressure as fuel rather than friction.
Drawn from his September 2025 Harvard Business Review article and IHHP research with over 34,000 professionals.
Key takeaways:
- The 7.56 percent gap between what people feel they should say and what they say.
- How high-performing teams design for candour without losing care.
- Measurable shifts in delayed decisions and avoided conversations once the gap is closed.