Liz Wiseman
Most organisations have more capability than they use. The people sitting in meetings are smart, experienced, and willing, yet leaders consistently extract a fraction of what their teams could contribute. The cost is invisible until a competitor moves faster with weaker talent.
Liz Wiseman is a leadership researcher and CEO of The Wiseman Group whose work shows organisations how leaders either multiply or diminish the intelligence already inside their teams.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Liz Wiseman
- She runs two distinct, primary-research-backed frameworks, Multipliers and Impact Players, that name behaviours leaders can change on Monday morning, not abstractions they have to translate.
- Her Accidental Diminisher diagnostic gives senior leaders a mirror most are not expecting: the well-intentioned habits, rescuing, idea-spraying, pacesetting, that quietly shrink their teams.
- The Impact Players research, drawn from 170 executives across ten countries, isolates the behaviours of the contributors managers actually depend on, which CHROs use to recalibrate performance criteria and promotion decisions.
- Seventeen years inside Oracle, including VP of Oracle University, mean she frames leadership in operating terms a senior corporate audience recognises immediately.
- Named the top-ranked leadership thinker by Thinkers50 in 2019 and recipient of the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2023, with continued presence on the ranking.
Biography highlights
- CEO of The Wiseman Group, Silicon Valley leadership research and executive development firm.
- Author of Multipliers (New York Times bestseller), Rookie Smarts (Wall Street Journal bestseller), and Impact Players (Wall Street Journal bestseller).
- Thinkers50 Leadership Award winner (2019); Thinkers50 Talent Award winner (2023).
- Former Vice President of Oracle University and global leader for Human Resource Development across a 17-year Oracle career.
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review and Fortune; guest lecturer at Brigham Young University and Stanford University.
- Advises and speaks for clients including Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, and Tesla.
Biography
The leader who is the smartest person in the room is often the reason no one else in the room is contributing. Liz Wiseman’s research into what she calls Multipliers and Diminishers, published in Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, isolates the specific habits that determine which one a manager becomes, often without realising. The Accidental Diminisher diagnostic that accompanies the work is now used by leadership teams across global corporations.
Before The Wiseman Group, she spent seventeen years inside Oracle, latterly as Vice President of Oracle University and global head of Human Resource Development. That operating background runs through the work. Her frameworks are written for executives who have to act on them, not academics describing them.
Impact Players, drawn from interviews with 170 executives across ten countries and surveys of 350 managers, asks a different question: what distinguishes the individual contributors that senior leaders actually rely on in high-stakes moments? The findings reshape how CHROs think about promotion, performance criteria, and the behaviours organisations should be selecting for.
She was named the top-ranked leadership thinker on the Thinkers50 list in 2019 and received the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2023. She contributes to Harvard Business Review and Fortune, and lectures at Brigham Young University and Stanford. Her client roster, Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, reflects an unusual fact: organisations with deep internal leadership capability still bring her in.
Key speaking topics
- Multiplier leadership and the Diminisher effect
- Accidental Diminisher behaviours in senior leaders
- Impact Players and high-contribution mindsets
- Leveraging collective intelligence inside teams
- Rookie Smarts and learning agility under uncertainty
- Talent identification, promotion, and performance criteria
- Executive development and leadership capability building
Ideal for
- CHROs redesigning leadership development, promotion criteria, or performance frameworks
- CEOs and senior leadership teams reviewing how they get more from existing talent
- Heads of talent and L&D building enterprise leadership programmes
- Leadership offsites for executive committees and senior management cohorts
Audience outcomes
- Recognition of the specific Diminisher behaviours senior leaders default to under pressure
- A working vocabulary for the team behaviours that drive disproportionate impact
- Diagnostic tools, including the Accidental Diminisher profile, that leaders can apply to their own management style
- Criteria for identifying and developing high-contribution individual contributors
- A revised view of where untapped capacity sits inside the existing workforce
Talks
A research-based keynote on why some leaders amplify the intelligence and capability of their teams while others, often unintentionally, suppress it.
Key takeaways:
- The five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers
- The Accidental Diminisher profiles and how well-intentioned habits diminish teams
- Practical shifts senior leaders can make to access more of the talent they already have
A keynote on the mindsets and behaviours that separate the contributors managers consistently rely on from those who simply do good work.
Key takeaways:
- The five practices of Impact Players, drawn from research with 170 executives across ten countries
- How leaders inadvertently filter out high-impact behaviour through their own management style
- What CHROs and senior leaders should be selecting and promoting for
A keynote on why learning beats knowing in fast-moving environments, and how experienced leaders can recover the mindset that made them effective when they were new.
Key takeaways:
- Why expertise becomes a liability when conditions change
- The four rookie mindsets that drive disproportionate learning speed
- How to build learning agility into senior leadership teams