Mike Lee
Performance and wellbeing are usually treated as separate operating problems, owned by separate functions, measured against separate scorecards. The result is a workforce being pushed for output while quietly burning out, and a leadership cadre with no shared language for what good actually looks like under pressure. Engagement scores slip, attrition climbs, and the cultural promise made to talent stops matching the daily experience of work.
Mike Lee is a performance coach and founder of MindShift Labs who helps senior leaders make wellbeing, presence and high performance the same operating discipline rather than competing ones.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mike Lee
- Direct credibility transfer from elite sport. Fifteen years coaching NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, plus Malcolm Brogdon, gives audiences a vocabulary for high performance that lands harder than any management framework.
- A useable account of mental health from the inside. Lee built his methodology while working through severe anxiety, depression and antidepressant withdrawal, which lets him talk about wellbeing without the abstraction that usually surrounds it in corporate settings.
- A specific argument about belonging. The book New Rules For The Future Of Leadership makes engagement, talent and belonging culture a single connected problem, useful for CHROs trying to defend headcount and engagement budgets in the same conversation.
- An unusually low-friction speaker for the brief. Bureau testimonials repeatedly call out preparation and adaptability, which matters when the room is a board offsite rather than a conference plenary.
Biography highlights
- Founder, MindShift Labs, a performance and leadership consultancy.
- Author, New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023).
- Fifteen years coaching elite basketball, including NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon.
- Host of The MindShift Lab podcast, with guests including Mo Gawdat (formerly Google X) and Cy Wakeman.
- Keynote and workshop client list: Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, ALPLA, and SHRM.
Biography
Elite athletes have always operated under conditions that resemble what senior corporate leaders now face every day: high stakes, public scrutiny, narrow margins between winning and losing, and almost no recovery time. The transfer of how that world handles performance is more useful to organisations than another framework borrowed from management literature.
Lee spent fifteen years inside that world. He built an international basketball training business from a college apartment and ended up working with NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon, among others. While the business grew, he was also working through severe anxiety, depression and the withdrawal from antidepressant medication. The combination of elite-performance coaching and a personal route through mental health is what shaped the methodology he now brings to corporate audiences.
That methodology is set out in New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). The book argues that engagement, the contest for talent and the felt experience of belonging are the same operating problem, and that leaders need both the composure of a mindful practitioner and the mindset of an elite athlete to address it. It draws on neuroscience, sports psychology and his own first-person experience.
Lee now runs MindShift Labs and works with companies including Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, and ALPLA, alongside professional bodies such as SHRM. His podcast, The MindShift Lab, ran twenty-nine episodes between 2021 and 2022 with guests including Mo Gawdat, formerly Chief Business Officer at Google X.
Key speaking topics
- High-performance leadership
- Engagement and belonging culture
- Mindfulness and presence at work
- Mental health and burnout
- Resilience under uncertainty
- Peak performance psychology
- Talent and retention
Ideal for
- CHROs and people leaders carrying engagement, retention and culture targets.
- Senior leadership offsites where performance and wellbeing need to be addressed in the same room.
- Sales, client-facing and high-pressure commercial teams.
- Talent and learning leads designing leadership development at the manager and director tier.
Audience outcomes
- A practical view of how elite athletes manage focus, recovery and pressure, applied to corporate conditions.
- A clearer line between belonging culture and the commercial cost of attrition.
- Specific mindfulness and presence techniques leaders can use before a high-stakes conversation, not as a wellbeing perk.
- A more honest internal language for mental health that senior leaders can use without sounding either performative or clinical.
Talks
A keynote on using presence as the precondition for performance and transformational leadership.
Key takeaways:
- Why distraction, not workload, is the binding constraint on senior performance.
- How elite athletes use attention and recovery as paired disciplines.
- A short practice leaders can run before pressure moments.
The five mindsets Lee identifies in basketball’s elite, mapped to corporate decision-making.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that separate consistent performers from intermittently brilliant ones.
- How focus is built rather than summoned.
- What a high-performance culture looks like in daily operating habits, not slogans.
The argument from Lee’s book: engagement, talent and belonging as a single connected problem.
Key takeaways:
- Why post-pandemic engagement has not recovered on its own.
- What “belonging culture” means in practical leadership behaviour.
- How leaders signal the new contract with talent without overpromising.
Navigating disruption, adversity and change through presence and recovery practice.
Key takeaways:
- How sustained pressure degrades decision quality, and what to do about it.
- The recovery habits elite athletes treat as non-negotiable.
- Why resilience is a team property, not an individual trait.
Practical mindfulness aimed at burnout, performance and wellbeing inside the workplace.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between mindfulness as a wellness perk and mindfulness as a leadership skill.
- How presence affects the room around a senior leader.
- Specific practices that survive contact with a packed calendar.