Employee Engagement speakers

Why organisations work with Matt Mayberry He gives leaders a working blueprint for culture, not a values exercise. Culture Is the Way sets out a Five-Step Culture-Building Process that McKinsey named a 2024 top business book. He has been ranked in the world’s Top 30 leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus on the basis of a 25,000-respondent CEO and MBA survey, which means buyers can defend the booking internally on credentials alone. His client list, JP Morgan Chase, Allstate, the FBI, DuPont, Lowe’s and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, signals that the material survives contact with regulated, high-pressure operating environments. The NFL backstory is not the act. He uses a career ended by injury in a Chicago Bears preseason opener as the opening case in a serious argument about reinvention and team behaviour, then moves to the management content quickly. He writes for the same audience that books him. Bylines in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune and Entrepreneur mean a CHRO can hand the keynote thesis to the executive team in printed form before he walks on stage. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Culture Is the Way (Wiley, 2023), named a 2024 top business book by McKinsey & Company and featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Book Club. USA Today bestselling author of The Transformational Leader (Wiley, 2024). Ranked in the Top 30 global leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus. Former Chicago Bears linebacker, signed 2010; college career at Indiana University, recipient of the 2009 Howard Brown Award. Featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur and Chief Executive; broadcast credits with NBC, ABC, Fox Business and ESPN. Client roster includes JP Morgan Chase, Allstate, the FBI, DuPont, Lowe’s, Optum, Fifth Third Bank, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, Phillips 66 and Mack Trucks. Biography Most culture work fails for the same reason. It treats culture as the warm story an organisation tells itself, not the set of repeated behaviours that determine whether the strategy lands. Mayberry’s Culture Is the Way (Wiley, 2023) is built around that distinction, and it is why McKinsey selected it as a 2024 top business book and Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Club picked it up. The argument has a structure. The Five-Step Culture-Building Process forces senior teams to define the behaviours they want to see, hold leaders accountable for them in public, and connect those behaviours to commercial outcomes. The Transformational Leader (Wiley, 2024), a USA Today bestseller, extends the work into how senior leaders model what they ask of others. Both books sit in front of an audience that includes JP Morgan Chase, the FBI, DuPont and Lowe’s. The credibility on stage comes partly from how the path began. Mayberry signed with the Chicago Bears in 2010 and lost the career to an ankle fracture in the preseason opener against the San Diego Chargers. He uses that moment briefly, as a way into the operating point about how teams rebuild after a setback, then moves to the management material. Global Gurus has placed him in the world’s Top 30 leadership thought leaders on the strength of that combined work. What organisations get is a senior practitioner who has translated the language of high-performing teams into something a CHRO, COO or transformation lead can put to work on Monday. The bylines in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune and Entrepreneur are the public evidence; the Five-Step Process is the working tool. Key speaking topics Workplace culture as an operating system Transformational leadership Employee engagement and team performance Change and disruption Peak performance and resilience Sales performance Leadership in the age of AI Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading culture and engagement programmes COOs and transformation leads accountable for cultural execution of a strategy Sales leadership conferences and revenue kickoffs Senior leadership teams running off-sites on team performance and behavioural alignment Audience outcomes A working definition of culture that connects daily behaviour to commercial outcome, drawn from the Five-Step Culture-Building Process A clearer view of what transformational leadership requires from senior leaders, beyond inspirational language Specific moves for rebuilding engagement when the workforce is fatigued by repeated change A vocabulary for how high-performing teams handle setback and recovery A short list of behaviours to take back to the executive team and operationalise

Why organisations work with Melissa Majors She gives managers a behavioural model, not a values statement. The seven habits in her book are written for the team-lead who has fifteen minutes between meetings, not for the chief diversity officer. She speaks from operator credibility, having rebuilt the education function at Ellucian for more than half a million clients and partners and run global education at Meeting Professionals International. She makes inclusion commercially legible. The argument she lands with senior buyers is innovation, retention and team output, which keeps the conversation alive when political appetite for DEI has cooled. She brings packaged IP, in’klooded for strategic planning and Community Keynotes for surfacing ideas, that clients can put to work after the keynote rather than translating principles into practice on their own. Biography highlights Author, The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders; also author of Help Them Thrive: Leadership Coaching for Humans Leading Humans. Former Director, Global Education Services, Ellucian; former Director of Global Education, Meeting Professionals International. Career across Nationwide Insurance, Wells Fargo and HD Vest Financial Services before moving into education and consulting. Founder of Melissa Majors Consulting; creator of the in’klooded inclusive strategic planning methodology and Community Keynotes. Advanced study in strategy and innovation at Harvard University; guest lecturer in leadership and inclusion at San Diego State University. Featured contributor and subject in Forbes, Smart Meetings, PCMA Convene and The Meeting Professional. Biography Most inclusion programmes were built for a different political climate. They assumed senior sponsorship would hold, that the language would be uncontested, and that managers would translate principles into practice. None of that is reliable now. The work that survives is the work that turns inclusion into something a busy manager can do, repeatedly, without thinking of it as a programme at all. That is the territory Melissa Majors has spent more than two decades inside. She ran global education at Meeting Professionals International and rebuilt the education services function at Ellucian, where she was responsible for more than 500,000 clients and partners. Before that, her career sat inside Nationwide Insurance, Wells Fargo and HD Vest Financial Services. The pattern is consistent: large, regulated, performance-measured organisations where culture work has to justify itself in operating terms. Her book The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders is the spine of her speaking work. It reframes inclusion as a set of repeatable behaviours, including how decisions get made, how empathy is applied tactically, and how dissent is invited rather than tolerated. The companion methodologies, in’klooded for strategic planning and Community Keynotes for idea generation, give clients something to use after the room clears. She has been featured in Forbes, Smart Meetings, PCMA Convene and The Meeting Professional, and lectures on leadership and inclusion at San Diego State University. The work she is booked for is straightforward: take inclusion off the values poster and put it back into the operating practice of managing a team. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership as everyday management practice Behavioural habits of high-performing inclusive teams Women’s leadership and progression Manager effectiveness and team performance Psychological safety and team trust Talent retention through inclusion Tactical empathy in leadership Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and heads of L&D rebuilding inclusion programmes for a more contested environment People-leader populations: front-line managers, mid-level leaders and newly promoted team leads Women’s leadership networks and ERGs inside large organisations Member associations and professional bodies addressing the meetings, events and education sectors Audience outcomes A behavioural model managers can apply in the next team meeting, not after the next training cycle Language for inclusion that holds up commercially when sponsorship has cooled A clearer read on where current inclusion efforts are stalling and which habits would shift them Practical mechanisms for surfacing dissent and quieter voices inside decision-making

Why organisations work with Michael Brenner His core argument; that empathy outperforms authority as both a marketing and a leadership lever, is grounded in practitioner experience inside SAP and NewsCred, not academic research; senior leaders engage with it as a claim someone has actually lived, not theorised His book Mean People Suck gives CMOs and CHROs a shared language for the link between culture, employee engagement, and revenue outcomes, making it useful in conversations that usually stay siloed The “Champion Leader” model is a named, transferable alternative to command-and-control management: specific enough to teach, tested across both large enterprises and early-stage startups His content marketing work is anchored in a measurable ROI framework from The Content Formula, translating content investment into financial terms for leaders who need to justify budgets to the CFO, not just the marketing team He has operated on both sides of the client-agency relationship, which means his diagnosis of where organisations waste marketing spend carries a credibility most single-perspective speakers cannot match Biography highlights CEO and Founder of Marketing Insider Group, a content marketing agency serving Fortune 500 brands and B2B technology companies Former VP of Global Content Marketing Strategy at SAP and Head of Strategy at NewsCred Author of three books: Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life (2019), The Content Formula, and Digital Marketing Growth Hacks Named Top CMO Influencer by Forbes and Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post Contributor to Forbes, The Economist, and The Guardian; contributor at Content Marketing Institute Featured in Entrepreneur Magazine; facilitated content strategy workshops for MarketingProfs Biography Most organisations treat their marketing problem as a content problem. The more accurate diagnosis is a leadership one: companies default to self-promotion when their customers need help, and they build management cultures that reward compliance when growth requires empathy. Michael Brenner spent two decades working from the inside of that tension – as VP of Global Content Marketing Strategy at SAP, as Head of Strategy at NewsCred, and as CMO across a series of high-growth technology startups. His 2019 book Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life argues that low employee engagement and weak marketing performance share a common root: a leadership culture that has traded empathy for authority. The research and case evidence he assembles make it a commercial argument, not a motivational one. As founder and CEO of Marketing Insider Group, Brenner has built content marketing programmes for more than 75 brands. His earlier book, The Content Formula, provides a practical ROI framework that converts content investment into financial language – useful for marketing leaders who need to make the commercial case to a CFO, not just a brand committee. His keynote work is structured around two named concepts: the “Champion Leader,” a model for leaders who close the gap between what organisations ask their teams to do and what actually drives results; and the “Bullseye Organisation,” which frames customer-centricity as a structural discipline rather than a values statement. A contributor to Forbes, The Economist, and The Guardian, and named Top CMO Influencer by Forbes and Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post, Brenner speaks across the United States and Europe, primarily to senior marketing, commercial, and leadership audiences. Key speaking topics Customer-centric marketing strategy Content marketing ROI and measurement Empathy-led leadership Employee engagement and culture The Champion Leader model Organisational alignment around the customer B2B marketing and demand generation Ideal for CMOs and marketing directors seeking a measurable framework for content marketing investment CHROs and culture leads addressing the connection between employee engagement and commercial performance CEOs and senior leadership teams weighing the limits of authority-based management B2B technology and SaaS organisations building customer-first marketing and go-to-market capabilities Audience outcomes A practitioner-built argument for why empathy is a commercial lever, with specific cases and research rather than aspiration The “Champion Leader” framework as a named, teachable model for shifting from directive to customer-oriented leadership A measurable ROI methodology for content marketing that can be used in internal budget and investment conversations A practical method for identifying where self-promotional bias is costing the business in audience reach and revenue Clearer criteria for distinguishing marketing that serves the customer from marketing that serves the organisation’s ego

Why organisations work with Michelle Rozen She brings peer-reviewed research on why goals fail, published in the Journal of Social Sciences, into a room of operators wrestling with stalled transformation. Her national study of 5,000 US professionals on AI adoption reframes the resistance problem from a technology question to a psychology question, which is where most enterprise AI programmes are actually losing ground. Branded, teachable frameworks (The 6% Club, the 0-10 Rule, The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI) give a leadership team shared language to use after the keynote, not a one-time message. A repeat client list across Fortune 100 and 500 organisations, including Pfizer, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and Merrill Lynch, signals she translates the research into something senior leadership groups will sit with for ninety minutes and then apply on Monday. Biography highlights PhD and Master’s in psychology; founder of the Dr. Rozen Institute. Author of The 6% Club (Wiley, 2024), a USA Today bestseller. Author of 2 Second Decisions and The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI. Research on goal execution published in the Journal of Social Sciences. Huffington Post contributor; quoted across NBC, ABC, FOX News and CNN. Repeat speaker for Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, IKEA and Illumina. Biography Most change programmes do not fail at the strategy layer. They fail at the point where a senior team has decided what should happen and a wider workforce, already worn down by previous change, has to make it real. Rozen’s work sits squarely on that point of failure. She is a behavioural scientist trained at masters and doctoral level in psychology, and her published research in the Journal of Social Sciences was the empirical basis for what became her best-known framework, The 6% Club. The headline finding from that research is uncomfortable for any leadership team running a transformation: of people who publicly commit to a change, only six percent sustain it past a month. The 6% Club, published by Wiley in 2024, took that finding into the boardroom. It became a USA Today bestseller and the spine of how she now works with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients including Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Johnson and Johnson, and Merrill Lynch. Her newer work follows the same logic into the AI conversation. A national study of five thousand US professionals, summarised in The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI, treats the AI adoption problem as psychological rather than technical. The point a senior buyer cares about is that this reframes where the bottleneck sits: not in the technology stack, but in the human response to it. What distinguishes her from the broader change-keynote field is the apparatus around the talk. Named frameworks, peer-reviewed research, a publishing record at a major business press, an institute under her name, and a Huffington Post column give a leadership team something to reach for after the room empties. The 6% problem is the one she has built her career on naming. Her contribution is giving senior leaders a defensible, research-grounded way to do something about it. Key speaking topics Behavioural science of organisational change The psychology of AI adoption and resistance Decision-making under pressure Goal execution and follow-through inside large organisations Leadership through restructure and uncertainty Motivation and influence at the team level Ideal for CHROs, transformation leads and change directors running multi-year restructures with stalled adoption. CIOs, CDOs and AI programme owners trying to move enterprise AI from pilot to operational use. Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is execution, not strategy. Sales and commercial leadership groups working on influence, decision-making and habit change in client-facing teams. Audience outcomes A research-backed account of why most change initiatives stall after the launch moment, and what a leader can do about it. Named frameworks (The 6% Club, the 0-10 Rule) the audience can use in their own teams without further translation. A specific reading of where AI adoption is actually breaking inside their organisation, drawn from her 5,000-professional study. Sharper language for talking to a tired workforce about another wave of change without losing credibility.

Why organisations work with Mike Abrashoff He has a documented operational turnaround, not a theory. As Commander of USS Benfold he cut turnover to 1 percent, tripled the promotion rate, reduced operating expenses by 25 percent, and won the Spokane Trophy for combat readiness, all with the crew he inherited. His book It’s Your Ship (Grand Central Publishing) has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is read in corporate leadership programmes as well as in the military. Senior teams leave with a vocabulary their middle managers already recognise. He translates the turnaround into a method, not a sea story. Aegis Performance Group, the consulting firm he founded, runs follow-on work with client teams after the keynote, so the material gets operationalised rather than admired. His prior role as Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense William J. Perry gives him a top-of-organisation perspective on how senior decisions land on the people meant to execute them. He speaks to both ends of the chain credibly. Biography highlights Former US Navy Commander; took command of USS Benfold at 36 as the most junior commanding officer in the Pacific Fleet. Within twelve months, USS Benfold was ranked best ship in the Navy on performance metrics, with turnover at 1 percent, promotion rate tripled, and operating expenses cut by 25 percent. USS Benfold won the Spokane Trophy for the highest degree of combat readiness in the Pacific Fleet. Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense William J. Perry prior to taking command of Benfold. Author of It’s Your Ship (Grand Central Publishing), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller with more than 1.3 million copies sold, plus follow-on titles It’s Our Ship and Get Your Ship Together. Founder of Aegis Performance Group; work referenced in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and The New York Times. Biography USS Benfold was one of the worst-performing ships in the United States Pacific Fleet when Mike Abrashoff took command of it at 36. He was the most junior commanding officer in the fleet, handed a destroyer with low morale and the highest turnover rate in the Navy, and a crew he had no authority to replace. Twelve months later, Benfold was rated the best ship in the Navy on its performance metrics, with the same people. The method that produced the result is the substance of his keynote and his consulting work. Turnover dropped to 1 percent. The rate of promotions tripled. Operating expenses fell by 25 percent. Benfold won the Spokane Trophy for the highest degree of combat readiness in the Pacific Fleet. The single line Abrashoff uses to describe what changed has become the title of the book that documents it: “It’s your ship.” The crew owned the outcome because the command structure made room for them to. The book, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, was published by Grand Central Publishing and went to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. It has sold more than 1.3 million copies and sits on corporate reading lists as widely as military ones. Two follow-on books, It’s Our Ship and Get Your Ship Together, extend the argument into civilian organisations. Before commanding Benfold, Abrashoff served as Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, which gives him a working understanding of how senior decisions translate into operational reality. What makes him useful in a corporate setting is not the uniform. It is that the Benfold turnaround was achieved without firing the crew, increasing the budget, or rewriting the rules of the Navy. The constraints inside which it happened look a great deal like the ones most senior leaders are operating in now. Key speaking topics Leadership and culture turnaround Employee engagement and retention Execution under constraint Accountability and ownership at every level Building high-performing teams from existing people Trust as an operating discipline Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and division heads inheriting underperforming teams or businesses. CHROs and people leaders rebuilding engagement, retention, and culture without a change of headcount. Senior leadership offsites focused on execution, ownership, and operating performance. Frontline and middle-management audiences in operationally intensive industries (manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, financial services, energy). Audience outcomes A concrete playbook for lifting performance from existing teams without changing personnel or budget. A working principle for distributing ownership down the chain without losing control of standards. A practical view of what employee engagement looks like as an operating discipline, not a survey result. A reframe of leadership in difficult conditions: from heroic intervention to systematic enablement of the people already there.

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.

Why organisations work with Mike Robbins He treats appreciation, vulnerability, and psychological safety as operational levers, not soft values, and gives leaders a vocabulary their teams can act on the next morning. He has spent twenty years inside the cultures of Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, eBay, Gap, Schwab, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar. The frame is tested against how high-stakes teams actually behave. His book Bring Your Whole Self to Work and the related TEDxBerkeley talk gave senior leaders a usable language for authenticity that does not collapse into oversharing or performance. He holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association, the top earned credential in his profession, and is one of fewer than ten percent of speakers worldwide to hold it. His perspective sits on an unusual seam: elite-level baseball at Stanford and in the Kansas City Royals system, then two decades of cultural work with serious operating companies. The room recognises the standard he is calling for. Biography highlights Author of five books, including Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together, translated into fifteen languages. Speaker at TEDxBerkeley, with three TEDx talks that have reached over 2.3 million views. Featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, and on ABC News; hosts the weekly We’re All in This Together podcast. Stanford graduate (American Studies, specialisation in race and ethnicity); pitched for Stanford in the College World Series. Drafted by the New York Yankees out of high school; played three professional seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), National Speakers Association. Biography Most teams underperform their talent. Not because the people are wrong, but because the cultural conditions around them, trust, candour, appreciation, the willingness to be honest under pressure, are weaker than the work demands. That gap is the territory Mike Robbins has worked in for twenty-five years, across more than 2,000 programmes in 17 countries. His five books, published by Hay House and translated into fifteen languages, build a coherent argument about how authenticity and appreciation operate as performance variables inside teams. Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together are the most cited. Both have moved from leadership reading lists into the working language that companies like Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar use to describe their own culture work. The intellectual frame is sharpened by an unusual background. Robbins pitched for Stanford in the College World Series and spent three seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system before injuries ended his playing career. He understands what high-performance teams demand of the people inside them, and he understands what fails. That perspective sits alongside a Stanford degree in American Studies with a specialisation in race and ethnicity, and the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. His TEDxBerkeley talk on bringing your whole self to work has reached audiences far beyond corporate stages, and his Forbes column extends the same argument into how leaders practise appreciation, navigate change, and create psychological safety without slipping into performance. The throughline is consistent: culture is not climate, it is capability, and the leaders who treat it that way get more from their people. Key speaking topics Team culture and psychological safety Authenticity and vulnerability at work Appreciation as a performance practice Emotional intelligence for leaders Belonging and inclusion inside teams Leading through change and uncertainty Trust and high-performing teams Human connection in an AI-accelerating workplace Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement and team culture after restructure or hybrid transition Senior leadership teams who want a shared language for trust, candour, and appreciation Heads of talent and learning designing culture and leadership development programmes Sales, R&D, and operating leaders responsible for the performance of large, distributed teams Audience outcomes A practical model for psychological safety that leaders can apply inside their own teams the same week Specific behaviours that turn appreciation from a soft idea into a measurable team practice A clear distinction between authenticity that builds trust and disclosure that erodes it Tools for engaging conflict directly rather than routing around it A shared team vocabulary for the cultural conditions that high performance actually depends on

Why organisations work with Mohamed Isa He has actually run the P&L. Former CFO of INOVEST B.S.C., a Bahrain Bourse-listed investment company, and former Regional Finance Manager at Unilever for the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, he speaks about service and engagement from inside the numbers. Original published work behind the commercial argument. Chai Karak: A Customer Service Story is now in its third illustrated edition and used by management teams as a discussion tool for service culture. His content rests on a published book with a specific thesis. Native bilingual delivery. Equally fluent in Arabic and English, he can hold a Gulf executive audience in either language without flattening the argument, which matters for regional events and for global firms operating across the GCC. Track record across very different rooms. Booked sessions include Google, American Express, BASF, KPMG, and SDAIA (the Saudi Authority for Data and AI), giving him unusual range across multinationals, professional services and Saudi public-sector audiences. Personal experience that earns the airtime. The 2022 Everest Base Camp trek to 5,364 metres gives him a concrete reference point for talks on persistence and pressure. The story is his own. Biography highlights Former Chief Financial Officer of INOVEST B.S.C., a Bahrain Bourse-listed investment company, with prior senior finance roles at Unilever covering the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey Author of Chai Karak: A Customer Service Story, now in its third illustrated edition, with international keynote bookings drawn from the book including Google, American Express and BASF Contributing author to The Success Blueprint alongside Brian Tracy, recognised with a Quilly Award from the National Academy of Best-Selling Authors in the United States Holds CPA, MBA and Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) credentials Trekked to Everest Base Camp at 5,364 metres, the experiential frame for his leadership keynotes Delivers in Arabic and English, with audiences including KPMG, SDAIA (Saudi Authority for Data and AI) and GGI Middle East & Africa Regional Conferences Biography In commoditised markets, the firm that competes on price loses. The firm that competes on service quality often wins on margin and retention, but most organisations cannot prove the link in their own numbers. Mohamed Isa spent more than a decade as Chief Financial Officer of INOVEST B.S.C., a Bahrain Bourse-listed investment company. Before that, he was Regional Finance Manager at Unilever, covering the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. That background gives him an unusual angle on customer experience. He argues for it in the language of revenue, retention and margin. Chai Karak: A Customer Service Story is the centre of his commercial content. Now in its third illustrated edition, the book is used by managers as a discussion tool with their teams. Customers in price-driven categories have enormous switching power, so service quality is where margin actually gets defended. The book has driven keynote bookings at Google, American Express, BASF and KPMG, alongside regional engagements with SDAIA and GGI Middle East & Africa. The Everest Base Camp trek to 5,364 metres is the experiential frame he uses for leadership material on persistence and pressure. He delivers in Arabic and English, which makes him one of the few speakers in the Gulf who can hold an executive audience in either language without simplifying the content. Key speaking topics Customer experience and commercial performance Service culture in commoditised markets Employee engagement and profitability Sales growth and profit maximisation Leadership under pressure Resilience in demanding conditions Ideal for Chief Customer Officers and customer experience leaders responsible for tying service investment to commercial outcomes Chief Sales Officers and commercial leaders facing margin pressure in commoditised markets CHROs and engagement leaders looking for an evidence-based link between people experience and revenue Regional conferences and leadership events in the GCC where audiences mix Arabic and English speakers Audience outcomes A thesis on why service quality outperforms price in defending margin in commoditised markets A worked example of how engagement levels show up in the P&L, drawn from inside CFO experience A specific tool from Chai Karak that managers can put to work with their service teams A reframing of leadership and resilience anchored in a specific endurance experience the audience has not heard before A regionally-aware perspective from a speaker who has held Gulf, multinational and US-technology audiences in both Arabic and English

Why organisations work with Nadine Chammas A working background in theatre direction, stage performance and hypnotherapy, applied to the workplace behaviours that leadership programmes usually skip: voice, presence, composure on the floor. Creator of the trademarked TLD Method, delivered as a book, certified course and retreat, which gives clients a defined system rather than a one-off keynote. Two decades operating across the GCC, with audiences in Arabic and English, and a track record of running corporate sessions on emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and executive presence. Author of The Stage is Yours, an Amazon bestseller that frames professional and personal communication through a theatre-director lens. A profile that travels in regional media: weekly counselling sessions on Al Arabiya, and a music output that gives her unusual cultural reach for a corporate trainer. Biography highlights Founder of The Life Director consultancy and creator of the TLD Method, delivered through book, certification course and retreat. BA in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, Lebanese University. Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy; certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy; certified stage hypnotist trained in Las Vegas. Founded Scenez Group Production Company (Dubai, 2000) and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy. Author of The Stage is Yours (Amazon bestseller); subsequent title The Life Director: Presence over Performance. Weekly counselling segments on Al Arabiya; 11 released songs, with two pandemic-era Arabic releases passing 1.2 million YouTube views combined. Biography Presence is a workplace skill, and most professionals are never taught it. Senior leaders are expected to hold a room, settle a difficult conversation, and stay composed under scrutiny, but the training they receive treats those behaviours as personality, not craft. Theatre treats them as craft, and that is where Nadine Chammas comes from. Trained at Lebanese University in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, she built her early career in Dubai through Scenez Group Production Company and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy, running productions across the region and teaching performance to children and adults. Alongside the theatre work she trained as a Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy, completed certification with the American Board of Hypnotherapy, and qualified as a stage hypnotist in Las Vegas. The combination is unusual: stagecraft and behavioural method, applied to how people show up at work. The Life Director is the consultancy that consolidates that work. Her TLD Method is delivered as a book, a certified practitioner course and a retreat, and is positioned for individuals, corporate audiences and educational institutions. The corporate framing is direct: communication and leadership, emotional intelligence and resilience, conflict resolution and team behaviour, executive presence, decision-making under pressure. The Stage is Yours, her Amazon bestseller, sets out the underlying argument that a working life can be approached the same way a director approaches a production. She operates across the GCC and the US, in Arabic and English, with regional media reach through weekly Al Arabiya counselling segments and a music career that runs in parallel to the corporate work. The composite makes her suited to audiences where personal credibility, communication and cultural fluency are part of the brief, not separate from it. Key speaking topics Executive presence and personal branding Communication and influence Emotional intelligence and resilience Conflict resolution and team behaviour Storytelling for leaders Women in leadership Workplace culture and engagement Ideal for HR and L&D leaders commissioning communication, presence and behavioural skills programmes. Corporate audiences across the GCC where Arabic-English fluency and regional cultural read are part of the brief. Women’s leadership networks and conferences. Professional services and client-facing teams whose work depends on how they show up in the room. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for executive presence drawn from theatre and behavioural method, not personality traits. Specific techniques for voice, composure and physical presence under pressure. A clearer sense of how to use storytelling to make a message land with a corporate audience. An honest read on the behaviours that cost senior professionals credibility, and what to do about them.

Why organisations work with Naya Antoniou She brings dual training in organisational psychology and integrative psychotherapy to workplace mental health, which sharpens her work on burnout beyond surface-level wellbeing programmes. Her career-transition practice with vulnerable populations through Doctors of the World and ActionAid Hellas gives her direct evidence of how work loss, identity and recovery interact, which translates into how she advises corporate clients on restructuring with humanity. She works across the full multigenerational stack, from Gen Z entrants to senior leaders, and treats generational tension as a culture-design question, not a stereotype-management exercise. As a Lean In Greece Circle Leader and Women on Top mentor, she has a substantive track record on women in workplace mental health and HR, useful for organisations whose inclusion work has stalled at policy level. Biography highlights Postgraduate Degree in Organisational Psychology Postgraduate Degree in Career, Executive and Business Coaching MSc in International Relations, University of Piraeus Evidence-Based Coaching certification, Athens Coaching Institute Circle Leader, Lean In Greece Network (Mental Health and HR circle) Career coach with Doctors of the World and ActionAid Hellas career transition programmes Biography Burnout has stopped being an individual diagnosis. Organisations now carry it as an operating cost: turnover, presenteeism, project slippage, the quiet attrition of people who never quite leave. Naya Antoniou’s work sits inside that operating cost, with the tools of organisational psychology and evidence-based coaching applied directly to how teams are structured, led and supported. Her training combines a postgraduate degree in Organisational Psychology with a postgraduate qualification in Career, Executive and Business Coaching, anchored by an MSc in International Relations from the University of Piraeus. Ongoing postgraduate training in Integrative Psychotherapy gives her practice a clinical grounding that is unusual in corporate coaching. The applied work spans corporate culture transformation, leadership development, and career transition programmes. With Doctors of the World, she has coached women asylum seekers rebuilding work identities from zero. With ActionAid Hellas, she has run career transition programmes for vulnerable groups facing displacement from the labour market. That work shapes how she advises corporate clients on restructure, redeployment and the human side of workforce change. Within Greece, she leads the Mental Health and HR circle of Lean In Greece and mentors with Women on Top on workplace equality. The through-line across her practice is concrete: cultures hold people when they are designed to, and fall apart when wellbeing is treated as a benefit rather than a system. Her speaking work brings that argument into rooms where leaders are deciding which to choose. Key speaking topics Multigenerational teams and Gen Z engagement Burnout and workplace mental health Psychological safety as a leadership practice Culture change in high-performance organisations Future skills for emerging leaders Career transition and workforce change Women in mental health and HR Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement strategy across five generations Leadership teams managing burnout risk during restructure or rapid growth HR and DEI leads building culture programmes that move past policy statements Founders and senior leaders of mid-sized organisations in Southern Europe scaling their first formal people function Audience outcomes A clearer view of how generational expectations shape engagement, retention and management overhead Specific moves leaders can make to install psychological safety as a working condition, not an annual survey question A working diagnostic for burnout that distinguishes individual recovery from structural cause Practical reframing of culture change as a design problem with measurable inputs

Why organisations work with Neelu Kaur She treats workplace silence as a structural problem. Most speakers in this space coach individuals to be more confident; her intervention sits in meeting design and the conversational rules that decide who gets to challenge a senior idea. The Self-Trust Recession is her named diagnosis of the moment: capable leaders, surrounded by AI and competing opinion, are second-guessing themselves and outsourcing decision authority. Her Self-Trust Reset framework is the way back. Her cross-cultural lens, the collective “we” she was raised in meeting the individualistic “I” of American corporate life, makes her credible to global and AAPI audiences who have lived that gap themselves. Her tools combine cognitive and body-based techniques. The pairing of organisational psychology training (Columbia, NYU Stern) and sixteen years of yoga and Ayurveda teaching produces practical methods her audiences can apply in the next meeting they walk into. Be Your Own Cheerleader, published by Post Hill Press in January 2023, gives her work a published thesis a senior buyer can read before commissioning. Biography highlights Author of Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, 2023), a guide to self-advocacy that addresses the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms. MA in Social and Organizational Psychology, Columbia University, and BS from NYU Stern School of Business. Certified NLP Master Practitioner and Coach, NLP Center of New York. Client list includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies. Featured on Morning Brew’s Good Work and TV Asia / SEEMA Network’s Sundays with Seema. Chief Guide at Chief (NYC), with over sixteen years as a yoga teacher and Ayurveda practitioner. Biography Most organisations have more talent than they have contribution. Capable people stay quiet at exactly the moments their judgement is most needed, and what looks like alignment is often silence. This is the tension Neelu Kaur takes on. Trained as an organisational psychologist at Columbia and with an undergraduate degree from NYU Stern, she has spent over fifteen years inside Fortune 500 organisations. The question her work returns to is why capable people stay quiet in the moments that matter. Her client list, which includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies, gives her a view across financial services, consulting, and tech. Her current diagnosis is what she calls the Self-Trust Recession. Leaders are surrounded by AI tools and competing opinion, and the quiet effect is that capable people are outsourcing their own judgement. The Self-Trust Reset framework she has built around this idea is a way to recognise when fear is shaping a decision and rebuild internal authority before acting on it. The earlier strand of her work runs through Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, January 2023). She wrote the book out of her own experience growing up between two cultures: Indian at home, American at work. It examines why people raised in collective ‘we’ cultures struggle to advocate for themselves in workplaces built around the individualistic ‘I’. That cultural lens still shapes her work and is part of what makes her credible to global teams and AAPI audiences who have lived the same code-switch. Key speaking topics Self-trust and decision-making in high-pressure environments Self-advocacy in the workplace Cross-cultural communication in global teams The cost of consensus and over-collaboration AAPI and underrepresented voices in corporate life Burnout and sustainable leadership Ideal for Leadership teams in Fortune 500 environments where decision speed and contribution quality are the bottleneck CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and L&D leaders building cultures of voice and accountability DEI, AAPI, and Employee Resource Group programmes looking for content that goes beyond representation language High-potential talent and mid-career professionals working across cultures in global organisations Audience outcomes A clear way to recognise when fear, perfectionism, or comparison is shaping a decision instead of judgement Behavioural tools to speak up in high-stakes moments without overshooting or shutting down A vocabulary for the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms, useful for global team conversations A diagnostic for where consensus and over-discussion are slowing the team’s decisions

Why organisations work with Neil Laybourn He runs Neil Laybourn Consultancy as a functioning advisory business, with frameworks and partner networks built around measurable workplace outcomes, not as a retainer attached to a keynote. The story is widely known. The corporate value sits in what he built afterwards: This Can Happen as the workplace mental health conference, the This Can Happen Awards as the practice benchmark, and the consultancy that operationalises both. He sits at the centre of the UK workplace mental health network as founder of This Can Happen, Ambassador for Mental Health UK, former Heads Together collaborator, and the UK LinkedIn Changemaker for Mental Health in 2021. The credibility chain is unusual for the category. The University of Bristol awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2018; the Pride of Britain Award (2014) and the Mind Media Award (2015) recognised the campaigning work; Channel 4 commissioned the Stranger on the Bridge documentary. He has addressed leadership teams at Bank of Ireland UK, HSBC, Coutts, Direct Line Group, Ticketmaster, BlackRock, and Yale School of Management. Biography highlights Founder of This Can Happen, the workplace mental health conference, and director of the This Can Happen Awards. Founder of Neil Laybourn Consultancy, a workplace mental health advisory firm. Co-founder, with Jonny Benjamin MBE, of Beyond, the youth mental health charity. Honorary Doctorate, University of Bristol; Pride of Britain Award; Mind Media Award for Making a Difference (with Jonny Benjamin). LinkedIn Changemaker for Mental Health (2021); LinkedIn Top Voice and Creator. Ambassador for Mental Health UK; subject of the Channel 4 documentary Stranger on the Bridge. Biography Workplace mental health is a category that absorbs budget and produces awareness, without reliably producing managers who know what to do when a colleague is in distress. The gap between corporate policy and operational practice is where the value sits, and where most programmes fail. On 14 January 2008, Neil Laybourn was walking across Waterloo Bridge to work when he saw a stranger preparing to jump into the Thames. He stopped, talked to him for half an hour, and persuaded him to step back. Six years later that stranger, Jonny Benjamin MBE, launched the #FindMike campaign on social media to find the man who had saved his life. The campaign reached over 300 million people and became the subject of the Channel 4 documentary Stranger on the Bridge. That intervention is the entry point. The offering, built over the decade since, is unusually operational for the workplace mental health category. He founded This Can Happen, the conference convening employers around what works, and the This Can Happen Awards that recognise the practice. Through Neil Laybourn Consultancy he advises organisations on the design and measurement of mental health programmes. He has delivered over 250 keynotes to more than 200 organisations across 25 sectors. Clients include Bank of Ireland UK, HSBC, Coutts, Direct Line Group, and Ticketmaster, with international audiences at Yale School of Management and BlackRock in New York. The University of Bristol awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2018, and LinkedIn selected him as the UK Changemaker for Mental Health in 2021. With Jonny Benjamin MBE he co-founded Beyond, the youth mental health charity, and remains an Ambassador for Mental Health UK. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health strategy Suicide intervention and prevention Manager capability for mental health conversations Employee wellbeing programme design Stigma in corporate environments Mental health and senior leadership Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People setting workplace wellbeing strategy HR Directors implementing or auditing mental health programmes CEOs and executive teams accountable for culture as a board-level outcome Line managers and people leaders who need usable tools for difficult conversations Audience outcomes A clear sense of why most workplace wellbeing programmes plateau, and where the operational gaps actually sit Practical language and protocols for managers in the moments that matter, from a colleague in distress to a return-to-work conversation A grounded view of what mental health strategy looks like at scale, from a practitioner who runs the conferences and advises the boards The confidence to talk about mental health at senior leadership level without retreating into corporate jargon