Employee Engagement speakers

Why organisations work with Phil Olley He gives leadership groups a working method for personal composure under pressure, not a generic resilience talk. The NEXUS Code is his own framework, refined over more than two decades of client work. His credibility rests on operating experience: six years as a Royal Navy officer, a sales and financial planning career, and a coaching practice founded in 1999. He speaks to commercial audiences as a peer, not an academic. He has a documented recovery story, a near-death incident in March 1999, which anchors his material on adversity and decision-making in something specific rather than rhetorical. He has been retained by Shell, PepsiCo, Mars, Kellogg’s, The Wood Group and IOSH, which signals that operating businesses, not just conferences, find the material useful. He has authored three books, including RESULT! published by Pearson, giving him a body of written work that buyers can read before commissioning. Biography highlights Former Royal Navy officer, six years’ service. Founded his performance coaching practice in 1999. Author of three books: Counting Chickens, RESULT! Think Decisively, Take Action and Get Results (Pearson, 2013), and Reflections from the White Tunnel (FCM Publishing, 2017). Creator of The NEXUS Code framework. Named corporate clients include Shell, PepsiCo, Mars (Masterfoods), Kellogg’s, The Wood Group, IOSH and Blevins Franks International. Media appearances include The Richard and Judy Show, BBC Radio 4 and The Times. Biography Most leadership advice on resilience starts from a model. Olley starts from an event. On 18 March 1999 he collapsed on a pavement and was revived by paramedics. The same year, he closed his sales and financial planning career and built a coaching practice around a single question: what actually holds people steady when the ground moves. That question became The NEXUS Code, a working framework on self-leadership, focus and execution that he has refined over more than two decades of client engagements. It is not a research model. It is a practitioner’s method, built and tested in front of sales teams, leadership groups and business owners under real commercial pressure. The body of written work backs the speaking. RESULT! Think Decisively, Take Action and Get Results was published by Pearson in 2013. Counting Chickens preceded it. Reflections from the White Tunnel, his most personal book, was published by FCM Publishing in 2017 and ties the recovery story directly to the framework. Three books give a buyer something concrete to read before commissioning a session. The career arc behind all of this matters for credibility with commercial audiences. Six years as a Royal Navy officer, then a sales and financial planning career, then his own business. Clients have included Shell, PepsiCo, Mars, Kellogg’s, The Wood Group and IOSH. He talks to leaders as someone who has carried a number and led a team, not as someone observing from a faculty position. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under pressure Mental toughness and resilience Goal setting and execution Performance coaching for leaders and teams Leading through change and adversity Employee engagement in difficult conditions Ideal for Sales leadership conferences and annual kick-offs. Leadership offsites for senior teams under restructuring or pressure. Owner-managed businesses and senior commercial functions in larger organisations. Professional services and financial services audiences working to lift execution and accountability. Audience outcomes A working method for holding composure and focus when conditions are difficult. A clearer view of where personal performance is being lost to noise rather than effort. Specific language and habits for converting goals into delivered results. A reset on how to lead a team through repeated change without losing momentum.

Why organisations work with Sarah Culberson A first-person story that does the work belonging-themed talks usually fail at: foster care, transracial adoption, and the discovery at 28 that her father was a Mende prince in Sierra Leone. Audiences disengage from abstract DEI framing; this is concrete. Co-author of A Princess Found (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), in development as a Disney live-action film with producer Stephanie Allain. The story has cultural reach beyond the corporate room. President and co-founder of Sierra Leone Rising, an operating nonprofit running water, sanitation, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. Allyship is something she builds, not theorises. Recipient of the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards (2022), with sustained media coverage on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times. Pairs the inspirational keynote with practical content on assumptions, uncomfortable conversations and inclusive team-building, drawn from over 15 years presenting in schools, universities and corporations. Biography highlights Co-author, A Princess Found: An American Family, an African Chiefdom, and the Daughter Who Connected Them All (St. Martin’s Press, 2009) President and co-founder, Sierra Leone Rising (founded 2006, formerly the Kposowa Foundation) Mahaloi (granddaughter of the Paramount Chief) of the Bumpe-Gao Chiefdom, Sierra Leone Disney development deal (2019) for a live-action film adaptation of her memoir, with Stephanie Allain as producer Impact Award, Bounce TV 30th Trumpet Awards (2022) BFA, West Virginia University; MFA, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco Featured on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC, NPR, The New York Times, People and Newsweek Biography In 2004, an adopted theatre student in San Francisco hired a private investigator to trace her birth family. The trail led from West Virginia to a chiefdom in Sierra Leone still recovering from a brutal civil war. Sarah Culberson’s father was a Mende prince. Her grandfather had been Paramount Chief. The discovery rewrote her sense of identity and gave her a public platform she has been working with ever since. That platform produced a memoir, A Princess Found, co-written with Tracy Trivas and published by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Disney signed a development deal in 2019 to adapt the book into a live-action film, with Stephanie Allain producing and Culberson serving as executive producer. The story has been covered on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times. The substantive work, though, sits inside Sierra Leone Rising, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2006. It runs sanitation, clean water, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. The nonprofit is what gives her belonging keynote its weight. She is not asking organisations to consider allyship as a concept; she has spent two decades building it across two cultures. For corporate audiences she translates that experience into the practical content of belonging: how assumptions form, how uncomfortable conversations are conducted, how cross-cultural teams move past politeness into trust. In 2022 she received the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards, recognition for a body of work that joins a personal story to operating institutions on two continents. Key speaking topics Belonging and allyship in the workplace Cross-cultural identity and biracial experience Inclusive team-building Diversity, equity and inclusion Personal transformation and purpose Humanitarian leadership and social impact Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and culture leads commissioning belonging or inclusion programmes Employee resource groups and women’s leadership networks Annual company conferences and kick-offs seeking an inspirational anchor with substantive content Education and nonprofit sector audiences working on equity and social impact Audience outcomes A vivid, memorable narrative that grounds inclusion conversations in lived experience rather than policy language A working vocabulary for assumptions, allyship and cross-cultural difference inside teams Concrete examples of how a Western-educated outsider built trust and impact in a post-conflict community in Sierra Leone Renewed commitment to belonging as a daily leadership practice, not a programme

Why organisations work with Rachael Robertson She gives leadership teams a working vocabulary, «No Triangles», «Bacon Wars», «Respect Trumps Harmony», that clients adopt as internal shorthand long after the keynote ends. She has run a workforce in conditions where avoidance was not an option: 18 people, one year, no exit, at Davis Station. The lessons are tested, not theoretical. Her two Wiley-published books, Leading on the Edge and Respect Trumps Harmony, give buyers a defensible, peer-reviewable body of work to point at internally. She speaks specifically to the leadership cost of false harmony: how senior teams that prize getting on quietly underperform teams that prize respect and direct disagreement. She reads as Australian-direct rather than American-motivational, which makes her credible with engineering, mining, finance and government audiences who are allergic to inspirational framing. Biography highlights Led the 58th ANARE expedition to Davis Station, Antarctica, including the year-long winter with a team of 18. Victoria’s youngest ever Chief Ranger, appointed at 32, with responsibility for the state’s South West Region. MBA, Melbourne Business School; BA in Public Relations, Deakin University. Author of Leading on the Edge (Wiley, 2013) and Respect Trumps Harmony (Wiley). Has delivered keynotes across mining, healthcare, finance, construction, retail and government, including ANZ, BHP-Billiton, Chevron, Australia Post and CPA Australia. Biography A workforce of 18 people, locked into Davis Station for the Antarctic winter, cannot be managed with charisma or compromise. Everyone is interdependent, no one can leave, and the dynamics that big organisations spend years tolerating become operational risks within weeks. That is the problem Rachael Robertson was handed in 2005 as the leader of the 58th ANARE expedition. She had arrived there through Victoria’s parks service, where she became the youngest Chief Ranger in the state’s history at 32. After Antarctica she completed an MBA at Melbourne Business School and turned the experience into a deliberate body of leadership work, not a memoir. The frameworks she has built, «No Triangles», «Respect Trumps Harmony», «Bacon Wars», «Lead Without a Title», are codified in her two Wiley books and used by client organisations as internal vocabulary. They focus on a specific failure pattern: senior teams that mistake politeness for cohesion and pay for it later in slow decisions, hidden grievances, and softening accountability. She has spoken to leadership audiences across mining, finance, healthcare, construction and government, including ANZ, BHP-Billiton, Chevron, Australia Post and CPA Australia. The reason she keeps being booked into those rooms is straightforward: she gives senior leaders a small set of behaviours they can name, defend, and install with their own teams the following Monday. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Constructive conflict and team accountability Resilience in isolated and high-stakes workplaces Safety leadership and remote operations Building team culture in interdependent environments Women in senior leadership Change-ready organisational cultures Ideal for CEOs, COOs and executive teams running geographically dispersed or high-risk operations Mining, energy, construction, transport and emergency services leadership HR and people directors rebuilding accountability after restructure or hybrid drift Conferences for senior women in operational and technical industries Audience outcomes A named vocabulary for the silent dysfunctions, gossip chains, parked grievances, false harmony, that erode senior team performance. Specific behavioural rules a leader can install the next week, including the No Triangles practice for direct communication. A clearer view of when team harmony becomes a leadership liability rather than an asset. Tested examples of how decisions, conflict and morale hold up when a team cannot escape itself.

Why organisations work with Rachel DeAlto She brings a working framework for relatability that translates a soft concept into specific leader behaviours, sourced from her own research and applied across Fortune 500, government and nonprofit settings. Her dual training in law and psychology gives her credibility with both legal-minded executives and people-function leaders, two audiences that often talk past each other on culture work. As Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, she works inside a business whose product is human connection at scale, which gives her examples that land with commercial audiences rather than HR-only ones. She holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation and has worked across more than 200 national media platforms, so the delivery is polished without sliding into performance. The work is built for multigenerational teams specifically, which is where most leadership programmes fail in practice. Biography highlights Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, parent company of Match.com, Tinder and Hinge. Author of The Relatable Leader and relatable, both published by Simon & Schuster. TEDx speaker; Being Authentic in a Filtered World featured on TED.com. Television expert on Lifetime’s Married at First Sight and TLC’s Kate+Date. Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association. JD, Seton Hall University; MA in Psychology, Arizona State University; BA in Communications, Syracuse University. Biography Most organisational culture problems present as engagement problems first. People stop volunteering ideas, hand-offs get sloppy, turnover ticks up in the wrong roles. The diagnosis is usually slower than the decline. Rachel DeAlto’s argument is that what looks like disengagement is often a relational deficit at the leader level, and that the deficit is fixable with specific skills rather than slogans. Her two books, relatable and The Relatable Leader, both published by Simon & Schuster, build the case. The first sets out how people connect with each other under conditions of distraction, filtering and fatigue. The second turns the argument toward leadership and the practical question of how a senior manager builds trust quickly across a workforce that spans five generations and several working modes. DeAlto’s background is unusual for the topic. She trained as an attorney at Seton Hall, holds a master’s in psychology from Arizona State, and now serves as Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, where connection is the commercial product. That combination shapes the work. She speaks the language of executives, draws on psychological research rather than anecdote, and tests her frameworks against a business whose users vote on connection every day. The audience is corporate, but the substance is granular. Whitepapers on the multigenerational workforce, signature programmes on customer experience and sales relatability, and a Certified Speaking Professional designation that signals a craft-level investment in delivery. The closing claim is not that culture is everything. It is that culture is built from countable leader behaviours, and those behaviours can be taught. Key speaking topics Relatability and human connection Leadership and team performance Multigenerational workforce dynamics Communication and emotional intelligence Customer experience and relatable sales Organisational culture and engagement Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers building engagement and retention strategy Senior leaders managing newly hybrid or distributed teams Sales and customer experience leaders rebuilding trust in long-cycle buyer relationships Leadership development teams designing programmes for multigenerational workforces Audience outcomes A vocabulary and a framework for relatability that turns a soft concept into observable leader behaviours A clearer view of where engagement breaks down inside multigenerational teams and what to do about it Specific tactics for building trust at speed in hybrid and high-turnover environments A shift in how senior leaders think about communication, from broadcast to connection

Why organisations work with Rachel Sheerin Speaks to burnout as a performance problem, not a wellness problem, which lets senior teams act on it without rebranding it as HR theatre. Behavioural-analyst training underpins the work, so the content has a diagnostic spine rather than relying on personal-story keynote tropes. TEDx talk “How to Burnout and Be Successful” reached a wide audience and gives the topic a recognisable hook for internal marketing of an event. Hospitality and sales operating background means she reads the room of a client-facing workforce accurately, including Ritz-Carlton, Marriott and SHRM audiences. Doubles as a tested conference emcee, which is useful when the buyer wants a single voice to anchor a multi-day programme rather than a one-off keynote. Biography highlights Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst. TEDx speaker: “How to Burnout and Be Successful,” TEDxPuntaCanaWomen. Author, “Better All The Time” (2024) and “BETTER: How to live, lead and succeed” (Hawthorn Road Press, 2023). Named NACE Speaker of the Year, 2019. Featured in Inc. Magazine; host of the podcast “F THIS S with Rachel Sheerin.” Clients include The Ritz-Carlton, Marriott International, Walmart, Freddie Mac, Berkshire Hathaway, SHRM and the James Beard Foundation. Biography Burnout has become the workforce conversation that organisations cannot afford to keep handling at the edges. The cost shows up first in the highest performers, the people whose output the rest of the operation is built on. Standard wellbeing benefits do not move that needle. Rachel Sheerin works in that gap. A Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst with a former career in hospitality and events sales leadership, she treats burnout as a behavioural and operational problem rather than a feelings problem. Her TEDx talk “How to Burnout and Be Successful” framed the territory for a wide audience and remains the most-cited entry point into her work. Her two books, “BETTER: How to live, lead and succeed” (Hawthorn Road Press, 2023) and “Better All The Time” (2024), set out a practical method for high performers who keep over-extending themselves. The same content reaches a recurring audience through the podcast “F THIS S with Rachel Sheerin” and through coverage in Inc. Magazine. She was named Speaker of the Year by NACE in 2019, and now works regularly with clients including The Ritz-Carlton, Marriott International, Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, Freddie Mac, SHRM and the James Beard Foundation. The audiences are typically sales, service and operating leaders inside organisations that depend on people performing at a high level in customer-facing roles. Key speaking topics Burnout prevention and recovery Self-leadership and energy management Employee engagement High-performer psychology Sales authenticity and motivation Workplace culture and wellbeing Conference emcee and event hosting Ideal for CHROs, heads of people and chief wellbeing officers in service, hospitality and sales-driven organisations Sales leadership audiences in client-facing industries Annual conferences for associations and franchises that need a keynote plus emcee in a single voice Post-merger or post-restructure events where the workforce is visibly fatigued Audience outcomes A clearer read on where burnout is showing up inside the team and what is driving it Practical language for talking about workload, energy and recovery in a working environment Tools high performers can apply without giving up the standard they hold themselves to Renewed engagement and focus in audiences entering a demanding quarter or season

Why organisations work with Rachel Stone A coach’s diagnostic eye rather than a speaker’s set piece. She reads what is actually happening between a leader and their team and names it, then offers next steps the leader can act on the same week. Direct experience of the operator’s chair. Commercial buying, retail management at Safeways PLC, classroom teaching and senior college leadership, before twelve years coaching 130-plus companies. The advice lands because it is grounded in those rooms. A clear behavioural model. The “breathe life into people” frame and the Kindness Economy (People, Planet, Profit) give leaders a vocabulary for what trust-based leadership looks like day to day. Tools that travel back to the workplace. ICQ Global DISC and Growth Zone diagnostics give audiences something concrete to use with their own teams, not just a takeaway feeling. Biography highlights Founder of Rachel Stone Coaching Ltd, established 2012. Author of “Spend Time With Me: A Story to Inspire Transformational Leaders” (2024), foreword by Professor Damian Hughes. Accredited ICQ Global DISC Profile and Growth Zone Practitioner. Qualified business coach via The Coaching Academy. Coached 130-plus companies and 250-plus leaders across construction, retail, education, manufacturing and professional services. Earlier career: commercial buyer in electronics, retail manager at Safeways PLC, Business Studies teacher and senior college manager. Biography Most managers are promoted for being good at the job they used to do. The job they now have is different, and the gap between the two is where engagement breaks, conflict festers and culture quietly drifts. Stone built her practice around closing that gap. She works with business owners and senior teams on the small behavioural shifts that change how a team performs, not on abstract leadership theory. Her route into coaching was unusual. After commercial buying in electronics and retail management at Safeways PLC, she retrained as a Business Studies teacher, took on senior college management, and in 2012 left to start her own coaching business. Twelve years later the client list runs to more than 130 companies across construction, retail, education and manufacturing, with over 250 individual leaders coached. The work spans board-level transformation, embedding coaching cultures, and middle-management development. The intellectual frame is set out in her 2024 book “Spend Time With Me: A Story to Inspire Transformational Leaders”, with a foreword by Professor Damian Hughes of the High Performance podcast. The book pairs her own story with the principles she teaches: trust as a leadership currency, the “Kindness Economy” of People, Planet and Profit, and the idea that leaders “breathe life into people” rather than extract performance from them. Audiences leave with usable language and a diagnostic. ICQ Global DISC and Growth Zone tools give leaders a way to read their own behaviour and their team’s. The delivery is pacey and pragmatic; the focus is on what a leader can do differently on Monday morning. Key speaking topics Transformational leadership Coaching cultures and coaching as a leadership skill Trust and team performance Communication and conflict in teams Employee engagement and burnout Resilience and self-management for leaders The Kindness Economy: People, Planet, Profit Workplace culture in hybrid and growing businesses Ideal for Business owners and founder-CEOs scaling beyond a hands-on operating model. Senior leadership teams in mid-market and SME organisations who need a behavioural reset, not a strategy day. HR and L&D leads commissioning manager development or embedding a coaching culture. Leadership groups in sectors that promote technically (construction, manufacturing, professional services, education). Audience outcomes A clearer read on how their own behaviour shapes their team’s engagement and output. Practical coaching techniques managers can use in one-to-ones and team conversations from the next working day. A shared vocabulary for trust, conflict and culture that survives beyond the session. Tools to spot early signs of burnout and disengagement before they cost the business people. A working definition of transformational leadership grounded in behaviour, not theory.

Why organisations work with Rachel Treece A coach-led leadership thesis grounded in published work, not platform rhetoric: her book “The Henka Effect” sets out how coaching changes the operating behaviour of senior leaders, with named case studies from financial services. Operating credibility inside financial services. The Henka Institute reports work with a majority of the largest fund managers and investment banks, and her podcast “Flex and the City” speaks directly to FS leadership audiences. ICF-accredited coaching credentials (PCC, CPCC) and a psychology background, which means the content is built on practice-tested method, not opinion. A multinational and multilingual delivery range across 35 countries, useful for boards and leadership populations that span Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. A direct, no-platitudes register on inclusion and culture that buyers can put in front of mixed senior audiences without it landing as DEI theatre. Biography highlights CEO of The Henka Institute and fts global, a leadership development firm operating in 35 countries. Author of “The Henka Effect: How Coaching is Transforming Leadership and Organisations” (2022). Host of the podcast “Flex and the City – Great leadership in financial services”. ICF-credentialled executive coach (PCC, CPCC) and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Speaker at the ALFI Leadership Seminar, the leading industry forum for the Luxembourg fund and asset management sector. Co-founder of Dress for Success Luxembourg. Biography Most senior leaders know that pushing harder no longer produces the result it used to. Workforces are exhausted by repeated change, sceptical of slogans, and quick to disengage from leaders who default to control. The harder question is what leaders should do instead, and how to develop that behaviour at scale. Rachel Treece’s answer is coaching. Not coaching as a development perk, but coaching as the operating mode of senior leadership itself. Her book “The Henka Effect” sets out the argument with case material drawn from her work inside financial services, where she has spent much of her career advising FTSE and Fortune 100 leadership teams. That work runs through The Henka Institute, the Luxembourg-based firm she leads. The institute operates across 35 countries and reports clients including a majority of the largest fund asset managers and investment banks. Her credentials sit alongside the practice: PCC and CPCC coaching certifications, a psychology background, and Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. For organisations going through restructure, integration, or cultural reset, the value of her work is specific. She gives senior leaders a usable behavioural toolkit that replaces directive instinct with curiosity, ownership, and accountability, rather than asking them to soften their style and hope. Key speaking topics Coaching as a leadership operating model Leadership in financial services Inclusive and values-based leadership Change and transformation in regulated industries Communication and executive presence Organisational culture and trust Sustainable performance and leader energy Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and heads of leadership development inside banks, asset managers, and other regulated financial institutions. Boards and executive committees navigating restructuring, M&A integration, or cultural reset. Senior leadership populations being asked to lead through change without burning out their teams or themselves. Audience outcomes A clear distinction between coaching as a development activity and coaching as a senior leadership behaviour, with the second framed as the lever for sustainable performance. Specific behavioural moves senior leaders can use to replace directive defaults in real conversations with their teams. A working model for building trust and ownership inside teams that have been through repeated change. An honest read on what inclusive leadership looks like in practice in commercial organisations, beyond statement-making.

Why organisations work with Rahul Kapoor A mindset framework taught inside IIM Bangalore’s Executive General Management Programme since 2009, not a stage routine reverse-engineered into a workshop. Two published books with Times Group Books and a long catalogue of corporate engagements with Accenture, Amazon, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung give buyers a track record across multinational audiences. Content is built for the personal layer of leadership performance: focus, self-direction, recovery, decision discipline. The brief that fits is “our senior people are running on empty,” not “we need a lecture on strategy.” Delivers in English and Hindi across South and Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and North America, which is rare for the South Asian executive audience segment. Biography highlights Guest faculty, IIM Bangalore, since 2009, leading the “Bond and Learn” programme for EGMP, Entrepreneurs & Family Businesses, and Armed Forces cohorts. Author of Workwise: Lessons in Excellence for Young Professionals (Times Group Books) and Dad and I. Outstanding Young Persons of India Award (2010); Young Achievers Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2016). Corporate engagements with Accenture, Amazon, Adobe, American Express, Cisco, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, SAP Labs, Nestle Nutrition Institute. Contributor to The Times of India (Education Times), Dainik Bhaskar, and Feelings Magazine. Bilingual delivery in English and Hindi, with engagement track record across India, the Gulf, Southeast Asia, and North America. Biography Most senior professionals reach a ceiling that has nothing to do with skill. Their calendars are full, their results are visible, and yet the personal layer underneath, the capacity to think clearly and recover quickly, is no longer keeping up with the role. Rahul Kapoor’s body of work addresses that layer directly. He has been guest faculty at IIM Bangalore since 2009, where his “Bond and Learn” sessions sit inside the Executive General Management Programme, the Entrepreneurs and Family Businesses Programme, and the Armed Forces Programme. The institutional context matters: the same content that runs as a keynote in a corporate room has been refined inside one of India’s most rigorous executive education environments for over a decade. His book Workwise: Lessons in Excellence for Young Professionals, published by Times Group Books, codifies the framework. Dad and I, a second book aimed at younger readers, extends it. Two awards, the Outstanding Young Persons of India and the Young Achievers Award for Social Entrepreneurship, recognise the contribution to early-career and youth audiences alongside the corporate work. The corporate roster reads like a global technology and professional services list: Accenture, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe, American Express, SAP Labs. What buyers in those rooms are commissioning is not a strategy lecture. It is a confident, bilingual practitioner who can shift the internal state of a senior audience inside ninety minutes and leave them with a usable mental model afterwards. Key speaking topics Mindset and self-leadership Personal performance and goal achievement Purpose, values, and work-life integration Resilience and emotional regulation under pressure Team motivation and engagement Executive development for early- and mid-career leaders Ideal for CEO and CHRO audiences commissioning an opening or closing keynote at leadership offsites Sales and revenue teams entering a high-stakes quarter or post-restructure period Executive education and high-potential cohorts inside multinationals operating in South and Southeast Asia Family business and entrepreneur networks looking for a serious mindset and values session Audience outcomes A direct framework for self-direction and personal performance that survives contact with a real working week Renewed clarity on individual purpose and how it maps onto current organisational role Practical tools for emotional regulation and recovery under sustained pressure A shared language inside the team for discipline, focus, and follow-through

Why organisations work with Rene Godefroy He brings a named, ownable philosophy. The “Village Hero” frame gives leaders a vocabulary for belonging that survives the keynote and shows up in daily behaviour. His client roster is unusually concentrated in frontline, customer-facing organisations. Coca-Cola, Aflac, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army. He speaks to the people who actually carry the brand. The resilience material is grounded in a specific lived narrative, not borrowed research. That gives the message authority with audiences who have heard the standard motivational circuit. He writes and speaks for retention and morale outcomes, not abstract inspiration. The brief he answers best is the one that mentions turnover, change fatigue, or a workforce that has stopped believing the slogans. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Village Hero, Inc., Atlanta. Author of Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent. Keynote work for Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott Hotels, Hyatt Hotels, and the U.S. Army. Speaker at the National Association for Pupil Transportation and the Michigan Assisted Living Association annual conference. Recognised by the City of Smyrna, Georgia with a dedicated “Rene Godefroy Day”; granted a key to the city by Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Runs humanitarian work supporting orphanages and health clinics in Haiti, partly funded by program fees. Biography Most workplace culture problems are not really about culture. They are about belonging. People decide to stay, contribute and look out for one another long before any engagement survey captures it, and they decide on the basis of small, daily signals from the people above them. That is the territory the “Village Hero” philosophy sits in. The frame comes from a specific origin. Godefroy grew up in a rural Haitian village, arrived in the United States as a young man with almost nothing, and worked through janitorial and service jobs before building a speaking practice. The argument he draws from that life is not biographical theatre. It is a working theory of how belonging is built one act at a time, and how leaders carry disproportionate responsibility for those acts inside an organisation. That theory has been tested against a particular kind of audience. His client list, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army, is heavy on frontline and customer-facing workforces, where morale, retention and belief in the mission show up directly in operational performance. Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent extends the same material into individual accountability for change, particularly under pressure and constraint. He is most useful to organisations that have already tried the values posters and the engagement task force, and are now asking a more honest question. What behaviour, repeated daily by managers, would actually rebuild the social contract here. The Village Hero framework gives them a starting answer, and the City of Smyrna, Georgia, which declared a “Rene Godefroy Day” in his honour, gives a small civic indicator of the impression that practice has left. Key speaking topics Resilience and change leadership Workplace culture and belonging Employee engagement and morale Team performance under pressure Frontline leadership Purpose-driven leadership Personal accountability and mindset Ideal for HR, people and culture leaders rebuilding engagement and retention in frontline-heavy workforces Operations and customer experience leaders in retail, hospitality, telecoms, insurance, and logistics Sales kick-offs and dealer or franchisee networks that need a morale reset, not a tactics talk Defence, public sector and uniformed services audiences with high-pressure operating conditions Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for belonging that managers can use the next day, anchored in the “Village Hero” frame A direct, personal challenge to the stories teams tell themselves about change and constraint Concrete behaviours that lift morale and retention without waiting for a new culture programme A renewed sense of purpose for workforces fatigued by repeated restructuring and uncertainty

Why organisations work with Richard Sennett A longitudinal sociological lens almost no other living speaker offers. Five decades on the same questions about what work does to people, running from The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972) through The Corrosion of Character (1998) to Building and Dwelling (2018). Reframes employee engagement as a question of craft. The Craftsman (2008) advanced the thesis that “making is thinking” and treats the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace asset organisations either nurture or destroy. A serious framework for cooperation as a workplace skill. Together (2012) argues that cooperation is a craft learned through structured practice, and shows why short-term teams and constant reorganisation erode the conditions that make it possible. Direct involvement in shaping how cities and labour are governed. Sennett wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III, helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate, and chaired the LSE Cities programme. Credentials at a level few corporate speakers reach: the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, the Centennial Medal from Harvard, an OBE for services to design and Fellowship of the British Academy. Biography highlights Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics; former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Author of The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Craftsman, Together, Building and Dwelling and The Performer. Founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities (with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky); former President of the American Council on Work; founder and chair of Theatrum Mundi. Senior Advisor to the United Nations Council on Urban Initiatives; wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III; helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate. OBE for services to design (2018); Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; recipient of the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard. Senior Fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University; Honorary Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Biography The promise of flexible capitalism was that workers would gain real control of their own time and direction. The Corrosion of Character, published in 1998, showed in granular ethnographic detail what actually happened to dismissed IBM executives, Boston bakers and a barmaid turned advertising executive. The book established a thesis that has only sharpened with time: an economy built around “no long-term” produces people who struggle to sustain identity and craft over a working life. That argument matured over two decades into a trilogy on what Sennett calls Homo Faber, or “man the maker.” The Craftsman (2008) advanced a single thesis: making is thinking. It treated the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace capacity organisations either nurture or destroy. Together (2012) extended the argument into the social. Cooperation is a craft, Sennett argued, learned through structured practice and degraded by short-term teams and constant reorganisation. Building and Dwelling (2018) carried the same lens into urbanism, distinguishing the ville (the built city) from the cité (how people actually live in it). Sennett’s intellectual lineage runs directly through David Riesman, John Rawls and Hannah Arendt at Harvard, where he took his PhD in 1969. Few living sociologists carry that depth of connection to the most serious thought of the twentieth century into corporate and policy conversations of the present. In 2024 he published The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, the opening volume of a new trilogy on performance, narration and image-making. Key speaking topics The future of work in flexible capitalism Craftsmanship and the conditions for good work Cooperation as a workplace skill Character and the personal consequences of “no long-term” employment Urbanism and the ethical city Public culture and authority in modern organisations Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders moving past trend diagnostics into the deeper drivers of engagement and workforce design. Executive teams contending with the cultural costs of reorganisation, short-term teams and high turnover. Boards, CEOs and strategy leaders commissioning long-horizon work on the human foundations of organisational change. City leaders, urbanists and real-estate strategists working on the ethics and design of public space. Audience outcomes A vocabulary for what short-termism and perpetual reorganisation actually do to character and craft inside organisations. The “making is thinking” framework, which puts employee skill and the conditions for good work at the centre of strategic conversation. Cooperation reframed as a workplace craft, built through specific practices and degraded by structures many organisations now treat as normal. The ville/cité distinction as a tool for thinking about the human and built dimensions of any large environment, from offices to city districts. A historical lens on flexible capitalism that sets present-day workforce challenges in their actual fifty-year arc.

Why organisations work with Rikki Arundel A category-defining UK voice on trans and non-binary inclusion at work, with the rare combination of an MSc in Gender Research from the University of Hull and twenty years of lived experience as an openly trans speaker. Inaugural recipient of The Speaker Awards Lifetime Achievement Award (2024) and a PSAE Speaker Hall of Fame inductee, signals that this is a senior practitioner, not a first-person-story booking. Founder and first president of the UK and Ireland Professional Speaking Association, which means a level of platform craft that allows hard subject matter to land with executive audiences without defensiveness. Practical content for managers and ERG sponsors: what to say when someone comes out, how policy holds up under challenge, and where unconscious bias actually shows up in promotion and customer-facing decisions. A track record across police forces, NHS trusts, financial services and government, including Sussex and Surrey Police, University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust, Fidelity International and the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Biography highlights Founder and first president, Professional Speaking Association (UK and Ireland). MSc in Gender Research, University of Hull. PSAE Speaker Hall of Fame, Professional Speaking Association. Inaugural Speaker Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, 2024. Named one of 50 LGBT Icons in the 2017 UK Pride 50th anniversary list. TEDx speaker, including “Why is Gender Identity so Important?” at TEDxFidelityInternational. Biography Most organisations have a trans inclusion policy. Far fewer have managers who know what to do when an employee comes out at work, when a customer files a complaint about pronouns, or when a journalist asks how the company will hold its position. Rikki Arundel’s work sits in that gap between policy language and operational practice. The credibility for that work is unusually layered. Rikki founded the Professional Speaking Association in the UK and Ireland and served as its first president, then publicly transitioned in 2002 and rebuilt a speaking career around gender and inclusion. An MSc in Gender Research from the University of Hull underpins the content, and a PSAE Speaker Hall of Fame induction reflects the platform craft. The substance is practical. Rikki separates sex from gender for non-specialist audiences, walks managers through the moments where inclusion is actually tested, and addresses how policy holds up when challenged externally. The aim is behavioural change inside teams, not awareness for its own sake. Recognition has tracked the work. The Speaker Awards named Rikki the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award recipient in 2024, and Rikki was listed among 50 LGBT Icons during the 2017 UK Pride 50th anniversary. Clients include Sussex and Surrey Police, University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust, Fidelity International, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and Atalian Servest UK and Ireland. Key speaking topics Trans and non-binary inclusion in the workplace Sex, gender and social identity LGBTQ discrimination and harassment Unconscious bias in recruitment and promotion Inclusive leadership for managers ERG enablement for Pride and LGBT History Month Ideal for CHROs and DEI leads designing inclusion programmes that need to survive external scrutiny. ERG and Pride network sponsors planning LGBT History Month, Pride and Trans Day of Visibility events that have to do more than mark a date. Line managers and people partners in regulated sectors, including policing, healthcare, financial services and government. Boards and executive teams seeking a credible briefing on trans inclusion before a public position is required. Audience outcomes A working separation of sex, gender identity and gender expression that managers can use in real conversations. Specific scripts and behaviours for the moment a colleague comes out as trans or non-binary at work. A clearer view of where unconscious bias actually shows up in hiring, promotion and customer-facing decisions. A framework for ERG leaders to plan inclusion content that is substantive rather than performative.

Why organisations work with Risha Grant A direct, behaviour-first approach to inclusion that holds up when the political climate around DEI is hostile, because the work targets individual bias and culture, not slogans or programmes. The BiaSphere framework, drawn from her book Be Better Than Your BS, gives leaders and employees a shared vocabulary for the belief systems that shape how they hire, promote, sell, and lead. More than twenty five years operating her own diversity consulting firm, which means the perspective in the room is that of a practitioner who has rebuilt cultures, not a commentator describing them. Credibility with both senior executives and broad employee audiences, evidenced by engagements at Google, Samsung, Procter and Gamble, the US Air Force, and Harvard University. A commercial frame on inclusion, connecting culture work to talent retention and to the customer markets organisations are otherwise leaving on the table. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Risha Grant LLC, founded in 1998 as the first diversity communications firm in Oklahoma. Author of Be Better Than Your BS: How Radical Acceptance Empowers Authenticity and Creates a Workplace Culture of Inclusion (Hay House, 2023), and of That’s BS! How Bias Synapse Disrupts Inclusive Cultures. Creator of DiversityConneX.com, a recruitment platform connecting diverse professionals to corporate roles, internships, and board seats. Named one of the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR (PeopleHum), NBA OKC Thunder Changemaker, and one of Real Leaders’ 40 Top Women Keynote Speakers. Featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Glamour UK, and Black Enterprise. Client engagements include Google, Levi Strauss, Samsung Electronics, Procter and Gamble, Intuit, Nestle Purina, the US Air Force, and Harvard University. Biography Most inclusion work fails for the same reason. It tries to change behaviour without ever touching the belief systems underneath it. Grant’s career has been a sustained argument that bias lives in personal stories before it lives in policies, and that organisations cannot get culture right until people are willing to examine the BS they bring to work. She built Risha Grant LLC in 1998, the first diversity communications firm in Oklahoma, and has run it ever since. That longevity matters. It means her view of what works in inclusion has been tested across more than two decades of changing political conditions, from the early diversity training era to the post 2020 acceleration and the current backlash. The framework she now teaches, the BiaSphere, came out of that long arc of practical work, not academic theory. Her 2023 book Be Better Than Your BS, published by Hay House and a Wall Street Journal bestseller per her publisher, set out the BiaSphere thesis in full: the subconscious beliefs that drive judgement of self and others, and the inner work required to dismantle them before any culture programme can stick. The book has anchored a speaking practice that reaches Google, Samsung, Procter and Gamble, the US Air Force, and Harvard University, and a media presence across Forbes, Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg. What separates her in the current climate is the refusal to soften the work or dress it in safer language. The premise is that inclusion is a behavioural and commercial capability, that organisations leave talent and customer revenue on the table when they get it wrong, and that the route to getting it right runs through individual honesty before it runs through policy. That is a harder message to sell now than it was five years ago, which is precisely why the organisations still serious about culture keep buying it. Key speaking topics Inclusive culture and belonging Unconscious bias and the BiaSphere Radical acceptance and authenticity at work Inclusive leadership behaviour Talent attraction and retention through inclusion Diverse customer markets and commercial inclusion Psychological safety in mixed teams Ideal for CHROs, chief diversity officers, and heads of talent rebuilding inclusion strategy after recent rollbacks Executive teams and boards under pressure to articulate a defensible position on culture and inclusion Senior leadership offsites where the brief is honest conversation about bias, not a training exercise All-employee and ERG audiences where credibility with both sceptics and advocates matters Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, drawn from the BiaSphere framework, for the personal belief systems that drive bias at work A clearer view of where unconscious bias is costing the organisation in hiring, promotion, retention, and customer reach Permission and a method to have direct conversations about inclusion without defaulting to compliance language A behavioural starting point for leaders who want to model inclusive practice rather than delegate it to a function A reframing of inclusion as a commercial capability tied to talent and market access, not a values statement