Employee Engagement speakers

Why organisations work with Sebastian Wachter He arrives in a wheelchair with a Master’s in business mathematics, a career as a stock analyst, and a Bundesliga rugby record. The audience cannot file his argument under inspirational story and move on. His thesis, set out in Change Mindset (BoD, 2020) and excerpted in WirtschaftsWoche, treats change resistance as a managerial problem with named mechanisms, not a motivational gap. He won the European Speaker Award 2019 in front of a jury drawn from Daimler, Lufthansa and Siemens, which is the buyer profile that commissions him. He works fluently in German and English, which matters for DACH-region corporates running cross-border transformation programmes. Biography highlights Master of Science in Business Mathematics, with an exchange semester at the University of Texas at Austin. Former stock analyst in a private bank before founding Barrierefrei im Kopf UG. Bundesliga wheelchair rugby player with German national team experience. Author of Change Mindset: Veranderungsprozesse ins Rollen bringen! (BoD, 2020), with a chapter excerpt carried by WirtschaftsWoche’s Management-Blog. Winner of the European Speaker Award 2019. Television and radio appearances on ARD, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Radio Gong and SWR’s Nachtcafe. Biography Most change programmes do not fail at the design stage. They fail at the moment when the people inside the organisation decide, often quietly, that the new direction is something happening to them rather than something they own. This is the gap Sebastian Wachter writes about and the gap his keynotes are designed to close. His own credibility on the subject is mathematical before it is motivational. He holds a Master of Science in Business Mathematics, spent an exchange semester at the University of Texas at Austin, and worked as a stock analyst in a private bank. The accident that left him with roughly 95% muscle paralysis came at 24, after the analytical training, not before it. He treats change as a managerial problem with mechanisms, not a feel-good lesson drawn from biography. That argument is set out in Change Mindset: Veranderungsprozesse ins Rollen bringen!, published in 2020 and excerpted in WirtschaftsWoche’s Management-Blog. The book reframes change resistance as a question of accountability, role clarity and the willingness of senior managers to keep asking for help once the plan is signed off. The European Speaker Award 2019, judged by representatives from Daimler, Lufthansa and Siemens, recognised the same content in keynote form. He works in German and English, founded the Wurzburg-based firm Barrierefrei im Kopf UG, and continues to play Bundesliga wheelchair rugby. The work he is booked for sits at the point where a transformation programme has stalled and the executive team needs the workforce to re-engage on its own terms. Key speaking topics Change mindset and stalled transformation programmes Growth mindset and managerial resilience Diversity and inclusion in the workforce Team accountability and role clarity Resilience after personal and organisational setback Communication and collaboration across functions Ideal for Executive teams and transformation leads running multi-year change programmes that have lost momentum DACH-region corporates with mixed German- and English-speaking audiences HR directors and culture leads addressing inclusion and engagement together Leadership offsites where the brief is to reset accountability across senior managers Audience outcomes A working definition of why change programmes stall at the point of behavioural commitment, not strategic design. A vocabulary for separating constraint from excuse inside a leadership team. A concrete account of how role clarity, accountability and asking for help operate together in change execution. A different reference point for what resilience looks like in practice, drawn from a verifiable biographical record rather than abstraction.

Why organisations work with Shane Feldman He built Count Me In from a high-school project into a global incubator that has initiated more than 30,000 community ventures across 104 countries. The operator credentials are unusual in the engagement space. His research is field-built, not desk-built. Feldman has embedded himself in more than 100 cities across six continents to study how communities form, hold, and break, and translates that fieldwork into corporate retention frameworks. His client list (Google, Disney, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, PwC, TD Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Netflix, Coca-Cola, YPO) signals a buyer base of large, complex employers who use him for substantive HR and culture interventions, not motivational filler. He carries genuine media credibility (A&E “Undercover High”, coverage by Forbes, People, Larry King, Oprah) that lifts the marketing weight of the engagement around a keynote. Recognised by the White House, the United Nations, and the Prime Minister of Canada for community leadership work, which makes the substantive claim on community expertise defensible rather than rhetorical. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Count Me In, a social entrepreneurship incubator with more than 30,000 ventures launched across 104 countries. Author of “A Kids Book About Community” (A Kids Co., 2020). Cast member of A&E docuseries “Undercover High” (2018), an embedded social experiment in a US public high school. Recognised by the White House, the United Nations, and the Prime Minister of Canada for achievements in community leadership. Keynote speaker for Google, Disney, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, PwC, YPO, TD Bank, Shopify, Kaiser Permanente, Netflix, and Coca-Cola. Featured by Forbes, People Magazine, Larry King, and Oprah. Biography Most large employers now lose people not for reasons their engagement surveys can name. Compensation, perks, and policy are not the friction point. Belonging is. The organisations that retain talent in this environment are the ones treating workplace community as an operating problem rather than a soft one. Shane Feldman’s career has been an unusually direct route into that problem. He founded Count Me In in 2008 as a teenager in Toronto after a difficult school transition; the organisation has since grown into a social entrepreneurship incubator with members across 104 countries and more than 30,000 ventures initiated. The work has been recognised by the White House, the United Nations, and the Prime Minister of Canada. The frameworks he brings to corporate audiences come from two sources that rarely sit together. One is operator experience running a global organisation built around commitment, service, and retention. The other is field research; Feldman has embedded in more than 100 cities across six continents to study how communities form and hold. He translates that into structured tools for HR, sales, and leadership audiences, packaged as “Passport” keynotes covering team retention, customer loyalty, future-of-work, and AI integration. The corporate roster reflects how the work travels. Google, Disney, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, PwC, YPO, TD Bank, Shopify, Kaiser Permanente, Netflix, and Coca-Cola have all booked him on engagement, culture, and retention briefs. Key speaking topics Workplace community and belonging Employee engagement and retention Customer loyalty and relationship-driven sales Future of work and hybrid team performance Humanising AI in the workplace Inclusive and community-centred leadership Talent attraction and culture design Ideal for CHROs and CPOs running engagement, retention, and culture programmes Sales and customer success leaders rebuilding loyalty in low-trust markets Conferences focused on the future of work, hybrid productivity, and AI integration Membership organisations (YPO, EO, professional bodies) addressing community and connection Audience outcomes A clear read on why engagement and retention initiatives fail when they treat community as a soft outcome. Practical mechanisms for building belonging at team and organisation level, drawn from Count Me In’s operating playbook. A vocabulary for talking about workplace community that connects people strategy to commercial outcomes. A set of usable frames for integrating AI into work without eroding the human relationships that drive retention.

Why organisations work with Shawn Achor The Happiness Advantage is one of the most-read popular books on the science of positive psychology, a New York Times bestseller that gives audiences a shared reference before the session begins. His TED talk «The Happy Secret to Better Work», with over 16 million views, is one of the most-watched of all time and is routinely used by HR and communications leaders to introduce his work internally. His Happiness Advantage training has been delivered across approximately a third of the Fortune 100, which means his intervention design is already calibrated for large, complex organisations rather than small-group coaching settings. A Harvard teaching record that includes more than a dozen distinguished teaching awards and one of the university’s most popular classes means his delivery has been pressure-tested in front of demanding, non-paying audiences. The research base is continuous: Institute for Applied Positive Research, collaboration with Yale and Columbia, HBR cover feature and a PBS special, all keeping the material updated rather than frozen at the 2010 book. Biography highlights CEO of Good Think, Inc.; founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research BA from Harvard University; MA in Christian and Buddhist Ethics from Harvard Divinity School; twelve years at Harvard Author of New York Times bestsellers The Happiness Advantage and Before Happiness TED talk «The Happy Secret to Better Work» viewed over 16 million times Research featured on the cover of Harvard Business Review; subject of a PBS special Happiness Advantage training deployed across approximately one third of the Fortune 100 Biography The success formula most organisations run on, work harder, deliver results, then be happy, runs against what positive psychology research has produced for the last two decades. Shawn Achor has built his career on inverting it, and The Happiness Advantage, his New York Times bestselling book, is the most accessible expression of the argument: positive mindset precedes performance, and the data now exist to prove it at corporate scale. His credentials are anchored at Harvard. A BA from the university, a Master of Arts from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist Ethics, twelve years on faculty with seven of those as an Officer of Harvard living in Harvard Yard, and more than a dozen teaching awards across that period. He taught what became one of the most popular classes in Harvard’s history on positive psychology. He now teaches in Wharton’s Advanced Management Program and continues research collaborations with Yale and Columbia through the Institute for Applied Positive Research. The public profile extends the research into the mainstream. His TED talk has been viewed more than 16 million times, one of the most-watched of all time. His work has been the cover of Harvard Business Review and the subject of a PBS special. He has lectured in more than 50 countries, a roster that includes CEOs in China, senior leaders at the Pentagon and the White House, and farmers in Zimbabwe. The commercial footprint is the point for corporate buyers. Achor’s Happiness Advantage training has been delivered across roughly a third of the Fortune 100 companies, which makes his positive-psychology material one of the most extensively deployed in enterprise use. For CHROs, chief wellbeing officers and executive teams trying to connect wellbeing investment to performance outcomes, he is one of the few researchers who has both the Harvard credentials and the deployment experience to hold both ends of the conversation. Key speaking topics The science of happiness and performance Positive psychology at organisational scale Mindset, optimism and resilience in high-pressure environments Leadership behaviours that generate positive contagion Stress, energy and sustainable performance Applying positive psychology to education and social systems Ideal for CEOs and executive teams connecting wellbeing and engagement to measurable performance outcomes CHROs, chief wellbeing officers and HR leadership teams designing enterprise-wide positive psychology programmes All-hands, sales kick-offs and leadership conferences requiring a main-stage, globally recognised speaker Schools, universities and education leadership teams applying positive education principles Audience outcomes The seven principles of positive psychology from The Happiness Advantage translated into workplace practice A research-grade view of the link between optimism, social support and job performance Specific behavioural interventions that are deployable without structural change Reference points from Harvard teaching, Fortune 100 corporate engagements and the Institute for Applied Positive Research

Why organisations work with Shola Kaye Her Emotional Audacity™ framework reframes empathy as an organisational capability – not a personal virtue – giving leaders a structured approach to courageous communication that is immediately applicable in high-pressure, high-stakes environments She holds an unusual credibility position: a Cambridge and Emory-trained scientist who also performed professionally on four continents. That combination makes her content land differently with technical and analytical audiences who typically resist people-skills programming Her work addresses a gap that DEI programmes and EQ training often miss separately: the intersection of speaking up, psychological safety, and inclusive communication as a single, integrated practice Her two published books and LinkedIn Learning instructor role mean buyers are extending into a content ecosystem, not just a single keynote She has worked across the full range of organisational contexts – from board-level at institutions including The United Nations and Deloitte to company-wide culture programmes – with consistent evidence of rebooking Biography highlights BA Natural Sciences, Cambridge University; PGCE, Oxford University; MSc Analytical Chemistry / Neuropharmacology, Emory University, with postgraduate research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Early career in IT management consulting with clients including Goldman Sachs and Prudential Assurance, followed by account director roles in aviation and finance Professional entertainer and jazz singer; performed on four continents including BBC appearances Author of How to be a D.I.V.A. at Public Speaking (Amazon.com #1 bestseller) and Big Talk, Small Talk and Everything in Between (Callisto Media, 2020) Winner of the Jenny Seagrove Speaking Award (2016); Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), Toastmasters International; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) Regular contributor to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management; featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, and BBC; TEDx speaker on empathy in the workplace Biography Shola Kaye spent her early career moving between worlds that rarely overlap: neuroscience research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, management consulting at investment banks in New York and London, and professional performance on stages across four continents. That trajectory is not a curiosity: it is the basis of her work. She understands analytically rigorous environments, the dynamics of corporate invisibility, and what it takes to hold a room. The core tension she addresses is one that organisations consistently underinvest in: the gap between stated inclusion values and the actual behavioural competencies required to make them real. Most people, even experienced leaders, struggle to give honest feedback, speak up under pressure, or navigate difficult conversations without defensiveness. Kaye’s Emotional Audacity™ framework names this gap explicitly: combining empathy, self-regulation, and courageous communication into a single, teachable practice. Her two books and a TEDx talk on workplace empathy establish the intellectual architecture behind the keynotes. Her contributors to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management position her as a credible voice in the professional management conversation, not only on the conference circuit. Clients including The United Nations, Deloitte, HSBC, Google, and IBM have rebooked or extended her programmes into training formats, evidence that the content holds beyond a single session. What makes Kaye distinctive in a crowded DEI and communication space is the precise nature of her argument: that empathy, done seriously, is not a softening of leadership but a structural condition for high performance. For organisations navigating transformation, hybrid work, or underrepresentation challenges, that reframe tends to land where other approaches have not. Key speaking topics Empathy at work Inclusive leadership Psychological safety and communication Emotional intelligence Courageous workplace communication Diversity, equity and belonging People-first culture Feedback and difficult conversations Ideal for CHROs and People Directors building cultures where psychological safety is a practical reality, not an aspiration Leadership development programmes targeting mid-to-senior leaders managing diverse, distributed, or technically-oriented teams Organisations running DEI initiatives that need to move beyond awareness into behavioural change International Women’s Day and women’s leadership events where communication confidence and visibility are the focus Audience outcomes A named framework (Emotional Audacity™) for integrating empathy, courageous communication, and inclusive behaviour into daily leadership practice Practical tools for navigating difficult conversations, delivering constructive feedback, and creating environments where people feel safe to speak up Greater understanding of the structural conditions – not just the personal attitudes – that determine whether inclusion is felt in practice Specific techniques for communicating with clarity and impact, particularly for those in technical, analytical, or STEM-rooted working environments Renewed understanding of how communication behaviours at the manager level directly affect team performance, retention, and innovation output

Why organisations work with Simon Alexander Ong A serious, published thesis on energy management as a leadership and workforce capability, anchored in Energize (Penguin, 2022) and recognised as Business Book of the Year for Wellness and Wellbeing in 2023. Direct credibility with global employers on people and culture briefs, with named keynote work for Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever, EY, Adobe and Barclays. A coaching practice behind the content, with qualifications from The Coaching Academy and NLP training, so the material survives contact with senior audiences, not just town-hall settings. Endorsements from Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith, giving HR and communications leads confident reference points when pitching internally. Biography highlights Bestselling author of Energize: Make the Most of Every Moment (Penguin Life, 2022). Winner, Business Book of the Year, Wellness and Wellbeing, Business Book Awards 2023. Endorsed by Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith. Keynote engagements with Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever, EY, Adobe, Barclays and DocuSign. Featured on Sky News, BBC Radio London and LBC, with written contributions in Forbes, HuffPost, Virgin and The Guardian. BSc Economics, London School of Economics; coaching qualifications from The Coaching Academy. Biography Most organisations now accept that burnout, disengagement and quiet exit are not edge cases. They are showing up across leadership teams, middle management and frontline staff at the same time. The argument in Energize, published by Penguin in 2022 and named Business Book of the Year for Wellness and Wellbeing in 2023, is that this is an energy problem before it is a wellbeing problem. Simon Alexander Ong treats energy as a managed resource. His work asks leaders to look at how attention, recovery, relationships and purpose are organised across a working week, then to redesign the parts that drain people without producing anything. The same lens is then turned on teams and on the wider employee experience. The practitioner side keeps the material grounded. Ong is a qualified coach through The Coaching Academy, trained in NLP, and works one-to-one with senior leaders alongside the speaking work. That is why a keynote at Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever or EY tends to land as a conversation with the room rather than a motivational set piece. Endorsements from Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith have helped place him on the same shelf as the leadership and performance authors that senior HR and culture functions already trust. For boards thinking about engagement, retention and the human cost of permanent change, his content gives a language and a set of moves that staff and leaders can actually use. Key speaking topics Energy management for leaders and teams Sustainable high performance Employee engagement and wellbeing Purposeful leadership Focus and attention in a noisy work environment Mindset and personal growth Coaching cultures inside organisations Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and heads of employee experience designing wellbeing and engagement strategy Leadership development and learning teams running senior offsites and high-potential programmes Internal communications and culture leads planning all-hands and kick-off events Sales and commercial leadership audiences working under sustained pressure and target intensity Audience outcomes A clear language for energy as a managed resource at individual, team and organisational level Specific practices for protecting focus and recovery inside an existing diary, not in addition to it A more honest view of where current wellbeing efforts are working and where they are decorative Renewed sense of purpose and ownership for senior leaders carrying long change agendas Practical prompts a manager can use with a team the following Monday

Why organisations work with Simon Sinek The Golden Circle gives leadership teams a named, diagrammatic model for examining whether their communication and strategy starts from purpose or defaults to product; concrete enough to run a board session around, not just a concept to absorb from a stage. The Infinite Game framework reframes how organisations think about competition: the argument that most organisations are playing a finite game in an inherently infinite one gives senior leaders a precise diagnostic for why short-termism is corroding their culture and decision-making. His work on the Circle of Safety – drawn from military and organisational research – gives leaders a specific language and accountability structure for psychological safety, distinguishing it from vague “culture” conversations. Three consecutive Thinkers50 appearances (2017, 2019, 2021), including the Future Thinker award, position him inside the recognised canon of serious management thinking – relevant where senior buyers are evaluating credibility, not just popularity. His reach into the US Armed Forces, the United Nations, and the US Congress alongside global corporate work gives his frameworks a cross-sector validation that most leadership speakers cannot match. Biography highlights Author of five books on leadership and purpose, including Start with Why (global bestseller, over one million copies sold in the US alone), Leaders Eat Last (New York Times bestseller), and The Infinite Game (New York Times bestseller); published by Portfolio/Penguin and Penguin Random House Creator of the Golden Circle framework, one of the most widely adopted models in leadership communication and organisational purpose TED Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” (2009) is the third most-watched talk on TED.com, with over 60 million views Named to the Thinkers50 ranking three consecutive times (2017, 2019, 2021); recipient of the Thinkers50 Future Thinker Award Adjunct staff member, RAND Corporation (since 2010); former instructor in Strategic Communications, Columbia University Founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development platform, and Optimism Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House; has spoken at the United Nations, US Congress, and across senior US military leadership Biography Most leadership conversations begin in the wrong place. They start with what an organisation does or how it does it – and never reach the question that actually determines whether people are engaged, aligned, and willing to give discretionary effort: why. The inability to answer that question convincingly is not a branding gap; it is a leadership gap, and Simon Sinek has built one of the most recognised frameworks in contemporary management thinking to address it. His Golden Circle model – introduced in Start with Why (2009) and subsequently the subject of the third most-watched TED Talk in history – provides organisations with a structured means of diagnosing whether their leadership, communication, and strategy is purpose-led or merely product-led. The argument is grounded in the biology of decision-making: people do not respond primarily to logic and features, but to belief and identity. The practical implication for leadership is significant, and it is why the framework has moved from conference rooms into board strategy sessions, culture programmes, and military leadership curricula. His later work extends the argument. The Infinite Game (2019, New York Times bestseller) identifies a structural problem in how most organisations compete: treating an inherently infinite game – business, leadership, institutional relevance – as if it has a finish line. Leaders operating with a finite mindset optimise for short-term metrics and burn through the trust, culture, and purpose that actually determine longevity. This is not motivational language; it is a specific claim about strategic error, and it gives senior leaders a framework for examining decisions that are degrading their organisations from the inside. Sinek’s affiliations reflect the range at which his work operates. As an adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation since 2010, advising on military innovation, and having spoken at the United Nations Global Compact Leaders Summit and directly to senior leadership across every branch of the US Armed Forces, he brings institutional credibility that extends well beyond the corporate speaker circuit. Three consecutive Thinkers50 appearances, including the Future Thinker Award, confirm his standing within the serious canon of management thinking. Key speaking topics Purpose-driven leadership and the Golden Circle Organisational trust and psychological safety Finite vs. infinite mindset in strategy and leadership Leadership culture and the conditions for engagement Long-term organisational performance and decision-making Inspiring communication for leaders and teams Values, identity, and organisational alignment Ideal for C-suite and board-level leadership development programmes where the strategic case for culture and purpose needs to be made at an executive level CHROs and People directors working on engagement, trust, and the conditions under which employees perform at their best Transformation leads and strategy teams examining how short-term competitive pressures are eroding long-term capability Senior leadership conferences requiring a speaker with both mass-market name recognition and a defensible intellectual framework Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary – Golden Circle, Circle of Safety, Infinite Game – that gives leadership teams a common reference point for conversations about purpose, trust, and strategy A framework for diagnosing whether their organisation’s leadership and communication starts from why or defaults to what A reframe of competitive strategy: the finite vs. infinite mindset distinction as a diagnostic tool for identifying decisions that are weakening organisational resilience Greater clarity on the specific leadership behaviours – protection, consistency, accountability – that build psychological safety and sustain discretionary effort A practical case for why culture and purpose are strategic variables, not HR programmes

Why organisations work with Simon T. Bailey Original research on workforce resilience. His State of Working America: Thriving in Resilience and Brilliance study surveyed over 1,000 US workers and underpins his keynotes with current data rather than received wisdom. A customer experience playbook rooted in operational reality. His SPARK methodology distils what he learned as Sales Director of the Disney Institute into practices that frontline teams can apply. Award-winning published work. Resilience@Work won both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Press Award, signalling editorial credibility beyond bureau-circuit hype. Reach that translates into recognition inside client organisations. His 14 LinkedIn Learning courses have reached more than 400,000 professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with the material. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Brilliance Institute, Inc. Former Sales Director, Disney Institute (seven years as a Disney cast member). Author of 11 books, including Release Your Brilliance (HarperCollins), ranked No. 17 by 800-CEO-Read among the top 100 books being read by corporate America. Resilience@Work recipient of the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Press Award. Named to Success magazine’s Top 25 thought leaders alongside Brené Brown, Tony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey. 14 LinkedIn Learning courses with a combined audience of 400,000+ professionals. Executive MBA, University of East London; three honorary doctorates, most recently a Doctorate of Science in Business Administration from Cleary University. Biography Disney spent decades teaching the world that service is a system, not a personality trait. Bailey was inside that system as Sales Director of the Disney Institute, and his work since has carried that operating discipline into the wider corporate world. The premise of his current research is straightforward. Engagement scores plateaued during the pandemic and have not recovered. His State of Working America: Thriving in Resilience and Brilliance report, drawn from over 1,000 US workers, gives leaders an evidence base for why and what to do about it. Resilience@Work, the book built on that research, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Press Award. The intellectual through-line across his 11 books is the connection between how people feel about their work and what customers experience at the other end. Release Your Brilliance, published by HarperCollins, was ranked among the top 100 books being read by corporate America. His SPARK methodology turns that thesis into operating practice for frontline teams. His reach inside organisations is unusual for a keynote author. 14 LinkedIn Learning courses have placed his material in front of 400,000+ professionals, which is why Success magazine listed him among its Top 25 thought leaders, in the company of Brené Brown, Tony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey. Key speaking topics Workforce resilience Employee engagement and retention Customer experience and service culture Leadership development Personal and professional brilliance Inclusive and values-based leadership Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement after sustained workforce fatigue Customer experience and service leaders translating brand promise into frontline behaviour Sales and commercial leadership teams looking to renew energy and conviction HR and L&D summits, organisational town halls, and customer-facing field events Audience outcomes A current evidence base, drawn from Bailey’s State of Working America research, on what is driving disengagement and what restores it. The SPARK service framework, translated into specific behaviours frontline teams can adopt the following week. Renewed conviction in the link between how employees feel and what customers experience. A vocabulary leaders can use to talk about resilience and brilliance without slipping into wellness platitudes.

Why organisations work with Stef Sword-Williams She gives quiet, high-performing employees a working method for being seen, which directly affects retention and promotion equity rather than abstract confidence. Her material is built from eight years inside advertising, so self-promotion is taught as a brand and storytelling discipline, not a motivational frame. F*ck Being Humble has trained workforces at Apple, Google, Unilever, Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, the BBC, NatWest, L’Oreal, Aviva, and Amazon, giving her a wide read on where internal visibility fails. The book F*ck Being Humble: Why Self-Promotion Isn’t a Dirty Word has sold over 10,000 copies and gives her a defined point of view that audiences can follow into workshops and team practice. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, useful as signal for senior buyers screening a younger speaker against a leadership-level audience. Biography highlights Founder of F*ck Being Humble, a global training consultancy working with Apple, Google, Unilever, Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, the BBC, NatWest, L’Oreal, Aviva, and Amazon. Author of F*ck Being Humble: Why Self-Promotion Isn’t a Dirty Word, published by Quadrille and reported to have sold over 10,000 copies. TEDx speaker, with a talk titled “F*ck being humble!” delivered at TEDxAreni. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe honouree. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), recognising the social impact of her work. Featured in Vogue, BBC World News, the Financial Times, and The Times, and a regular speaker at industry events including Advertising Week. Biography The people who get promoted are not always the people doing the best work. Inside large organisations, visibility shapes who progresses and who plateaus, and most employees have never been taught how to make their contribution legible to the people deciding their next role. Stef Sword-Williams spent close to eight years in advertising telling stories for global brands before noticing how rarely the same craft was applied to individual careers. She founded F*ck Being Humble in 2018 to close that gap, and in 2020 published the book of the same name with Quadrille, setting out a method for self-promotion that treats it as professional skill rather than personality trait. The work has scaled into a training practice used by Apple, Google, Unilever, Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, the BBC, NatWest, L’Oreal, Aviva, and Amazon. She has been recognised as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe honouree and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, with media coverage across Vogue, BBC World News, the Financial Times, and The Times. Her TEDxAreni talk, “F*ck being humble!”, is the short form of the same argument. Organisations that want to keep their best people, close promotion gaps, and grow a stronger internal pipeline cannot rely on quiet competence to surface itself. Sword-Williams gives them a vocabulary and a practice for fixing that. Key speaking topics Self-promotion as a workplace skill Personal branding inside organisations Imposter syndrome and confidence at work Pitching, presenting, and making ideas heard Negotiation and asking for more Networking and internal visibility Feedback culture Storytelling for individuals in a brand-driven world Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and L&D leaders working on retention, promotion equity, and internal mobility. DEI and ERG leads designing programming for women, early-career talent, and underrepresented groups in promotion pipelines. Heads of Talent and managers running high-potential and emerging-leader cohorts. Conference programmers building tracks on workplace confidence, personal brand, or future skills. Audience outcomes A practical method for talking about their own work without sounding self-serving or scripted. A clear view of where internal visibility breaks down and which behaviours close that gap. Language for handling feedback, negotiation, and self-advocacy conversations with managers. Permission and pattern for ambitious self-presentation in cultures that default to humility. Tools managers can use to surface quieter talent and rebalance who gets seen.

Why organisations work with Stefaan van Hooydonk His Global Curiosity Institute has developed individual and organisational diagnostic tools deployed across 16 multinational companies. This means organisations can baseline their curiosity culture before investing in it – a rigour that most L&D and culture interventions do not offer. His core argument is specific and verifiable: 90% of the leaders in his research say investing in curiosity is important for innovation; 50% simultaneously believe innovation distracts from operational focus. That contradiction is not an attitude problem – it is a structural design problem, and he has a method for resolving it. His six Fortune 200 CLO appointments – including Cognizant, where he led learning for more than 300,000 associates globally – mean his diagnostic model was stress-tested against the same conformity pressures he now advises organisations to overcome. Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) provides a durable, publishable framework that sustains the conversation in organisations well beyond a single event. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, his account of how cultures differ in their relationship to curiosity and conformity is grounded in direct, cross-cultural professional experience – not comparative research conducted at a distance. Biography highlights Founder, Global Curiosity Institute; developer of individual and organisational curiosity diagnostic tools, applied in 16 multinational companies across a 500-person study Former Chief Learning Officer at Cognizant (L&D responsibility for 300,000+ associates), Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart Set up and led the executive education arm of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai Author of The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) Executive MBA, Rutgers University; master’s degrees in Economics and Chinese; postgraduate study in Cross-Cultural Management (France); certified executive coach Has lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia Biography The idea that organisations want curious employees rarely survives contact with the way most organisations are actually designed. As companies scale, they reward consistency, structure incentives around delivery, and create management cultures in which asking the wrong question carries professional risk. Stefaan van Hooydonk spent more than two decades inside that structural tension – as Chief Learning Officer at six Fortune 200 companies including Cognizant, Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart. What distinguishes his perspective is the precision of his diagnosis. Working through the Global Curiosity Institute, van Hooydonk developed two empirical tools: an individual curiosity profile measuring three dimensions of inquisitiveness – toward the world, toward others, and toward oneself – and a nine-dimension organisational diagnostic assessing conditions from psychological safety and manager behaviour to failure acceptance and vision clarity. These instruments have been applied across 16 multinationals and studied across 500 professionals. The research revealed a core tension: 90% of leaders surveyed said investing in curiosity supports innovation, yet 50% simultaneously said innovation distracts from operational efficiency. This is not a values gap. It is a structural contradiction embedded in how most organisations function. His two books – The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) – develop the argument in full. The central thesis: curiosity is not a personality trait but a learnable, measurable capability that atrophies in environments that reward conformity. At Cognizant, his final corporate appointment, van Hooydonk oversaw learning and development for more than 300,000 associates across a global workforce. That scale makes the question of how environments either enable or suppress curiosity concrete in a way that purely academic research cannot replicate. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, van Hooydonk brings an account of curiosity as a culturally shaped organisational condition – one that looks different in a Finnish engineering firm, an Indian e-commerce company, and a Gulf energy business, but is subject to the same structural suppressants in all of them. Key speaking topics Workplace curiosity as an organisational capability Intentional curiosity and learning culture design Curiosity-driven leadership Organisational curiosity diagnostics and measurement Building learning organisations Curiosity and innovation at scale Corporate learning strategy Ideal for CHROs and CLOs driving learning culture or capability transformation Senior HR and L&D leaders designing or evaluating learning ecosystems Leadership teams in large organisations where learning agility and adaptability are strategic priorities Boards and senior executives examining organisational resilience and the cultural conditions that support it Audience outcomes A clear, evidence-based account of why large organisations structurally suppress curiosity – and why standard L&D investment does not resolve it Familiarity with a three-part curiosity model (world, others, self) as a practical design language for leadership and team development Understanding of the nine organisational dimensions that enable or limit curiosity, drawn from research across 16 multinational companies A set of specific, actionable moves – applicable to managers, HR teams, and executives – for building conditions where intentional curiosity is measurable and sustained A framework for distinguishing curiosity as a capability from curiosity as a cultural aspiration – and for making the former real

Why organisations work with Stephanie Davies A working method that gets cynical adult audiences to engage with behaviour change without the eye-rolling that usually accompanies culture training. A track record on hard conversations, with a programme at HSBC training more than 500 leaders to handle performance and feedback without flinching. A point of view on engagement grounded in published psychology, set out in her book Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter (Crown House). Two decades inside corporate culture work across HSBC, Nespresso, Nando’s, and government, so the content lands as practitioner advice rather than commentary. A delivery style that holds the room. The comedy training is a tool for retention and recall, not a gimmick layered on top of the content. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Laughology, founded 2006. Author of Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, Crown House Publishing. Master’s-level training in psychology, focused on humour and organisational performance. Designed and delivered performance-conversation training at HSBC for 500+ leaders. Culture and behaviour programmes with Nespresso, Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and UK government departments. Regular columnist for Training Journal; previously an award-winning stand-up comedian. Biography Most culture programmes lose the room in the first ten minutes. Adults arrive sceptical, the language is corporate, and the behaviours being asked of them feel performative. Laughology was built to solve that delivery problem. Stephanie Davies founded it in 2006 to pair applied psychology with the craft of stand-up, and uses humour as a mechanism for behaviour change rather than as decoration. The substance sits behind the style. Her book, Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, sets out humour as a thinking skill, drawing on positive psychology and the cognitive research on how laughter shifts perspective and learning retention. Her master’s-level work in psychology runs through the firm’s programmes on engagement, leadership behaviour, and feedback. The client list reflects the practical bias. HSBC commissioned performance-conversation training for more than 500 leaders. Nespresso brought her in to strengthen retail leadership. Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and government departments have used Laughology for culture and behaviour work. Across these, the brief is consistent: get people to commit to a change in how they behave, not just understand why it matters. That practitioner record is what distinguishes her in a crowded happiness-at-work category. Most speakers in the space arrive from coaching, HR, or pop-psychology. Davies arrives from a working comedy career and a psychology specialism in humour, with twenty years of corporate delivery behind her. Key speaking topics Workplace engagement and culture change Psychology of humour at work Performance and feedback conversations Behaviour change in large organisations Leadership development and team culture Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Resilience and positive psychology Ideal for CHROs and people directors running engagement or culture change agendas. L&D and OD leads commissioning leadership, feedback, or behaviour-change programmes. Boards and executive teams looking for a substantive culture session that an internal audience will actually engage with. Conference organisers programming a keynote that has to do real work on a wellbeing or culture theme. Audience outcomes A working model of humour as a behaviour-change tool, not as entertainment. Language and techniques for running performance and feedback conversations without avoidance. A clearer view of what drives engagement at the level of daily behaviour. Practical positive-psychology techniques for resilience and team morale. A session people actually remember, which is the precondition for any of the above changing behaviour.

Why organisations work with Steve Gutzler Translates emotional intelligence research into specific behaviours senior leaders can run inside high-stakes meetings, escalations, and team conversations. Coaches at the operator level. His client list (Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, Spotify, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, U.S. Department of Commerce) is built around enterprise leadership development, not after-dinner motivation. Author of Splash and co-author of Lead With No Fear, two books that give a sponsor team a defensible body of work to point to when justifying the investment internally. Bring a coaching, not lecturing, posture into the room. Useful when the audience is senior enough to resent generic frameworks and wants to leave with something they will actually use on Monday. Biography highlights President of Leadership Quest, a leadership development and executive coaching firm. Author of Splash: The Ten Remarkable Traits to Build Momentum in Life and Leadership. Co-author of Lead With No Fear with Mike Acker, a 90-day leader-shift workbook with a companion edition. Creator of the Life and Leadership Journal, a 52-week guided self-reflection tool used in his coaching engagements. Keynote and coaching client roster includes Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, Spotify, Starbucks, Seattle Seahawks, Ritz-Carlton, Starwood Hotels, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Marriott, U.S. Department of Commerce. Recent keynote platforms include the 2024 BNI Global Convention and the ECHL 2024 league meetings. Biography Most leadership programmes still teach influence as an intellectual problem. The hard part for senior leaders is rarely the analysis. It is the half-second after a difficult question, the tone of the next email, the look on the face when the quarterly numbers slip. Emotional intelligence is the discipline that decides those moments, and it is the discipline most leadership curricula skip. Leadership Quest, the firm Gutzler runs, exists to close that gap. The work draws on neuroscience-grounded emotional intelligence research and translates it into observable behaviour for executives operating under pressure. It is built for leaders who are already capable on paper and need the next layer of self-management, presence, and team effect. His writing reinforces the same argument. Splash sets out the everyday leadership traits that compound into team momentum. Lead With No Fear, co-authored with Mike Acker, walks leaders through a structured 90-day shift away from worry, insecurity, and self-doubt toward clarity and confidence. Both books are practical rather than theoretical, and both are used as backbone material in his coaching engagements. The client roster reads as a working list of organisations that buy leadership development seriously: Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, Spotify, Starbucks, the Ritz-Carlton group, the Seattle Seahawks, the U.S. Department of Commerce. The pattern across them is consistent. They are buying a coach who can stand in front of a senior audience, name what is actually difficult about leadership, and leave the room with leaders behaving differently the same week. Key speaking topics Emotional intelligence for senior leaders Executive presence and influence Leadership performance under pressure Human-centered leadership High-performance teams Stress, composure and emotional agility Personal leadership and accountability Ideal for Heads of leadership development and L&D sponsors building EI into senior leadership curricula. CHROs and Chief People Officers running executive offsites and high-potential programmes. Business unit leaders and CEOs whose senior teams are technically strong but stretched on composure, presence, and team effect. Sales, customer-facing and front-line leadership populations where interaction quality drives commercial outcomes. Audience outcomes A working definition of emotional intelligence as a performance variable, with named behaviours that leaders can identify in themselves and their teams. Specific habits for managing reactivity, tone and presence in high-stakes interactions. A clearer view of how stress and self-management show up in team output, retention and trust. Language to use with direct reports about emotional regulation without making it feel like therapy. A simple structure (drawn from Splash and Lead With No Fear) for sustaining the change after the keynote.

Why organisations work with Stew Friedman Total Leadership is one of the few leadership methods built inside a Fortune 10 operating environment, Ford Motor Company, and then road-tested through a top-five business school for two decades. It has the rigour of academic work and the realism of factory-floor change. He gives executive teams a usable language for the trade-off they actually face, which is not work versus life but performance under pressure versus depletion of the people delivering it. His framework converts a soft topic into a measurable one. Participants run small structured experiments and report performance gains across four domains, which gives HR and L&D leaders something concrete to point at. Thinkers50 named him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into the Hall of Fame in 2023, which is unusually strong recognition in a category that buyers are now under board pressure to take seriously. He works at the level senior buyers want, which is senior leaders and high-potential cohorts, and he is comfortable in front of a board, an executive offsite, or a long-form development programme. Biography highlights Emeritus Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, on faculty since 1984. Founder of the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, both established in 1991. Former senior executive for leadership development at Ford Motor Company, where he ran the Leadership Development Center and a corporate programme reaching 2,500 managers a year. Author of Total Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press), Leading the Life You Want, and Parents Who Lead. Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Talent, 2015, and inductee into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2023. Families and Work Institute Work Life Legacy Award, 2013. Host of Work and Life on SiriusXM Wharton Business Radio. Biography Ford Motor Company in the late 1990s was the proving ground for an idea that most leadership programmes still avoid: that the performance of senior leaders is inseparable from the rest of their lives, and that pretending otherwise produces fragile executives and exhausted teams. Friedman ran that experiment as the company’s senior executive for leadership development from 1999 to 2001, leading the Leadership Development Center and a programme that touched 2,500 managers a year. What he took back to Wharton became Total Leadership, the book and the method. The argument is simple to state and difficult to execute. A leader has four domains, work, home, community and self, and the job is to design small experiments that produce gains across all four at once. The method is taught inside Wharton’s MBA and executive programmes and has been delivered to thousands of leaders inside companies that cannot afford to treat senior burnout as a private matter. The intellectual home for the work is the Wharton Leadership Program and the Work/Life Integration Project, both of which Friedman founded in 1991 and ran for decades. He has written Total Leadership, Leading the Life You Want, and, with Alyssa F. Westring, Parents Who Lead. Harvard Business Review has carried more than fifty of his digital pieces. The external recognition matters because the category does. Thinkers50 ranked him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2023. The Families and Work Institute gave him its Work Life Legacy Award. For a senior buyer trying to fix the gap between what their leaders are asked to deliver and what their workforce is willing to give, that is the body of work in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership impact in all parts of life Total Leadership and four-way wins Leadership development inside large organisations Work and life integration as a performance question Engagement and the contract between leaders and the people they lead Talent strategy and senior leader development Parenting, career, and the dual-career executive household Ideal for CEO, COO, and executive committees rebuilding the leadership model after restructure or sustained pressure CHRO and chief talent officers responsible for senior leader development and retention Boards looking at engagement and burnout as a governance and risk issue, not a perks question High-potential cohorts inside leadership academies and corporate universities Audience outcomes A different working definition of leadership performance, one that includes the durability of the leader and the team, not just quarterly output A simple structure for designing small experiments that improve performance and wellbeing at the same time A language senior teams can use with each other about pressure, depletion and trade-offs without it sliding into a wellbeing conversation A clearer sense of what the next generation of senior leaders actually need from their organisations, and what they will not accept