Employee Engagement

Why organisations work with Bobby Umar He treats connection as a teachable skill, not a personality trait. The 5 C’s of Connection framework, drawn from his TEDxUWO talk, gives leaders and employees a structured way to build trust, credibility and influence inside and outside the organisation. His background is unusually broad for the topic: engineering at Bombardier, brand marketing at Kraft and Unilever, and Second City improv training. That mix shows up in how the work lands, structured enough for senior audiences, performative enough to hold a room. He is a recognised authority on LinkedIn as a professional channel. Multiple LinkedIn Top Voice designations, including an early Presentation Skills badge, mean leaders learn from someone who has built an audience the way they are being asked to. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker and five-time TEDx speaker, which gives senior audiences confidence that the craft and delivery will match the content. Biography highlights Five-time TEDx speaker, including “The 5 C’s of Connection” (TEDxUWO) and “School: Learning to Fly” (TEDxUTSC). Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, listed alongside Richard Branson and Brené Brown. LinkedIn Top Voice, with early badges for Presentation Skills, Thought Leadership and Personal Branding. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone (#1 on three Amazon bestseller lists). Founder of DYPB (Discover Your Personal Brand), described as North America’s largest personal branding event, with 60 experts and over 300 delegates. Career background spans Bombardier (engineering), Kraft and Unilever (brand marketing) and Second City (performing arts). B.Eng., McGill University; MBA, McMaster University. Biography Most leadership development still treats connection as a soft skill that either comes naturally or does not. Bobby Umar’s work argues the opposite. His 5 C’s of Connection framework, popularised through a viral TEDxUWO talk, breaks authentic relationship-building into components that can be taught to engineers, sales teams, senior executives and entry-level employees alike. That argument is grounded in an unusual professional path. Before becoming a speaker, Umar trained as an engineer at McGill, ran brand marketing for Kraft and Unilever, took an MBA at McMaster and studied improv at Second City. The result is a practitioner who can move between the analytical and the performative without losing either audience. His credentials inside the speaking and creator economy are deep. Five TEDx talks. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. LinkedIn Top Voice across several categories. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Founder of DYPB, the personal branding conference that became the largest of its kind in North America. What makes him commercially useful to organisations is the translation step. Personal branding, networking, social audio, vulnerable storytelling: these are not pitched as marketing tactics but as the connective infrastructure of modern professional life. For organisations trying to develop influential leaders, engaged employees and externally visible experts, Umar offers a practical, structured account of how connection actually works. Key speaking topics Authentic networking and relationship-building Personal branding for leaders and employees LinkedIn presence and professional digital reputation Vulnerable storytelling and leadership communication Heart-centred leadership Employee advocacy and internal brand-building Connection skills in hybrid and remote teams Ideal for CHROs, talent and L&D leaders investing in employee engagement, advocacy and internal communication. Marketing, communications and executive leaders building external thought leadership programmes for senior teams. Sales and business development functions where individual networking capability drives revenue. Conference organisers building agendas on leadership, future of work, employee experience or culture. Audience outcomes A working language for connection, anchored in the 5 C’s framework, that audiences can apply immediately to internal and external relationships. A clearer view of how personal branding intersects with leadership credibility, especially on LinkedIn. Practical methods for using storytelling, vulnerability and digital channels to build trust at scale. A reframing of networking as a professional discipline, not a transactional activity reserved for extroverts. Confidence to put senior leaders and frontline employees on visible platforms without sounding scripted.

Why organisations work with Lior Arussy He has the documented Mercedes-Benz USA case: a dealer network that moved from ninth to first in customer satisfaction, with 25,000 employees engaged through 80 full-day programmes. His method treats customer experience as an execution problem, not a brand or service problem. The deliverable is behavioural change at the frontline, tied to revenue and retention. He brings a published intellectual track. Seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster) on building organisations for continuous change, and 300+ articles, with regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Chief Executive. He has run more than 200 corporate transformations through Strativity, with clients including Mercedes-Benz, Royal Caribbean, Thomson Reuters, HSBC, SAP, FedEx, and Johnson & Johnson. The reference base is unusually deep for a CX speaker. His Generative AI keynote work addresses what the technology does to customer expectations and to the operating model of customer-facing teams. It is positioned as a strategic conversation, not a tooling demo. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Strativity Group, a global customer experience and strategy execution consultancy operating across multiple countries. Author of seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Passionate and Profitable (Wiley, 2005), and Customer Experience Strategy. 300+ published articles, with regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Chief Executive media. Led the Mercedes-Benz USA customer experience transformation, taking the dealer network from ninth to first in customer satisfaction. Named to the Global Gurus customer service and customer experience rankings; recipient of the CRM Magazine “Influential Leaders” award. MBA, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Previously held executive positions at Hewlett-Packard. Biography Most customer experience programmes do not fail at the strategy stage. They fail when an engaged steering committee meets a frontline that has been trained to comply with policy rather than own a customer outcome. Arussy has spent two decades closing that gap inside large organisations. He founded Strativity Group in 2003 and has since led more than 200 corporate transformations across customer experience, employee engagement, and strategy execution. The Mercedes-Benz USA work is the cleanest illustration: a dealer network that moved from ninth to first in customer satisfaction after 25,000 employees were engaged through 80 full-day programmes. A European logistics client he advised moved from 3% to 44% annual organic growth in two years. The work is consistently anchored in measurable commercial change, not in survey scores or brand language. The published track behind the consulting is substantial. He has written seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster, 2018) on building organisations that thrive under continuous change, and Passionate and Profitable (Wiley, 2005) on why customer strategies typically fail. He has published more than 300 articles, including in Harvard Business Review, and contributes regularly to Chief Executive media. His current keynote work extends into the implications of generative AI for customer expectations and the operating model of customer-facing teams. For a senior buyer, the value is access to a CX practitioner who has done the work at scale and writes about it with the directness of someone who has watched it succeed and fail in real organisations. The references run from Mercedes-Benz and Royal Caribbean to HSBC, SAP, and Johnson & Johnson. Key speaking topics Customer experience as commercial growth strategy Strategy execution and behavioural change at the frontline Customer-centric culture and employee engagement The generative AI-empowered customer Leading continuous change and organisational reinvention Personal agency and ownership in transformation Ideal for Chief Customer Officers, CXOs, and Chief Marketing Officers leading enterprise-wide CX programmes. CEOs and COOs evaluating the gap between customer strategy and operating reality. Transformation and change leaders responsible for embedding new behaviours across large, distributed workforces. Boards and leadership teams in retail, financial services, automotive, hospitality, logistics, and B2B technology. Audience outcomes A practitioner’s account of what separates CX programmes that move revenue from those that move only dashboards. A clearer picture of how generative AI is reshaping customer expectations and the work of customer-facing teams. The five steps from Next Is Now applied to the audience’s own change environment. Named case material from Mercedes-Benz, Royal Caribbean, and other Fortune 500 transformations. A direct challenge to the policy-and-consistency model of customer service, with the alternative framed in operational terms.

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 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 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 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 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 Mark Sanborn The Fred Factor is a recognised internal language for service standards. Costco, FedEx, Harley-Davidson and ServiceMaster have used the book and keynote to give frontline employees a shared definition of what extraordinary looks like. He treats leadership as a behaviour, not a role. You Don’t Need a Title to be a Leader gives organisations a way to mobilise discretionary effort from people who will never sit on an executive team. The Potential Matrix from The Potential Principle is a named framework for closing the gap between current performance and capacity, structured around four domains and four tools that managers can apply without consultants. Hall of Fame credentials with weight. Past President of the National Speakers Association, holder of the Cavett Award and a CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame member, the three highest distinctions the profession confers. Leadership Expert in Residence at High Point University since 2019, an active academic affiliation that grounds the keynote content in current student and faculty work. Biography highlights Author of The Fred Factor, over two million copies sold in 20-plus languages, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and BusinessWeek bestseller. Eight books in total, including You Don’t Need a Title to be a Leader, The Potential Principle and The Intention Imperative, published by Currency, Crown Business and Thomas Nelson. Leadership Expert in Residence, High Point University. Past President, National Speakers Association; CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame; Certified Speaking Professional. Cavett Award recipient, the NSA’s highest honour. Leadership programmes taught in 90 countries via Crestcom International; client list includes Costco, FedEx, Harley-Davidson, Cisco, IBM, KPMG, ESPN, General Motors and Toyota Financial Services. Biography Postal carrier Fred Shea delivered mail in Denver with such care that he became the subject of a book that has sold over two million copies in more than twenty languages. The Fred Factor turned a single neighbourhood story into a corporate standard for service, and gave Mark Sanborn the platform from which a much broader body of leadership work has been built. The work treats leadership as a daily behaviour rather than a position. You Don’t Need a Title to be a Leader argues that organisations underestimate the influence of people without formal authority, and overestimate the influence of those who only have it. The argument lands with operating leaders because it maps onto the gap they already feel between strategy and execution. Subsequent books extend the same thesis into structured frameworks. The Potential Principle sets out the Potential Matrix, four domains (thinking, performing, learning, reflecting) crossed with four tools (disrupt, refocus, engage, expand), for closing the distance between current and capable performance. The Intention Imperative argues that culture, inspiration and emotion are the three deliberate practices of the modern leader, not the soft consequences of good strategy. The credentials are unusually concentrated. Past President of the National Speakers Association, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame member, holder of the Cavett Award, Leadership Expert in Residence at High Point University, and creator of training programmes taught in 90 countries through Crestcom International. Costco, FedEx, Harley-Davidson and IBM return to the same body of work because it makes service and leadership behaviour teachable at scale. Key speaking topics Everyday leadership without formal authority Service excellence and customer experience standards Organisational performance and accountability cultures Personal and team potential Intentional culture and engagement Leadership legacy and succession Ideal for CEOs and operating leaders setting service or culture standards across a distributed workforce CHROs and learning leaders building scalable leadership development for non-managerial staff Customer experience and service leaders in retail, hospitality, logistics and financial services Franchise and dealer networks where brand experience depends on people the corporate centre does not employ Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for what extraordinary service looks like inside their own organisation A practical model for developing leadership behaviour in employees who hold no formal authority The Potential Matrix as a working tool for identifying where individual and team performance is capped A clearer view of culture, inspiration and emotion as deliberate leadership practices, not side effects Specific behavioural changes that frontline managers and individual contributors can apply the next working day

Why organisations work with Jim Knight Twenty years inside Hard Rock International leading global training, not a consultant looking in from outside. The frameworks he teaches were stress-tested across cafes, hotels, and casinos in fifty-plus countries. A culture and service argument anchored in three books (Culture That Rocks, Leadership That Rocks, Service That Rocks), the last two Amazon No. 1 bestsellers, with a consistent thesis rather than a topic catalogue. Practical fluency in the operating mechanics of training, onboarding, and frontline development. The work translates for hospitality, retail, franchise, and any business where the customer meets the brand through a junior employee. A delivery style built for energy-driven audiences. Knight’s background as a music teacher and his Hard Rock pedigree mean conference and franchise audiences treat him as a peer, not an academic visitor. Biography highlights Twenty years leading Global Training and Development for Hard Rock International, including Corporate University, e-learning, and leadership transition programmes. Founder and CEO of Knight Speaker, delivering culture, leadership, service, and engagement programmes worldwide. Author of Culture That Rocks (third edition), Leadership That Rocks (Amazon No. 1), and Service That Rocks (Amazon No. 1). Contributing member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council since 2020. Co-host of the Thoughts That Rock leadership podcast with Brant Menswar. Multiple Telly Awards for corporate training video, plus Brandon Hall Gold Best in Class for service recovery e-learning. Lifetime member of CHART. Biography Hard Rock built a global brand on the idea that the cafe, the hotel, and the casino should each feel like a live show. Holding that standard across more than fifty countries is not a marketing job. It is a training job. For two decades, Jim Knight ran that training function. That experience sits behind the Culture That Rocks series. The first book argued that culture is the operating system, not the wallpaper, and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine among the books most likely to change how a business is run. Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks extended the thesis into how leaders behave and how the customer actually feels the brand. Both reached Amazon’s No. 1 spot. The work translates particularly well for organisations whose product is delivered by frontline staff at scale: hospitality, retail, franchise systems, healthcare networks, and any consumer brand where a twenty-year-old in a uniform is the face of a billion-dollar logo. Knight speaks to those audiences as someone who has trained that workforce, not theorised about it. Beyond the speaking practice, he co-hosts the Thoughts That Rock podcast with Brant Menswar, contributes to the Rolling Stone Culture Council, and supports No Kid Hungry and Cannonball Kids’ Cancer through book and speaking proceeds. Among bureau-circuit culture speakers, the rarity is the operator pedigree. Most started as consultants. Knight started inside the room. Key speaking topics Organisational culture Customer experience and service differentiation Employee engagement and retention Leadership development Team building and frontline talent Hospitality, franchise, and consumer-brand operations Ideal for CHROs, learning and development leaders, and culture leads in consumer-facing organisations Franchise systems and multi-site operators where culture must scale across independent owners Hospitality, retail, and service-brand leadership audiences Conference and annual-meeting audiences looking for a high-energy culture keynote with operating substance Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as an operating system, with the mechanisms that hold it in place at scale Specific moves on hiring, onboarding, and frontline development drawn from Hard Rock’s training playbook A service-design lens for separating a brand experience from competitor parity Language and structure leaders can use to talk about engagement without falling into wellness-industry generalities

Why organisations work with Joe Mull He has a named, defensible framework, Employalty, that reduces engagement to three operating levers (Ideal Job, Meaningful Work, Great Boss) and links each to retention, reputation and revenue. He brings the credibility of running learning and development inside a major US healthcare employer, UPMC Physician Services, so the content lands with operators rather than HR theorists. He is one of fewer than 300 living speakers inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, a body of work recognised by his peers in 2025. Publishers Weekly named Employalty a top business book of the year, which gives the keynote an evidence base buyers can quote back to their executive team. He owns the manager-as-multiplier argument with specific, repeatable behaviours, not generic “be a better boss” framing, which is what a CHRO actually needs to commission a change programme around. Biography highlights 2025 inductee, Professional Speakers Hall of Fame (CPAE), National Speakers Association. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), NSA. Author of Employalty, named a top business book of the year by Publishers Weekly. Author of No More Team Drama and Cure for the Common Leader. Former Head of Learning and Development, Physician Services, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Host of Boss Better Now, ranked among the top management podcasts globally. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Management Speakers list in 2026. Contributor to and featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. Biography Engagement scores are a lagging measure of something more basic: whether people have a reason to commit. After three years of forced redesign, employees are choosier, quieter and more willing to walk, and the manager layer is where most organisations lose them. That is the territory Joe Mull works in. His Employalty framework, set out in the book Publishers Weekly named a top business book of the year, names three conditions that decide whether an employee commits or coasts: an Ideal Job, Meaningful Work, and a Great Boss. The argument is operational. Each lever maps to a manager behaviour, and each manager behaviour maps to retention, reputation and revenue. Before he was a keynote speaker, Mull ran learning and development for Physician Services at UPMC, one of the largest physician groups in the United States. That history matters. The content was built inside a healthcare employer under real workforce pressure, not derived from survey data, which is why operators tend to leave his sessions with specific things to change on Monday. In 2025 he was inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, a recognition fewer than 1% of professional speakers receive. His podcast Boss Better Now sits among the most-listened-to management shows, and his commentary appears in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune and Harvard Business Review. The through-line across all of it is the same wager: that the quality of bosses, not the quality of perks, decides whether a workforce stays. Key speaking topics Employee commitment and retention The manager-employee relationship as a business lever Workplace culture in the post-pandemic labour market Team dynamics and workplace conflict Leadership development for frontline and mid-level managers Workforce trends and the changing social contract of work Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding retention and engagement strategy Heads of learning and development designing manager capability programmes Healthcare, hospitality, professional services and other high-turnover sectors CEO and executive offsites where culture and people strategy are on the agenda Audience outcomes A shared language for what actually drives commitment at work, anchored in the Employalty framework A clear read on where the manager layer is creating or destroying retention Specific behaviours managers can adopt to lift discretionary effort A sharper view of the trade-offs between engagement spend and manager capability investment Practical tools for addressing team drama, gossip and the conflict patterns that drain culture

Why organisations work with Eric Termuende He gives leadership teams a working language for incremental change. The “one-degree shift” framework reframes culture work as a sequence of small, low-resistance moves teams can actually make, instead of a programme to be launched. His research base is original. Rethink Work and the surveys behind it focus on what attracts and retains the right people for a specific workplace, not the best people in the abstract, which is a more useful question for most CHROs. He pitches at team level, not enterprise level. Most future-of-work speakers operate at workforce-strategy altitude. Termuende speaks to the manager and the leader of leaders, which is where engagement and retention are actually won or lost. He has tested the material against operating environments at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Nokia. The keynotes have been refined through repeated commercial use, not built for the stage. Biography highlights Co-Founder of NoW of Work, a workplace innovation and leadership consultancy. Author of Rethink Work (Barlow Books), an Amazon best-seller on engagement and retention. Named to American Express’s Top 100 Emerging Innovators under 35. 2022 Arch Award for Early Career Achievement, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. TEDx speaker (TEDxBCIT, “Bigger than Work”) and Walrus Talks contributor. Host of the One Degree Shift podcast, interviewing operators and executives on incremental team change. Biography Most culture programmes fail not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the prescribed change is too big to land. Teams are asked to adopt new behaviours on top of existing workload, and the new behaviours do not survive the first quarter. Eric Termuende’s work begins from this observation. The argument running through Rethink Work and the surveys behind it is that engagement and retention are decided at the team level, by a small number of recurring behaviours, and that the right intervention is operational rather than aspirational. NoW of Work, the consultancy Termuende co-founded, is built around that premise. The “one-degree shift” framework is its working vocabulary: small, specific behaviour changes designed to reduce friction and build trust without triggering another transformation initiative. The credentials sit underneath the argument. American Express named him to its Top 100 Emerging Innovators. The University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business gave him its Arch Award for Early Career Achievement in 2022. The material has been refined in front of audiences at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nokia, and Zoom, and on TEDx and Walrus stages. For senior people leaders, the proposition is unusually concrete. Termuende leaves an audience with a way to act on Monday morning, not a thesis to debate. That is rare in the future-of-work category, where most speakers operate one level too high to be useful to the line managers who actually run the teams. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce design Team performance and trust Talent attraction and retention Workplace culture and engagement Multigenerational teams Leadership in uncertainty AI and the manager’s role Ideal for CHROs and people leaders responsible for engagement and retention strategy Leadership development and learning teams designing manager curricula Operations and divisional leaders running multigenerational teams under change Executive offsites focused on culture and talent in growth or post-merger contexts Audience outcomes A working framework for designing small behavioural shifts that hold at team level A clearer answer to which people the organisation should be attracting, not just how to attract more Practical positions on the multigenerational workforce that line managers can apply A reframing of culture work as operational practice, not communications activity

Why organisations work with Beatrice Kabutakapua A journalist’s discipline applied to leadership voice. A decade as a London-based foreign correspondent gives her a working method for turning messy human material into a clear, defensible narrative that holds up in a boardroom. A published methodology, not a workshop format. Lead With Your Story sets out a usable framework for converting lived experience into leadership content, which DEI and L&D teams can build a programme around rather than a single session. Harvard’s “Public Narrative” training is behind the work. The frame she uses sits inside an established discipline of civic and organisational storytelling, not a personal brand exercise. A specific answer to the diversity-at-the-top problem. She works with the leaders companies have invested in for years and still struggle to promote, and gives them language for authority on their own terms. A four-language operator. Sessions delivered in English, French, Italian and Spanish, with experience across European, North American and Middle Eastern audiences. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Business Storytelling Centre. Author of Lead With Your Story: How to Turn Your Lived Experience Into Your Leadership Superpower (Amazon bestseller, 2025). Harvard University certificate in Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling and Action. MA in international journalism, Cardiff University; MSc in social research methods, University of Sussex. Former foreign correspondent covering human rights, international development and African affairs. Client roster includes WPP Media, Aviva, Save the Children, Booking.com, Holland & Barrett, the Lankelly Chase Foundation and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Biography Most diversity strategies stop working at the threshold of the senior team. The pipeline is full, the sponsorship budget is spent, and yet the same kind of leader keeps getting promoted. The block is rarely capability. It is that the people coming through have spent their careers translating themselves into a voice the organisation already trusts, and that translation runs out at the point where authority needs to feel personal. Beatrice Kabutakapua works on that exact gap. Trained as a journalist at Cardiff, with a Harvard certificate in public narrative and a decade as a London-based foreign correspondent behind her, she founded The Business Storytelling Centre to give senior and emerging leaders a method for leading from their own material rather than someone else’s template. Her 2025 book Lead With Your Story, an Amazon bestseller, sets out the system she uses with clients. Her client roster is built around the buyers who feel this problem most directly. WPP Media, Aviva, Save the Children, Booking.com, Holland & Barrett, the Lankelly Chase Foundation, the European Journalism Centre and the Pacific Council on International Policy all sit inside her recent work, typically commissioned through DEI, People and Culture, or L&D leads. Sessions run in English, French, Italian and Spanish. The editorial background matters. She does not treat storytelling as motivation. She treats it as a discipline for extracting the specific, defensible argument inside a leader’s experience and giving it commercial form, which is why her sessions tend to land with senior audiences who are sceptical of softer leadership content. Key speaking topics Business storytelling for leaders Authentic leadership and lived experience Visibility and voice for under-represented leaders Inclusive leadership pipelines Internal communication and culture Coaching for newly promoted leaders Cross-cultural leadership communication Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers redesigning the senior leadership pipeline Heads of DEI and inclusion leads commissioning substantive, capability-led inclusion work L&D directors building authentic leadership and executive presence programmes Internal communication leads working on the leader visibility and culture narrative Audience outcomes A working method for turning their own lived experience into a leadership argument that holds up with a senior audience Specific language for the moments where existing executive communication training falls short A clearer view of why their current diversity-at-the-top interventions are not converting, and what to change Practical structures for coaching newly promoted leaders through the visibility threshold A vocabulary for inclusion work that senior leaders can use without political signalling