Talent Retention Strategies

Why organisations work with Russell Beck His 6C© model (Compensation, Career, Cause, Community, Culture, Company) gives people teams a structured, actionable framework for talent strategy: not a list of principles, but a diagnostic and planning tool organisations can apply directly. His career spans engineering project leadership across 25 countries, European Head of Talent at Yahoo!, MD of a £120m talent outsourcing business, and Global Head of Consulting at Impellam Group: a level of operational depth that most future-of-work commentators do not have. The World of Work to 2030 was recognised by the Financial Times as a business book to read and won the Institute of Leadership’s Book of the Year giving his frameworks independent, named validation rather than self-asserted authority. He translates megatrend analysis into specific commercial decisions. His sessions leave teams with a clear view of what the talent market will require of them by 2030, not just why it matters. Biography highlights Author of The World of Work to 2030, published by Bloomsbury Business (2024) Winner, Institute of Leadership Leadership Book of the Year 2024 Recognised by the Financial Times as a business book to read; regular interviewee in the FT Former European Head of Talent, Yahoo! – built one of the first pan-European talent functions Former Managing Director, Carlisle Managed Solutions – grew business to £120m turnover in 30 months; former Global Head of Consulting, Impellam Group Engineering project leader across 25+ countries, including a USD500m programme; co-owner and Director of Inspiration, ImagineThinkDo Biography Work is changing faster than most organisations’ talent strategies can keep up with. The labour market that defined hiring and retention practices for the last thirty years has shifted structurally, and the organisations still winning on compensation alone are discovering the limits of that approach. Russell Beck has spent three decades working through this tension as an operator running large-scale engineering programmes across 25 countries to building Yahoo!’s first pan-European talent function, to leading a £120m talent outsourcing business as Managing Director. His book, The World of Work to 2030, published by Bloomsbury Business, maps the megatrends reshaping organisations and careers and translates them into a practical action framework. It won the Institute of Leadership’s Leadership Book of the Year in 2024 and was recognised by the Financial Times as a business book to read. The book’s argument is not that change is coming, it is that most organisations are already behind, and that closing that gap requires deliberate, structured action on people strategy now. The 6C© model (Compensation, Career, Cause, Community, Culture, Company) is Beck’s proprietary framework for diagnosing and rebuilding talent strategy in a market where employees hold structural leverage. It has been deployed with organisations across sectors including Vodafone, the NHS, Cambridge University Press and the Top Employers Institute. Through ImagineThinkDo, the consultancy and development firm he co-owns with Alison Beck, he works directly with senior leadership teams on workforce transformation, leadership development and cultural change. His perspective combines the research discipline of an engineer, the strategic experience of an operator who has led at scale, and the practical tools of a practitioner who has done the work inside organisations, not just advised on it from outside. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce strategy Talent attraction, retention and the 6C© model Organisational culture and belonging The multigenerational workforce Purpose-led leadership Leadership in uncertainty Future skills and employability Megatrends and their organisational implications Ideal for CHROs and people directors designing future-fit talent strategy Senior leadership teams navigating workforce transformation Talent, learning and organisational development functions CEOs and MDs seeking a commercially grounded view of the future labour market Audience outcomes A structured view of the megatrends reshaping work, and their specific implications for organisational and talent strategy Familiarity with the 6C© model as a practical tool for rebuilding attraction and retention approaches Clearer understanding of why belonging – not diversity alone – determines whether inclusion strategies deliver measurable outcomes Practical steps leaders can take to close the gap between current people strategy and what the labour market will require by 2030 A leadership lens for embedding purpose and meaning at work in ways that affect retention and performance

Why organisations work with Ruth Gotian Her research base is unusual in the leadership field: in-person interviews with named peak performers including Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate Mike Brown, former NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, and Steve Kerr, not aggregated case studies pulled from secondary sources. Thinkers50 named her the #1 emerging management thinker in the world in 2021, placed her on the Coaches50 list in 2024, and shortlisted her in 2025 for the Coaching and Mentoring Award, one of eight thought leaders globally. Few executive development voices hold all three. For 29 years inside Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Chief Learning Officer, she built and ran the mentoring infrastructure her frameworks describe. The work is operational, not theoretical. Her four-attribute model from The Success Factor (intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, constant informal learning) gives leadership teams a shared, testable language for what they are actually selecting and promoting for. Her mentoring work is structural, including how to recognise toxic mentorship and where to find mentors outside the obvious channels, which is what large organisations actually struggle with when formal programmes stall. Biography highlights Faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University, teaching graduate-level courses on high achievement based on her research. Previously Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, over a 29-year career. Author of The Success Factor (Kogan Page, 2022), co-author of The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring with Andy Lopata (Pearson/FT, 2024), and co-author of Mentoring in Healthcare with Vineet Chopra and Sanjay Saint (2025). Thinkers50 Radar Award, 2021 (#1 emerging management thinker); Coaches50, 2024; shortlisted for the Coaching and Mentoring Award, 2025 (top eight globally). Cited as a leadership expert by The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and NBC News; named a top mentor by Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University. Contributing author at Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Fast Company; LinkedIn Top Voice in Mentoring, 2023. Semi-finalist for the Forbes 50 Over 50 list. Biography The four attributes that distinguish Nobel laureates, astronauts, Olympic champions, and world-class CEOs are not the ones senior leaders typically optimise for. Intrinsic motivation, perseverance, a strong foundation, and constant informal learning, all running at once. That is the central finding behind The Success Factor, the book that put Ruth Gotian on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2021 as the world’s #1 emerging management thinker. The research is what gives the work its weight. The book is built on direct interviews with named figures, including Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate Mike Brown, former NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, Build-A-Bear founder Maxine Clark, and Steve Kerr. The conclusions are not extrapolated from secondary case studies, which is the standard pattern in the success and performance category. For 29 years inside Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology, she built and ran the institution’s mentoring infrastructure. That operational base is what separates her advice on building mentoring capability from the lighter material in the field. The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, co-authored with Andy Lopata, is the practical companion volume; Mentoring in Healthcare, co-authored with Vineet Chopra and Sanjay Saint, extends the work into the sector that taught her the discipline. She now sits on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate in adult learning and leadership, teaching graduate-level courses on high achievement built on the same research. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Fast Company, and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in Mentoring in 2023. Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University have each named her among the top mentors in the world; The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and NBC News have called on her as a leadership expert. The 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award shortlist placed her among eight thought leaders globally on the discipline she has spent her career inside. Key speaking topics High performance and the science of extreme success Mentorship as a leadership discipline Executive coaching and senior talent development Authentic professional networks Leadership behaviours of Nobel laureates, astronauts, and Olympic champions Retention of high performers Organisational learning and chief learning officer practice Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers building leadership and mentoring capability Boards and executive committees thinking through succession and senior talent retention Partner-track and director-level cohorts inside professional services and healthcare Women’s leadership and executive development programmes inside large enterprises Audience outcomes A defined model for what high performance actually consists of, usable inside promotion and selection conversations A practical method for spotting and avoiding toxic mentorship inside formal programmes Concrete language for how senior leaders can develop people, not just deliver results A clearer view of how peak performers maintain momentum after early success Specific examples drawn from named Nobel laureates, astronauts, and CEOs that audiences can cite the next day

Why organisations work with Maja Jovanovic She has built an entire body of work around one specific, observable behaviour, the unnecessary workplace apology, which gives her sessions a level of practical specificity that most “women’s confidence” programming lacks. Her TEDxTrinityBellwoodsWomen talk and the follow-on TED Ideas article gave her a clearly identifiable thesis that travels beyond the room, useful for internal communications and post-event reinforcement. She works from a sociological lens rather than a self-help one, framing communication patterns as products of culture and structure, which lands well with audiences sceptical of motivational content. She has been engaged across regulated and conservative environments, including programming associated with TD Bank, RBC Financial Group and Harvard Business School, and consulted on Midol’s “No Apologies. Period.” campaign. She delivers in keynote, half-day workshop and online-course formats, viable for both flagship women’s leadership events and ongoing manager-level capability work. Biography highlights PhD in Sociology, with research focus on the sociology of women’s health. Contract and sessional faculty, Department of Sociology, McMaster University. Author of Hey Ladies, Stop Apologizing… and Other Career Mistakes Women Make (Rock’s Mills Press), with a published workbook and audiobook edition. TEDxTrinityBellwoodsWomen speaker, “How apologies kill our confidence”. Contributor to TED Ideas on workplace apology language and confidence. Consultant on Midol’s “No Apologies. Period.” campaign; broadcast appearances on Global News, CHCH and CTV’s The Social. Biography The unnecessary apology is one of the most reliable predictors of how a woman will be perceived in a meeting. Maja Jovanovic has spent over a decade studying it. As a sociologist trained at the doctoral level in the sociology of women’s health, she treats workplace communication as a social phenomenon, not a personality trait, which is what gives her work its bite. Her book, Hey Ladies, Stop Apologizing… and Other Career Mistakes Women Make, names a category of behaviour that most leadership programmes gesture at but rarely isolate. The argument is straightforward. Women in professional settings apologise reflexively in moments that do not call for it, and each instance erodes credibility with the stakeholders who decide who gets sponsored. The book has appeared in multiple editions through Rock’s Mills Press, alongside a workbook and audiobook. The thesis travelled further through her TEDxTrinityBellwoodsWomen talk, “How apologies kill our confidence”, and a TED Ideas feature that her own site identifies as the platform’s most-read piece of 2019. That visibility has translated into corporate workshops with audiences at TD Bank, RBC Financial Group and Harvard Business School programming, plus consulting work on Midol’s “No Apologies. Period.” campaign. What sets her apart in the women’s leadership speaker pool is her refusal to generalise. She does not talk about confidence as an attitude. She talks about confidence as a set of identifiable speech acts, written and spoken, that can be observed, measured and changed inside a quarter, the form of intervention that operations-minded HR and DEI functions can actually use. Key speaking topics Workplace communication and gendered language patterns Confidence as a learnable behaviour Apology language and professional credibility Imposter syndrome and structural bias Allyship and male sponsorship in mixed teams Perfectionism and people-pleasing at work Women’s leadership and career progression Ideal for CHRO, Chief Diversity Officer and DEI leads designing women’s progression programmes Heads of Talent and Learning building manager and high-potential curricula Employee resource group and women’s network leads booking flagship events Financial services, professional services and regulated-industry firms running women’s leadership tracks Audience outcomes A sharper, sociologically grounded vocabulary for naming the communication patterns that limit progression. Specific edits to spoken and written language that audiences can apply the next working day. A reframe of confidence as observable behaviour rather than personal trait, coachable at scale. A clearer view of where individual habit ends and organisational culture begins, useful for managers and sponsors.

Why organisations work with Eleanor Mills She has built the most detailed evidence base in the UK on ABC1 women aged 45 to 60, including partnership research with HSBC on midlife female entrepreneurs and with Accenture on the economic power of women over 45. She names a category most boardrooms still treat as a footnote, the “Queenager”, and gives employers and brands a working vocabulary for talent retention, marketing strategy and product design aimed at this group. She has 22 years of editorial authority at The Sunday Times, including running the magazine when it won Supplement of the Year at the 2018 Press Awards, which gives her communications work with senior leaders genuine craft behind it. Her book, Much More to Come (HarperCollins, 2024), turns midlife transition into a leadership story about reinvention after redundancy, divorce and caring responsibilities, the same pressures organisations are failing to design around. She convenes a 50,000-strong community at Noon, which means her insight is continually refreshed by the audience itself, not drawn from a one-off study. Biography highlights Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Noon (noon.org.uk), launched 8 March 2021. Former Editorial Director of The Sunday Times and Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, 1998 to 2020. Chair of Women in Journalism, 2013 to 2021. Author of Much More to Come (HarperCollins, 2024), a Sunday Times bestseller; co-editor of Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs (2005). Recipient of the International Alliance for Women World of Difference Award (2012); editor of the Press Awards Supplement of the Year (2018). Research partnerships with HSBC (Fearless and Thriving) and Accenture (The Rise of the Queenager). Biography The most economically active female demographic in Britain is also the one most likely to leave senior roles before reaching the top. Women aged 45 to 60 hold disposable income, household decision-making power and decades of operating experience, yet employers and consumer brands consistently underestimate both their commercial weight and their willingness to stay. This is the gap Eleanor Mills has spent the last five years documenting. After 22 years at Times Newspapers, including running The Sunday Times Magazine when it won Supplement of the Year at the 2018 Press Awards, she left in March 2020 and founded Noon on International Women’s Day 2021. Noon is now a 50,000-strong community and a research platform, with partnership studies for HSBC on midlife female entrepreneurs and Accenture on the economic power of women over 45. Her book Much More to Come (HarperCollins, 2024) extends that argument into the territory of reinvention. It draws on her own redundancy and the pressures her readers describe: menopause, divorce, empty nests, caring for elderly parents, second careers. The book reframes midlife as a productive stage organisations should design around, not write off. For a senior buyer, the value is precise. She gives a board the vocabulary, the data and the editorial sharpness to act on a workforce and consumer segment most strategy decks treat as a rounding error. Key speaking topics Women in midlife as a talent and consumer category Retention of senior women through menopause and caring years Reinvention after redundancy and career disruption Marketing and brand strategy for women over 45 Personal storytelling in leadership communication Resilience in transition Ideal for CHROs and talent leaders designing retention strategies for senior women CMOs and brand leaders targeting the over-45 female consumer Boards reviewing DEI and culture beyond entry and mid-career pipelines Leadership programmes for women navigating career and life transitions in their forties and fifties Audience outcomes A working definition of the Queenager category and what makes it commercially distinct Specific intervention points where organisations lose senior women, and what changes the curve Evidence drawn from named partnership research with HSBC and Accenture, not generic DEI argument A reframing of midlife transition as a leadership and reinvention story rather than a wellness theme

Why organisations work with Gorick Ng He turns two recurring HR problems, the disengagement of capable early-career hires and the quiet stagnation of mid-career professionals in pyramid-structured firms, into a single teachable framework drawn from 500-plus structured interviews and used by Harvard Business School with every MBA cohort. His work bridges three conversations that most organisations run separately: new-hire onboarding, frontline manager development, and DEI for first-generation and underrepresented professionals. One body of content, three internal audiences. The Unspoken Rules sits on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Books list for 2022 and is published by Harvard Business Review Press, which gives the content institutional credibility that motivational early-career speakers cannot match. He speaks the language of large professional-services and corporate buyers because he has been on the buy-side of it: Boston Consulting Group, Credit Suisse, and Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work research project. Sessions are designed as practical training, not inspiration. Manager toolkits, ERG curricula, and onboarding modules can be built directly off the talk. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right (Harvard Business Review Press). Named to Thinkers50’s 30 Thinkers to Watch in 2022; book selected for Thinkers50’s Best New Management Books of 2022. Career adviser at Harvard College and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. Former management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and investment banker at Credit Suisse. Researcher with the Managing the Future of Work project at Harvard Business School. Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, CNBC, and The Today Show. Biography The reason capable graduates plateau in their first two years is rarely the reason their managers give. It is almost never effort or intelligence. It is the gap between what new hires were told work would reward and what their organisations actually reward, a gap that is invisible to the people who already know the rules and punishing to those who do not. The Unspoken Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press and built on more than five hundred structured interviews, names that gap and gives organisations a vocabulary for closing it. Gorick Ng wrote the book that Harvard Business School now hands to every MBA, and he teaches the same material to undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. As a career adviser at Harvard College, he works directly with first-generation and low-income students, the population on whom the cost of unspoken rules is highest. The work moved from classroom to corporate quickly. Aon, BNP Paribas, GE, Google, IBM, Invesco, Kirkland and Ellis, and Charles River Associates have used the content in manager training, new-hire onboarding, and DEI programming. UC Berkeley, StartSe, and Singularity University have commissioned him on adjacent themes including innovation and how authors and founders build audiences in the AI search era. His authority comes from sitting on both sides of the question. Before academia he was a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and an investment banker at Credit Suisse, and a researcher with Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work project. He has watched professional-services organisations make the same recurring mistakes with early-career talent, and his frameworks are written for the specific tensions those organisations face, not for a general audience. Thinkers50 named The Unspoken Rules one of the ten best new management books of 2022 and named Gorick to its 30 Thinkers to Watch list the same year. The work has since been covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, CNBC, and The Today Show. The recognition matters less than the practical point underneath it: very few speakers treat early-career navigation, manager onboarding, and first-generation inclusion as one connected problem with one connected research base, and that is what large employers buy him for. Key speaking topics Early-career talent attraction and retention Manager development for frontline and people-leader cohorts Inclusive management of first-generation and underrepresented professionals Onboarding and the school-to-work transition Employee Resource Group programming and DEI training content Ownership and performance behaviours in early-career roles The future of work and early-career expectations Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent, and learning and development leads designing onboarding or manager training at scale. Heads of DEI and ERG sponsors building substantive programming for first-generation and underrepresented professionals. Professional-services and corporate firms with large early-career intakes (consulting, banking, law, accounting, technology). Talent leaders addressing mid-career stagnation among senior associates, senior managers, and VPs in firms where the path to the top narrows sharply. University and graduate-school audiences at convocation, orientation, and career-readiness events. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary across managers and new hires for the behaviours that quietly determine early-career progression. Specific manager actions that reduce avoidable attrition in the first two years, drawn from named patterns in the research. A practical lens for ERG and DEI work that translates inclusion into observable workplace behaviours, not slogans. Onboarding content that addresses what first-generation and underrepresented hires need to hear that their peers already know. Confidence among early-career employees that career progression is learnable, not a matter of background.

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

Why organisations work with Simon Hartley Nearly three decades inside elite sport, including Premier League football, the English Institute of Sport, Olympic teams and the Fijian rugby 7s programme, give him a working library of what world-class actually looks like in practice. He treats mindset and culture as engineered outcomes, not motivational ideas, with a published body of work (twelve books including Peak Performance Every Time and Stronger Together) that gives buyers a concrete intellectual product to point at. His client list crosses sectors that rarely share a stage, from Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest and The North Face to Bayer Leverkusen, FC Bayern Munich and Team GB, which makes the translation from sport to business credible rather than asserted. Founder of Be World Class and co-founder of Success Engineers, he runs a long-form consulting practice alongside the keynote work, so what audiences hear has been tested with the same leadership teams he later embeds with. Biography highlights Founder of Be World Class (2008) and co-founder of Success Engineers (2017). Former Consultant Sports Psychologist, English Institute of Sport; former Head of Sport Science, Sunderland AFC. Author of twelve books on performance, character, teams and hiring, including Peak Performance Every Time, Stronger Together and How to Develop Character. Worked with Olympic teams, Premier League clubs, Bundesliga sides (including Bayer Leverkusen and FC Bayern Munich), the Fijian rugby 7s programme, and Formula One. Corporate clients include Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest and The North Face. Featured in Personnel Today, Management Today, The Times and Bundesliga Weekly; on-screen consultant for the Fiji Time documentary series. Biography Elite sport offers a controlled study in performance. The conditions are public, the consequences are immediate, and the gap between teams that win consistently and teams that almost win is usually invisible to outsiders. Simon Hartley has spent close to thirty years inside that gap. He held senior roles at the English Institute of Sport and Sunderland AFC, worked across Premier League football, the Bundesliga, Olympic programmes and Formula One, and was part of the support team behind the Fijian rugby 7s side that became one of the most-watched sporting stories of recent years. In 2008 he founded Be World Class to apply what he had learned in those environments to organisations outside sport. The premise is straightforward. World-class performance is not a personality trait or a slogan. It is a set of habits, behaviours and cultural conditions that can be identified, taught and reinforced. His work for Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest, The North Face and others tests that premise against the practical questions senior leaders actually ask, about teams, hiring, character, and decision-making under load. Across twelve books, including Peak Performance Every Time, Stronger Together, How to Develop Character and Hire Great People, he has built a body of work that takes the language of elite sport and translates it into something a board or an executive committee can use. The books are short, deliberately, because they are written to be read by people who already have a day job. He has been featured in Personnel Today, Management Today, The Times and Bundesliga Weekly, and is a regular on-screen contributor to sports documentary work. The throughline in his speaking is a refusal to treat mindset as a soft topic. Resilience, character, team chemistry and culture are presented as variables that leaders can shape with the same discipline they apply to revenue and operations. That framing is why his audiences tend to leave with a checklist, not a feeling. Key speaking topics World-class team performance Winning mindset and mental toughness Resilience and performance under pressure Values-driven culture and leadership Hiring for character Sustaining high performance in volatile conditions Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees aiming to lift their performance ceiling, not their average CHROs and people leaders responsible for team performance, culture and hiring practice Sales and commercial leadership teams operating in high-pressure markets Conference audiences of senior leaders looking for substance behind the language of resilience and high performance Audience outcomes A clear distinction between good, great and world-class as operating standards, and what separates them in practice A working understanding of the behaviours and conditions that build resilient, high-performing teams Specific reference points from elite sport that translate to commercial settings, not analogies for their own sake A view of culture and mindset as engineered outcomes that leaders can influence directly Language and frameworks senior teams can take back into their own performance conversations

Why organisations work with Mimi Nicklin A productised methodology, ALUR (Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition), that gives line managers something more usable than “be more empathetic” and translates into engagement, psychological safety, and retention conversations. Practitioner credibility from a former CEO of a global advertising agency, so the empathy argument is framed in commercial language CHROs can defend to the CFO. Deep multigenerational fluency, including the HBR IdeaCast on generational differences and a thesis on listening to Millennial and Gen Z employees instead of forcing conformity. Strong Asia-Pacific and MENA market footprint, which is rare for an English-language workplace culture speaker and useful for regional and global rollouts beyond the usual US and UK circuit. Three published books on empathy at work, including Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work, that give internal HR sponsors something concrete to circulate before and after the session. Biography highlights Founder of Empathy Everywhere, a global empathy training and engagement platform. Author of Softening the Edge: Empathy: How Humanity’s Oldest Leadership Trait is Changing the World, and Empathy at Work. Featured guest on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, episode “How Empathy Helps Bridge Generational Differences”. Host of the Empathy Everywhere podcast (previously Empathy for Breakfast). Former CEO of a global advertising agency with 15+ years in marketing and brand strategy across 25 markets. Recognised on LinkedIn as the Number 1 Workplace Wellbeing Leader in Malaysia and named Malaysian Female Leader 2024. Biography Most empathy conversations in corporate settings die at the values poster. Leaders nod, HR runs a workshop, engagement scores barely move, and managers go back to managing on output. Mimi Nicklin’s work starts from the assumption that the problem is operational, not philosophical: empathy has no traction inside a business until it is broken into behaviours a tired manager can use on a Tuesday afternoon. That is what the ALUR methodology, the framework behind her platform Empathy Everywhere, attempts to do. Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition. Four practices, taught as habits, that sit underneath the messier work of running multigenerational teams, restoring psychological safety after restructure, and rebuilding engagement when hybrid has flattened the cues people used to read each other by. Her credibility on this is unusual because it is commercial first. She built and ran a global advertising agency before she became a full-time author and speaker, and her writing in Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work argues the business case in numbers a CFO will accept, not in the language of wellbeing alone. Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast brought her on to make the case that generational friction is mostly a listening failure, an argument that has since shaped how a number of her client organisations talk about Gen Z retention. The work sits at the practical end of the people agenda, which is why CHROs, heads of culture, and senior HR leaders book her rather than chief executives. She is the speaker you commission when the engagement survey came back worse than last year, the exit interviews keep using the same words, and someone needs to give the leadership population a usable answer. Key speaking topics Listening-led leadership and the ALUR methodology Empathy as a measurable workplace capability Multigenerational engagement and Gen Z retention Psychological safety in restructured and hybrid teams Mental health and wellbeing at work Conflict resolution and difficult conversations Inclusion as an everyday management practice Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers commissioning culture or engagement programmes after a low survey or restructure Heads of L&D rolling out leadership development to senior managers across multigenerational, multi-market teams Heads of DEI, wellbeing, or culture transformation looking for a substantive empathy capability that does not collapse into wellness theatre Regional HR leaders in Asia-Pacific, MENA, and Europe running global culture programmes that need a speaker with cross-market fluency Audience outcomes A practical operating definition of empathy at work, broken into the four ALUR behaviours, that managers can apply the next day Specific tactics for closing the engagement gap between senior leaders and Millennial or Gen Z talent without forcing either side to conform A clearer reading of where psychological safety has eroded inside hybrid and restructured teams, and what restores it A commercial case for empathy that connects to retention, productivity, and customer outcomes, not only wellbeing Confidence that empathy is a teachable management skill, not a personality trait some managers happen to have

Why organisations work with Mel Abraham A practitioner’s view of personal finance, not a motivational one. Thirty years as a CPA advising founders and high earners sits behind every framework he teaches. Financial wellbeing translated into a workforce metric. His employee financial wellness sessions connect personal money stress directly to productivity, retention, and engagement numbers a CFO recognises. A published, repeatable system. Building Your Money Machine and its Wealth Priority Ladder give audiences a sequenced model they can act on the next morning, not a set of principles to remember. Credibility at the top of the speaker profession. The Certified Speaking Professional designation is held by fewer than one in ten working speakers, and Abraham earned it on top of the CPA qualification. A founder’s story buyers can verify. He built, sold, and reinvested through a cancer diagnosis and recovery, which is why the work avoids the abstract optimism that defines most personal-finance content. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Building Your Money Machine (Hay House, 2024). International bestselling author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution. Certified Public Accountant with more than 30 years of advisory experience to founders and entrepreneurs. Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association. Host of the Building Your Money Machine podcast and YouTube show, reaching around two million viewers. Has shared stages with Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Arianna Huffington, Ed Mylett, and Amy Porterfield. Biography The gap between earning a high income and being financially free is wider than most professionals expect. Lifestyle absorbs salary growth, savings sit idle, and the moment when work becomes a choice keeps moving further out. Mel Abraham has spent three decades inside that gap as a CPA advising founders and high earners, and his work begins with the mechanics of closing it. Building Your Money Machine, his 2024 USA Today bestseller, sets out the sequence: earn, grow, protect. The book introduces the Wealth Priority Ladder and the Five Incomes, frameworks he uses to move audiences from a single salary to a portfolio of cash-producing assets. It followed The Entrepreneur’s Solution, an earlier international bestseller written for owner-operators trying to scale without trading their lives for the business. Inside organisations, Abraham translates the same material into a workforce argument. Personal financial stress shows up as distraction, presenteeism, and turnover, and his Financial Wellness, The Missing Link to Employee Wellness programme reframes it as a measurable productivity issue rather than a soft benefit. Buyers tend to be CHROs, founders, and benefits leads who want financial literacy treated with the same seriousness as physical and mental health. The Certified Speaking Professional designation, held by under one in ten working speakers, sits alongside the CPA credential. The combination is unusual, and it is what allows Abraham to take a stage at a sales kickoff of 20,000 or a boardroom of 10 and treat both as exercises in numerical precision. Key speaking topics Personal financial freedom and wealth-building systems Employee financial wellness and productivity Entrepreneurship and founder economics Wealth priority sequencing for high earners Legacy planning and intergenerational wealth Money mindset and behavioural finance Ideal for Sales conferences, founder summits, and entrepreneur networks CHROs and benefits leads building financial wellbeing into the employee proposition Wealth management, banking, and financial services events for client audiences Professional services firms and partnerships addressing partner and associate financial literacy Audience outcomes A sequenced model for converting earned income into income-producing assets A clearer view of which financial moves come first, second, and third Language for treating financial wellbeing as a measurable workforce outcome, not a benefit line item A founder’s account of building wealth through health crisis and business reinvention Tools drawn from a CPA practice rather than a motivational frame

Why organisations work with Joanne Lockwood A rare combination of lived experience as a transgender woman and the formal speaker credentials of a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I, which gives leaders both authenticity and confidence in how the message will land in a corporate room. Practical experience translating inclusion into operational HR practice through SEE Change Happen, the consultancy she founded after exiting a £3m IT services business she had run for two decades. A documented platform of long-form thinking through the Inclusion Bites podcast, written contributions to HRZone, The HRD, Training Zone and Worklife PA, and the Channel 4 / RDF documentary The Making of Me. A track record at scale with employers including Levi Strauss, lululemon EMEA, HarperCollins UK, Ogilvy, Molson Coors and Wates Group, across retail, professional services, housing and the NHS. A delivery style summarised by her own mantra, Smile, Engage, Educate, that lowers the temperature of difficult conversations and lets senior teams engage with trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion without defensiveness. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, SEE Change Happen, a diversity, inclusion and belonging consultancy specialising in transgender awareness and workplace inclusion. Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I. Fellow of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals. First openly transgender National President of Round Table Great Britain and Ireland. Host of the Inclusion Bites podcast and featured subject of the Channel 4 / RDF documentary The Making of Me. Former Trustee of akt, the LGBT+ youth homelessness charity, and volunteer with Beyond Reflections. Biography Most organisations have an inclusion statement. Far fewer have a workforce that knows how to act on it. The gap between published intent and daily behaviour is where culture either compounds or quietly erodes, and it is the space Joanne Lockwood has built her practice around. SEE Change Happen, the consultancy she founded after selling the IT services business she had built to £3m and 25 staff, works with employers to translate DEI policy into the language and habits of line managers. The work is grounded in trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion, where she has personal authority as a transgender woman, but extends across belonging, allyship and inclusive recruitment. Clients include Levi Strauss, lululemon EMEA, HarperCollins UK, Ogilvy, Molson Coors and Wates Group. Her credibility is reinforced by formal recognition from her own profession. She is a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I and a Fellow of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals. She was the first openly transgender National President of Round Table Great Britain and Ireland, and was the subject of Channel 4 and RDF’s documentary The Making of Me. The published work continues through the Inclusion Bites podcast and regular contributions to HRZone, The HRD, Training Zone and Worklife PA. Her own framing, Smile, Engage, Educate, is doing real work in the room: it gives leaders permission to ask the questions they have been avoiding, which is usually where useful inclusion conversations actually begin. Key speaking topics Inclusion and belonging at work Trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion Workplace allyship Inclusive recruitment and hiring practice Culture change and DEI strategy Employee engagement and experience Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and employee experience leaders rebuilding inclusion practice beyond statements and training modules. Executive teams and boards preparing for substantive conversations on trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion in a contested public climate. Talent acquisition and people-team leaders working on inclusive recruitment, onboarding and line-manager capability. Internal employee resource groups and Pride or DEI networks seeking a credible external voice that combines lived experience with formal expertise. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where inclusion policy is and is not shaping daily workplace behaviour, and the specific points at which it breaks down. Direct, practical language for trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion that leaders and line managers can use without fear of getting it wrong. A working definition of allyship that goes beyond visible support and into the everyday decisions managers make about hiring, promotion and team culture. Renewed confidence to engage with DEI as a leadership responsibility rather than an HR programme.

Why organisations work with Otmar Szafnauer He has run a Formula 1 constructor through administration and out the other side with the workforce intact, a credential almost no other operational leader on the speaking circuit can claim. He led the same team across three brand identities, Force India, Racing Point and Aston Martin, which gives him direct experience of the gap between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand in the engineering hall. His technical grounding, an engineering degree paired with operational roles at Ford, BAR, Honda and Force India, means board audiences get specifics on how decisions actually move through a complex organisation, not motivational abstractions. He has worked under three very different ownership cultures, from Vijay Mallya at Force India to Lawrence Stroll at Racing Point and Renault Group at Alpine, and can speak credibly about leading inside contested governance structures. Biography highlights Team Principal and CEO, Racing Point F1 and Aston Martin F1, 2018 to January 2022. Team Principal, BWT Alpine F1 Team, February 2022 to July 2023. Senior leadership at Force India from October 2009, including the team’s 2016 and 2017 fourth-place Constructors’ Championship finishes. Former Vice President, Honda Racing Developments, after entering F1 as Operations Director at British American Racing in 1998. Founder and Chairman, Soft Pauer, publisher of the official Formula 1 Timing iPhone app launched in 2009. BSc Electrical Engineering, Wayne State University; master’s in Business and Finance, University of Detroit Mercy. Biography Force India was placed in administration in mid-2018 after Vijay Mallya’s financial collapse. The garage was full of staff who had been approached by other teams, and a technical director the rivals very much wanted. The team came out of that summer with most of its people still in their seats. Otmar Szafnauer was the operational leader who kept them there. That period is the centre of his value to a serious audience. Across more than a decade running the same Silverstone constructor under three brands, Force India, Racing Point and finally Aston Martin, he saw what holds a high-performance organisation together when ownership, identity and strategy all change at once. The answer turned out to be unglamorous: honesty in front of the workforce, continuity of technical leadership, and a refusal to let the rebrand outrun the operating reality. His route into that role was deliberate. An electrical engineering degree from Wayne State, an MBA in finance from Detroit Mercy, then Ford, then Formula 1 from 1998 onwards, including a Vice President role at Honda Racing Developments. The result is a leader who can speak to engineers and to a board, and who treats culture as something built on calendar-blocked decisions about hiring, accountability and recognition rather than slogans. His later move to Alpine, where he served as Team Principal from 2022 until July 2023, gives the picture its second half. Running an OEM-owned team under Renault Group meant operating inside a corporate governance structure, with all of the political weight that implies. Few operators have led both an independent privateer and a manufacturer-owned team at the same level, and the contrast is the substance of what he can say to leaders managing similar shifts of their own. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership Leadership through restructure and ownership change Culture, accountability and psychological safety in elite environments Operational decision-making under time and resource pressure Lessons from three decades inside Formula 1 leadership Building and retaining technical talent in competitive markets Ideal for Boards and executive teams navigating ownership change, M&A integration or a corporate rebrand CHROs and people leaders responsible for retaining critical talent through periods of uncertainty Senior operators in technical and engineering-led organisations Leadership development audiences focused on composure and decision quality under pressure Audience outcomes A working sense of what leadership actually does for a workforce when ownership and strategy are in flux Specific examples of how culture, retention and accountability hold up in genuinely high-stakes environments A practical view of the difference between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand inside the operating organisation Confidence that the lessons translate, drawn from a domain where the consequences of poor decisions are visible every fortnight

Why organisations work with Anna Allerton She built her authority inside a 17-year operational career at Sky, including founding and producing Sky’s Sportswomen programme, so she speaks about high-pressure performance from inside it rather than outside it. Her Management Today 35 Women Under 35 listing and editorial track record give buyers a credible name on the panel for senior internal audiences who are sceptical of the wellness market. She is qualified through the Academy of Executive Coaching, the triple-accredited UK training body, and runs a 1:1 executive coaching practice alongside the speaking work, which means workshop content lands as coaching, not awareness. Her client list, including Workday, IMG, the Premier League, Sky, The Forward Trust and NBCU New York, shows she has tested the same content across financial, sports, media and broadcast environments at senior level. She writes on the topic for serious audiences, including a co-authored chapter in Myths of Menopause (Sequoia Books, edited by Dr Nicky Keay), giving organisations published material they can circulate internally after the session. Biography highlights Founder and Director of Allerton Coaching & Consulting 17-year career at Sky, including roles at Sky Sports News from Sub-Editor through to Global Head of Internal Communications Founder and producer of Sky’s Sportswomen, launched in 2012 as the first dedicated women’s sport TV programme of its kind Named in Management Today‘s 35 Women Under 35 Trained and qualified executive coach with the Academy of Executive Coaching Co-author of a chapter in Myths of Menopause (Sequoia Books, edited by Dr Nicky Keay) Clients include Workday, IMG, Sky, the Premier League, The Forward Trust, Whisper, NBCU New York and Age UK Featured in Grazia, Stylist, Times Radio and We Are The City Biography Sportswomen launched on Sky Sports in 2012 as the first British TV programme dedicated entirely to women’s sport. Anna Allerton founded and produced it, and it ran inside one of the most demanding live broadcast environments in UK sport. That credit, alongside seventeen years of editorial and production roles at Sky Sports News, is the reason her work on women in the workplace lands differently from most. She came back from her second maternity leave at 38 with debilitating symptoms that took a year to be correctly diagnosed as perimenopause. The experience pushed her to retrain through the Academy of Executive Coaching, the UK’s triple-accredited training body, and to build a practice specifically around keeping experienced women in senior roles through their forties and fifties. The work now runs on two tracks. A 1:1 executive coaching practice for senior women, and a consulting and speaking offer for organisations on what a menopause-inclusive workplace actually looks like in operating terms. Clients to date include Workday, IMG, the Premier League, Sky, The Forward Trust, Whisper, NBCU New York and Age UK. She co-authored a chapter in Myths of Menopause, edited by Dr Nicky Keay and published by Sequoia Books, and has written and spoken in Grazia, Stylist and Times Radio. What makes her useful in a boardroom rather than a wellness slot is the angle. She frames menopause as a talent-retention question first and a wellbeing question second. She was named in Management Today‘s 35 Women Under 35 for her work in sports journalism, not for her current specialism, and that older credential is part of why senior internal audiences take the newer one seriously. Key speaking topics Perimenopause and menopause in the workplace Talent retention of women in their 40s and 50s Women’s leadership and career navigation through midlife Women in sport and women’s sports journalism Returning to senior roles after maternity leave Menopause-inclusive workplace policy and practice Mental health and wellbeing for senior women Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and talent leaders designing retention strategy for women in senior roles Executive teams and ERGs in financial, professional services, media and sport launching menopause workplace programmes Senior women’s networks and leadership development cohorts in the 35 to 55 age range Boards and ExCos commissioning a credible non-clinical voice on menopause as a business issue Audience outcomes A clear reframing of perimenopause and menopause as a talent-retention and performance issue, with management implications Practical language for line managers and senior women to use when the conversation comes up at work An honest account, drawn from a high-pressure broadcast career, of what symptoms actually do to focus, confidence and decision-making Specific organisational examples from work with Workday, IMG, the Premier League, Sky and others Reference material from Myths of Menopause and Allerton’s published writing for internal follow-up