Talent Retention Strategies

Why organisations work with Mark Noon He has built leadership benches inside two of the most accountability-driven environments in American working life: the U.S. Air Force medical system and Studer Group’s healthcare client base. Senior teams get someone who has run the work, not described it. His signature framework, Set Up To Step In, gives organisations a concrete method for preparing successors before the seat opens, drawn from his book Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success. He has coached and presented inside more than 300 organisations across 43 states and several countries, which means the playbook has been pressure-tested across hospital systems, military units, and civilian operating environments. He treats employee engagement as a discipline rather than a sentiment, anchored in structured one-on-one rounding practices that frontline managers can repeat weekly. He pairs Studer Group’s service excellence lineage with first-hand command experience, a combination that lands credibly with clinical leaders who are sceptical of theory imported from outside healthcare. Biography highlights Retired U.S. Air Force Major after roughly 20 years of service, including 12 years as a commissioned officer and clinical lab director. Career path moved from enlisted laboratory technician to officer with immediate appointment to a lab management role. Served across nine assignments in seven U.S. states and a tour of duty in the Middle East. Spent approximately eight years as a coach with Studer Group, working with healthcare systems on operational and service excellence. Currently a Professional Speaker, Executive Coach and Developer of Leaders with LeadershipTen. Author of Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success (T.H.E. Studer Group, 2018). Biography The hardest moment in any organisation is the one nobody schedules: a seat opens, and the person expected to fill it is not ready. That gap is rarely a hiring problem. It is the cumulative result of small leadership habits that were never made routine. Mark Noon spent 20 years inside the U.S. Air Force watching that pattern up close, then nearly a decade at Studer Group helping healthcare leaders fix it. He retired as a Major after 12 years as a commissioned officer and clinical lab director, with assignments across seven states and a tour in the Middle East. The path from enlisted lab technician to officer running a lab gave him a working theory of leadership grounded in operational reality rather than abstraction. That theory became Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success, published by T.H.E. Studer Group in 2018. The book and its companion keynote, Set Up To Step In, treat succession as a daily discipline, not an annual planning exercise. Leaders are not chosen, they are prepared, through repeatable habits that show up in how meetings are run, how feedback is given, and how one-on-one rounding is conducted with the people closest to the work. His client work now runs through LeadershipTen, where he coaches and speaks inside hospital systems, military units, and operationally demanding civilian organisations. The footprint covers more than 300 organisations across 43 states and several countries, which gives senior teams something useful: a coach who has seen which engagement and culture practices survive contact with a stretched workforce, and which do not. Key speaking topics Leader development and succession readiness Employee engagement and one-on-one rounding Culture aligned to strategy Healthcare leadership and service excellence Managing up and team reliability Lessons from military command for civilian leaders Ideal for Healthcare CEOs, COOs, and chief nursing officers building leader benches across hospital systems Heads of leadership development and learning leaders responsible for succession and frontline manager capability Senior military and veteran-serving organisations translating command experience into civilian operating practice Operationally complex organisations where frontline leadership turnover threatens service quality Audience outcomes A clear, named set of habits that distinguish leaders who are setting up successors from those who are not A working method for one-on-one rounding that frontline managers can run inside their existing week Language for talking about engagement as an operational discipline, not a survey result A frame for connecting daily leader behaviours to the strategy and culture senior teams have already committed to Confidence that the practices have been tested across military, healthcare, and civilian operating environments

Why organisations work with Chris Dyer He ran the experiment before he taught it. PeopleG2 was a fully remote business through five Inc. 5000 listings and fifteen “best place to work” cycles, which means his culture and remote-work models come from operating evidence, not consulting observation. His “7 Pillars” (Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, Mistakes) give an executive team a shared diagnostic vocabulary for culture, replacing the usual mix of values posters and engagement-survey theatre. He works at the intersection of culture and remote design, where most speakers pick a side. Buyers wrestling with hybrid productivity, distributed leadership, and connection in dispersed teams get one voice on both questions. Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his client roster includes NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines, which signals he holds a senior room across regulated, industrial, tech, and consumer settings. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a fully remote background-screening company, five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Author of The Power of Company Culture (Kogan Page) and co-author of Remote Work (Kogan Page). Named #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine; ranked #5 on the LeadersHum Power List. Listed among Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. Forbes Business Council member, Fast Company Executive Board member, and contributor to Inc.com. Keynote clients include NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. Biography Most companies treat culture as something HR runs and leaders endorse. PeopleG2 was built the other way around. Chris Dyer ran the firm as a fully remote operation while it landed on the Inc. 5000 list five times and was repeatedly named a best place to work, which made culture a daily operating decision rather than an annual initiative. That experience produced a specific framework. The Power of Company Culture, published by Kogan Page, sets out seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. The book’s argument is operational. Each pillar maps to behaviours leaders can audit, and the cases used to test it sit inside companies like General Motors, Southwest Airlines, and VaynerMedia. His second book, Remote Work, also with Kogan Page, addresses the harder follow-on question: how do you keep a culture intact when your workforce is distributed. Inc. Magazine subsequently named Dyer the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his keynote work has placed him in front of leadership teams at NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. What buyers tend to take from Dyer is permission to stop treating culture as soft. He gives senior teams a vocabulary, a diagnostic, and a set of operator decisions, grounded in a business he built and ran rather than a model he assembled from interviews. Key speaking topics Company culture as an operating system The 7 Pillars framework Remote and hybrid workforce design Employee engagement and retention Leadership in distributed organisations Future of work and AI integration in the workplace Burnout and recession-period leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of People rebuilding engagement and retention strategy CEOs and executive teams setting the direction on hybrid or fully remote operating models Culture and transformation leads inside organisations carrying out post-restructure rebuilds Leadership development functions designing programmes for distributed managers Audience outcomes A shared diagnostic for which cultural levers in their organisation are actually moving performance A practical view of how to run a distributed or hybrid workforce without losing cohesion An operator’s account of how engagement, retention, and productivity reinforce each other when the right pillars are in place Concrete tactics from a CEO who tested them inside a five-time Inc. 5000 company

Why organisations work with René Meulensteen He spent six years inside the Ferguson dressing room during one of the most studied winning runs in modern sport, and can describe how standards, feedback, and selection were actually managed day to day. He developed and ran the individual technical and finishing programme that Cristiano Ronaldo credits for the shift from winger to record goalscorer, a working example of how senior performers are coached, not managed. His book “United, Sir Alex and Me”, with a foreword by Ferguson, gives him a documented and endorsed account of the methodology behind a sustained elite culture. As Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos, he has carried the same operating model into a different country, league, and squad and reached the World Cup knockout stage with it. Biography highlights First Team Coach at Manchester United from 2007 to 2013 under Sir Alex Ferguson. Three Premier League titles, one UEFA Champions League and one FIFA Club World Cup during his First Team Coach tenure. Twelve years at Manchester United in total, beginning in 2001 as Youth Technical Skills Development Coach. Author of “United, Sir Alex and Me: My Life in Football” (2023), foreword by Sir Alex Ferguson. Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos, contributing to qualification and Round of 16 progression at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Former Head Coach of Fulham FC in the English Premier League. Biography Manchester United won three Premier League titles, a Champions League and a FIFA Club World Cup in the years René Meulensteen spent as First Team Coach under Sir Alex Ferguson. The interesting question is not what was won. It is how a squad of senior internationals kept raising standards once they had already won everything. Meulensteen joined the club in 2001 as a youth technical skills development coach, working with academy players on the kind of detail that usually disappears once a player turns professional. By 2007 he was working with the first team, running individual development sessions with players including Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Ryan Giggs. The Ronaldo finishing programme, run during a suspension early in the 2007-08 season, is one of the few publicly documented cases of an elite forward being rebuilt as a goalscorer by deliberate coaching design. After Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, Meulensteen took head coach roles at Anzhi Makhachkala and Fulham FC in the Premier League, then moved into international football. Since 2018 he has been Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos under Graham Arnold, including the squad’s progression to the knockout stage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. His book “United, Sir Alex and Me”, co-written with Wayne Barton and with a foreword by Ferguson, sets out the working methodology behind that period: how standards were set, how individuals were stretched, how a culture was held together across generations of senior players. That is the material organisations engage him to translate. Key speaking topics Building and sustaining a winning culture Coaching senior performers through individual development Leadership transition and succession in elite environments Standards, feedback and accountability inside high performance teams Translating elite sport methodology into executive teams Team cohesion across generations and personalities Ideal for Executive teams and boards seeking to maintain performance after a founder, CEO or long-tenured leader transitions out Sales leadership, partner groups and senior performer cohorts where individual development is the unlock Talent and people leaders responsible for high performance culture, succession and leadership pipeline Leadership offsites and conferences focused on team cohesion and sustained excellence Audience outcomes A working understanding of how Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United actually operated day to day, told from inside the coaching staff A concrete model of how senior performers are developed individually, drawn from the Ronaldo finishing programme Specific language for the standards, feedback and accountability practices that hold an elite culture together A clearer view of the leadership behaviours that survive a change at the top, and the ones that do not

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

Why organisations work with Lorraine Hariton Six years leading Catalyst, the global nonprofit whose research and benchmarks Fortune 500 boards already use to evaluate their own progress on women’s advancement. Operating background that buyers in male-dominated executive teams take seriously: 15 years at IBM, CEO of two Silicon Valley start-ups, Obama-appointed State Department official. Specific authority on the measurement question. Catalyst’s frameworks on emotional tax, empathic leadership, and inclusion assessment were developed and scaled during her tenure. Credible on the intersection of bias and emerging technology, including how gender and racial bias enter AI systems through data and design choices. Biography highlights President and CEO of Catalyst from 2018 to 2024. Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the US State Department under President Obama. CEO of two venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, Beatnik and Apptera. Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships, New York Academy of Sciences; co-founder of the Global STEM Alliance and the 1000 Girls, 1000 Futures programme. Inaugural Women’s Leadership Champion Award, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, 2022. Crain’s New York Business Women of Influence, 2023. BS Stanford University, MBA Harvard Business School. Biography Catalyst is the research organisation whose data Fortune 500 boards quote back to themselves when they discuss the women-in-leadership gap. For six years that organisation was run by Lorraine Hariton, an operator with credentials those same boards understand: fifteen years at IBM, two CEO roles at venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, an Obama-administration appointment representing US commercial interests at the State Department. That mix matters because the audience for serious DEI work has shifted. Senior teams now want practitioners who can speak the language of operating performance and capital discipline, not advocacy. At Catalyst, Hariton oversaw the development of frameworks used inside member companies on emotional tax, empathic leadership, and inclusion measurement, the kind of artefacts that survive contact with a sceptical executive committee. Her work addresses the credibility gap between public DEI commitments and observable workplace outcomes. She speaks directly to the failure mode senior leaders fear most, performative policy that produces no change and erodes employee trust. She also works on how gender and racial bias enter AI systems through training data, an issue most executive teams are still under-prepared for. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business presented her with its inaugural Women’s Leadership Champion Award in 2022. Crain’s named her to its Women of Influence list the following year. Her holistic view of where women’s advancement sits within an organisation, alongside compensation strategy, capital allocation, and technology governance, is what makes her useful in a boardroom rather than at a conference panel. Key speaking topics Gender equity and women’s advancement in senior leadership Inclusion measurement and DEI accountability Bias in artificial intelligence and emerging technology Workplace culture transformation Future of work and flexible workplace design Empathic and inclusive leadership practice Ideal for CHROs, Chief Diversity Officers, and CEO offices commissioning a measurable advancement strategy for women in senior leadership Boards and nominating committees evaluating their own pipeline credibility Senior leadership teams in male-dominated industries (financial services, technology, energy, industrials) working on inclusion outcomes that hold up to scrutiny Companies building governance around bias and fairness in AI deployment Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what credible DEI measurement looks like, drawn from Catalyst’s published frameworks A sharper grasp of where bias enters AI systems and what executive teams should be asking about it Direct exposure to a practitioner who has worked with the leadership teams of many of the world’s largest employers on this agenda A more confident vocabulary for senior leaders, particularly men in executive roles, to engage with women’s advancement as a business strategy issue rather than a compliance one

Why organisations work with Anna Baréz-Brown A track record at scale: the Shine programme has reached thousands of women across four continents and more than 75 nationalities, with named corporate clients including WPP, Channel 4, TikTok, Rothschild & Co, and Google. Her work is built around retention and progression metrics, not engagement scores. Clients commission her when the gender balance of their senior roster needs to change, not when they need an inspirational keynote. She frames inclusion as a commercial discipline. Her core argument, that diversity fails in most companies because it sits with people who lack decision rights and budget, lands credibly with COOs and CEOs as well as CHROs. A corporate operator before a coach: a former European Sales Director responsible for 12 countries and 85 employees, with credentials as a CTI Leadership Coach, NLP Master Practitioner, and qualified Organisational Relationship Systems Coach. She talks to men as well as women. The programme deliberately addresses allyship, micro-aggressions, and the part male leaders play in changing the system, which makes her workable for organisations nervous about polarised DEI framing. Biography highlights Co-founder of Shine (now We Are Shine), launched 2013 with Caroline Whaley. Former European Sales Director with responsibility for 12 countries and 85 employees. Earlier roles at Axel Springer Verlag and Bertelsmann. Programme has worked with thousands of women across more than 75 nationalities and four continents. Named clients include WPP, Rothschild & Co, TikTok, Channel 4, Google, Channel 4, ITV, and EasyJet. Credentialled as a CTI Leadership Coach, Neuro-Linguistic Master Practitioner, and qualified Organisational Relationship Systems Coach. Biography Most diversity work fails on the same fault line. Programmes sit inside HR, measured by sign-up rates and sentiment, while the senior roster keeps reproducing itself. Promotion patterns do not move. Mid-career women leave. The gap between stated values and lived experience widens. Shine, the organisation Anna Baréz-Brown co-founded with Caroline Whaley in 2013, was built to attack that fault line directly. The programme is delivered into companies including WPP, Channel 4, TikTok, Rothschild & Co, and Google, and is measured against retention, promotion, and the gender balance of senior teams. It has worked with thousands of women across more than 75 nationalities and four continents. The credibility behind that work is corporate, not activist. Before launching Shine, Baréz-Brown ran a sales business as European Director with twelve countries and eighty-five staff reporting in, after earlier roles at Axel Springer Verlag and Bertelsmann. She is a CTI Leadership Coach, an NLP Master Practitioner, and a qualified Organisational Relationship Systems Coach. Her argument to senior teams is commercial. Diversity stalls because the responsibility is delegated downward, the investment is underestimated, and the conversation polarises before any system actually changes. Her work treats inclusion as a leadership discipline that involves men and women, allies and sceptics, and the operating decisions of the business itself. Key speaking topics Gender balance in senior leadership Inclusive leadership and allyship Building corporate leadership pipelines Coaching cultures and feedback Personal energy and performance at work Influence, impact, and executive presence Courageous conversations and managing micro-aggressions Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Heads of D&I designing senior pipeline programmes. CEOs and ExCo sponsors who want gender balance treated as a commercial outcome, not a comms initiative. Leadership development teams running cohort programmes for high-potential women and their managers. Male executives and line managers being asked to act as allies and sponsors in practice. Audience outcomes A clearer view of why most diversity programmes do not move the senior roster, and what does. Language and tools for courageous conversations across difference, including on micro-aggressions. Specific practices for women navigating senior career transitions: stakeholder management, brand, energy, narrative. A framing of inclusion that male leaders can act on, not just endorse. A diagnostic for where their own organisation’s pipeline is leaking and who needs to own the fix.

Why organisations work with Andy Storch He has facilitated talent and leadership programmes for Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Toyota, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Cisco, Sony, and Tiffany & Co., which means he has tested his career-ownership material against the most demanding corporate L&D functions in the market. He runs the room where his buyers meet each other. The Talent Development Think Tank conference, community, and podcast give him a working view of what CHROs and L&D leaders are actually trying to fix, before they brief a speaker. His thesis is concrete and actionable: career ownership is a learnable practice, not a slogan. Own Your Career Own Your Life breaks it into specific steps employees and managers can apply on Monday. His 2025 follow-up with Mike Kim, Own Your Brand, Own Your Career, gives organisations a practical handle on personal brand as a retention and internal mobility lever, not a LinkedIn exercise. He works equally credibly as a keynote, workshop facilitator, and community host. For talent functions running multi-day events, that flexibility is rare. Biography highlights Author of Own Your Career Own Your Life (2020) and co-author with Mike Kim of Own Your Brand, Own Your Career (2025). Founder and host of the Talent Development Think Tank podcast, conference, and community, sponsored by Advantage Performance Group. Has consulted, taught, or facilitated for Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Toyota, State Farm, Red Bull, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, HP, Sony, Cisco, and Tiffany & Co. MBA, USC Marshall School of Business (President of the MBA programme); BS, University of Florida. Host of three podcasts: The Talent Development Hot Seat, Own Your Career, and My NFT Journey. Workshop facilitator for global enterprises since 2011. Biography Career development inside large organisations has become a quiet contract failure. Employees assume their employer will plot the path; employers assume employees will take initiative; the middle is where engagement and retention disappear. Storch built a practice around closing that gap from both sides. His book Own Your Career Own Your Life sets out a step-by-step approach to career ownership for individual contributors and managers. The 2025 follow-up with Mike Kim, Own Your Brand, Own Your Career, extends the argument into personal brand as an internal-mobility and retention lever rather than an external marketing exercise. Both books are direct and operational, not motivational. The proof point most relevant to corporate buyers is who he works with. Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Toyota, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Cisco, Sony, and Tiffany & Co. have used him to facilitate leadership and talent programmes. He has been running these workshops since 2011, which is what allows the keynote material to land in language a senior L&D function recognises. The Talent Development Think Tank, his podcast, conference, and community, gives him an unusual position in the market. He is not commenting on the talent development field from outside it; he is the convener inside it. For a CHRO or head of L&D, that means the speaker on stage has heard, in private, the same problems they are trying to solve. Key speaking topics Career ownership and employee development Talent development strategy Personal brand and internal mobility Leadership for managers of professionals Employee engagement and retention Future of work and talent trends Ideal for CHROs, heads of L&D, and talent development leaders running enterprise development programmes Annual talent and leadership offsites for managers of professionals Employee resource groups and internal high-potential cohorts Sales and account leadership conferences focused on retention and growth of top performers Audience outcomes A working definition of career ownership that managers and employees can apply to weekly conversations Specific tools to make personal brand work as an internal mobility and retention asset A clearer line between what the employer owes the employee and what the employee owes their own career Language to frame development conversations that does not collapse into performance review template A view of where talent development practice is heading, drawn from a sitting community of CHROs and L&D leaders

Why organisations work with Hayley Mulenda She has been booked into the rooms where retention strategy is set, including Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Unilever’s C-suite under Leena Nair, and Meta MENA’s leadership. Her TEDxLSE talk «The Danger of Being a Role Model» frames a specific argument about authenticity that translates directly into how organisations think about leadership visibility and reverse mentoring. She holds an active operating seat as Brand Board Member at Wagamama, so the inclusion and culture content is informed by board-level decision-making, not consultancy at arm’s length. Her work on the gap between C-suite intent and Gen Z lived experience addresses a problem most leadership teams can name but few can resolve. Her book «The ABCs to Student Success» and her TEDx platform give her a public body of work that buyers can read before booking. Biography highlights TEDxLSE speaker, «The Danger of Being a Role Model» Author, «The ABCs to Student Success» Brand Board Member, Wagamama Keynote and consulting work with Microsoft, Unilever, JP Morgan, Google, Meta MENA, Chanel, Bloomberg Media, Harrods, Clifford Chance, Cabinet Office UK Spoken at Wembley Arena, Oslo Spektrum, and the UK Houses of Parliament Named one of 25 Black entrepreneurs to watch in 2024, The Black Business Show x HSBC Biography The cost of failing to engage a younger workforce is now measured at executive committee level. Retention has become a leadership question rather than an HR one. Hayley Mulenda’s work sits at the point where mental health, inclusion, and generational change converge inside that question. She came to the work through her own experience. After a suicide attempt at 18, she rebuilt her life around the practical mechanics of mental health and self-worth, and turned that into a public body of work. Her TEDxLSE talk, «The Danger of Being a Role Model», argues that organisations and leaders default to curated personas when employees actually need authenticity, and that the difference is what determines trust. Her client list reflects how that argument lands inside large organisations. Microsoft brought her to Redmond. Unilever’s then Chief HR Officer Leena Nair, now CEO of Chanel, has worked with her. Meta MENA, JP Morgan, Bloomberg Media, Clifford Chance, Google, the Cabinet Office, and Teach First have all booked her on briefs covering wellbeing, inclusion, and reverse mentoring. Wagamama appointed her to its brand board. The «ABCs to Student Success» gives her a published framework. The board seat keeps the work close to operating decisions. Together, they explain why she is booked less as a wellbeing speaker and more as a translator between senior leaders and the workforce now reporting to them. Key speaking topics Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Reverse mentoring and generational engagement Diversity, equity and inclusion Employee retention and the social contract of work Authentic leadership and personal branding Workplace culture across the MENA region Ideal for CHROs and people directors managing retention of Gen Z and millennial talent Inclusion and culture leads building reverse mentoring or ERG programmes Executive teams reviewing employee engagement and wellbeing strategy Conferences and offsites where leadership wants a credible voice on mental health rather than a generic one Audience outcomes A working language for the difference between leader visibility and leader authenticity, and why one drives engagement and the other does not A direct view of what younger employees actually want from senior leaders A reframing of mental health from a wellbeing programme into a retention lever Practical reference points for designing reverse mentoring that produces decisions, not optics

Why organisations work with Anj Handa She brings governance-level credibility into inclusion conversations that usually stop at HR, holding positions as Independent Governor of Leeds Arts University, Chair of Freedom Studios, and Fellow of the RSA. Her campaign craft is verifiable, not rhetorical. She built the legal team, petition, and media strategy on the Afusat Saliu FGM-asylum case, gathering 126,500 signatures and pushing FGM higher on the UK political agenda. She names the parts of inclusive leadership most speakers avoid: emotional correctness, healthy boundaries, psychological safety, and what allyship has to do that employee networks cannot. She offers a working alternative to the glass ceiling, the labyrinth, which describes the actual sequence of barriers women, and particularly Black and brown women, encounter inside large organisations. Forbes named her in its 10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers list, and Grant Thornton UK featured her among its 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy. The recognition tracks substantive work, not commentary. Biography highlights Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers, an inclusive community and consultancy advising on equity, governance, and systems change. Independent Governor of Leeds Arts University and Chair of the Board of Freedom Studios. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Named in Forbes “10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers” and Grant Thornton UK’s 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy (2018). Featured in Charity Times 2023 International Women’s Day list. Contributor to “Generation Share”, “Eradicating FGM in the UK” (Hilary Burrage), and “Refugee Tales” (Comma Press). Biography Most organisations have a diversity statement. Far fewer have governance and leadership practices that match it. The gap is where talent gets lost, complaints get managed, and senior leaders quietly accept attrition that the policy was meant to prevent. Closing that gap requires someone fluent in both the structural and the human side of the work. Anj Handa has spent more than two decades operating in that space. She is Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers, an inclusive community and consultancy that advises senior leaders on inclusive governance, equity, and systems change. She is an Independent Governor of Leeds Arts University, Chair of Freedom Studios, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; positions she has often noted are held by fewer than one percent of Black and brown women in the UK. Her authority is not theoretical. In 2014 she led the high-profile asylum campaign for Afusat Saliu and her daughters, assembling the legal team, running a Change.org petition that drew 126,500 signatures, and bringing MPs and national media into the story. The work was later included in Hilary Burrage’s “Eradicating FGM in the UK” and the Comma Press anthology “Refugee Tales”. Forbes named her in its 10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers list; Grant Thornton featured her among its 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy. What separates her work for senior teams is the territory she is willing to name. Psychological safety, emotional correctness, healthy boundaries, allyship that is more than a network. She challenges the glass ceiling as a useful frame and offers the labyrinth in its place, a more accurate description of the sequence of barriers women encounter inside complex organisations. That precision is what boards and executive teams hire her for. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership and governance Equity, diversity, and structural change The labyrinth: rethinking the glass ceiling Allyship beyond employee networks Psychological safety and emotional correctness Self-care and resilience for changemakers Campaign craft and policy influence Ideal for Boards, governance committees, and executive teams setting inclusion strategy CHROs, Heads of DEI, and senior people leaders rebuilding programmes under scrutiny Public sector, charity, and arts leaders working on equity and safeguarding Women’s leadership and changemaker networks inside large organisations Audience outcomes A sharper vocabulary for the structural barriers women face beyond the glass ceiling A clear distinction between allyship as practice and employee networks as forum Specific governance-level questions to put to their own inclusion programmes Permission and language to address emotional correctness and boundaries in senior teams A view of inclusion that connects policy, governance, and lived experience without losing rigour

Why organisations work with Matt Havens He treats generational friction as a leadership design problem, not a personality clash, which gives HR and operations leaders something they can act on rather than another set of demographic slides. His Simplicity framework is built from inside a Fortune 50 operating environment, not from a consultancy deck, so the examples land with line managers who run contact centres, branches, and field teams. The “4 Human Truths” content reframes engagement around what employees of every age actually share, which is useful for organisations stuck rotating perks instead of fixing leadership behaviour. He carries a room. Comedy-club upbringing translates into a delivery style that holds attention through a full keynote, which matters for late-day conference slots and large internal kickoffs. Deployable across very different audience profiles, with named repeat clients including Cisco, State Farm, RE/MAX, Lockheed Martin, Allstate, Duke Energy, and Mondelez International. Biography highlights Fourteen years in Fortune 50 leadership across finance, sales, and customer service, with responsibility for contact centres in five US locations. Creator of the Simplicity framework for leading multigenerational teams and reducing organisational complexity. Author of the “Make Your Business Human: The 4 Human Truths” keynote on engagement and culture. Repeat keynote speaker for organisations including Cisco, State Farm, RE/MAX, Lockheed Martin, Allstate, Duke Energy, and Mondelez International. Grew up backstage in comedy clubs alongside a stand-up comedian father; uses that craft to deliver leadership content with sustained audience energy. Programmes are delivered in person and virtually, working across corporate, association, and franchise audiences. Biography Five generations now sit on the same org chart, and most leadership systems were not built for that reality. Engagement programmes default to perks. Generational training defaults to stereotypes. Leaders end up managing labels rather than people, and the friction shows up in attrition data long before anyone names it. Matt Havens works that problem from inside the operating side of an organisation. Fourteen years of Fortune 50 leadership across finance, sales, and customer service, including responsibility for contact centres in five US locations, gave him a working view of where complexity actually accumulates: in handovers, in jargon, in well-meaning processes that no one will defend if pressed. His Simplicity framework is the response. It asks leaders to strip away the layers that make modern work harder than it needs to be, and to manage multigenerational teams through what people share rather than how they differ. The companion “4 Human Truths” content reframes engagement around the few fundamentals that hold across age, tenure, and function. The delivery is the second half of the proposition. Havens grew up in comedy-club green rooms with a stand-up comedian father, and he uses that craft to keep a room with him through serious leadership content. Cisco, State Farm, RE/MAX, Lockheed Martin, Allstate, Duke Energy, and Mondelez International have brought him back for that reason: the message lands, and the audience remembers it on Monday. Key speaking topics Multigenerational workplace leadership Employee engagement and culture Simplicity in leadership and operations Talent attraction and retention Workplace humour and human connection Customer-facing team leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of culture working on cross-generational engagement Operations and customer service leaders running large frontline teams Conference programmers needing a humour-led, high-energy main-stage keynote on people and culture Sales and franchise leadership audiences at annual kickoffs Audience outcomes A working definition of generational friction as a leadership design issue, with practical levers managers can pull The Simplicity framework as a checklist for stripping unnecessary complexity out of team operations The 4 Human Truths as a shared engagement vocabulary across a multigenerational workforce Renewed energy and a memorable shared reference point for the rest of the offsite or conference

Why organisations work with Julian Placino Practitioner credibility: nearly two decades inside corporate recruiting, including seven years leading talent acquisition at Bottle Rocket, a Dallas mobile development firm with an outsized reputation for hiring quality. Operating-level content. His recruiting talks address the working mechanics buyers ask about: employer value proposition, candidate pipeline, referral systems, hiring manager discipline. Not HR theory. Doubles as a host. With 220+ episodes of The Pathways to Success podcast under his belt, he is comfortable interviewing leaders on stage and moderating panels, useful when an event needs both a keynote and a host. Personal-brand and resilience material that translates for sales, recruiting, and frontline audiences who need a motivational anchor rather than a leadership framework. Biography highlights Former Head of Recruiting, Bottle Rocket (seven-year tenure) Earlier recruiting leadership at ReachLocal (Gannett) Founder, Pathways Media and the Recruitment Masterclass training programme Host and creator, The Pathways to Success podcast (220+ episodes, Apple Podcasts and Spotify) BBA, University of North Texas Commercial actor and voice-over artist with named campaigns including Microsoft, Indeed, Ford, AT&T, and the NFL Biography Most companies treat recruiting as an administrative function until a critical hire stalls. Then it becomes a board-level problem. Placino built his career inside that gap. As Head of Recruiting at Bottle Rocket, he spent seven years scaling a hiring operation at a Dallas mobile development firm whose product work for Fortune 500 clients depended on the quality of its engineering bench. That operating background is what he brings to the stage. His core keynote, Mastering the Talent Puzzle, treats employer brand and recruiting strategy as a system that can be deliberately built, not a function of headcount or agency spend. The argument is grounded in what worked inside a high-pressure tech recruiting environment, including how to design an employment value proposition, how to mobilise existing employees as a pipeline, and how to make hiring managers accountable for the people they bring in. Beyond the recruiting material, Placino runs The Pathways to Success podcast, where he has interviewed more than 220 leaders across business, sport, and the creative industries. The format gives him a working interviewer’s craft, which he extends into event hosting and panel moderation. He also delivers talks on personal branding, resilience, and stewardship, drawn from his own path as a first-generation Filipino American who built a recruiting career, a media company, and a parallel commercial acting line that includes Microsoft, Indeed, Ford, AT&T, and NFL campaigns. He is based in Dallas and holds a BBA from the University of North Texas. He is represented by multiple bureaus across the US in addition to Speakers Associates internationally. Key speaking topics Recruitment strategy and employer brand Talent acquisition operating models Personal branding and reputation Resilience and adaptability Stewardship-based leadership Event hosting and interview-format moderation Ideal for CHROs and Heads of Talent Acquisition rebuilding in-house recruiting capability Talent and recruiting team offsites Sales and revenue kickoffs that need a personal-brand or motivation anchor Conferences requiring a keynote speaker who can also host or moderate Audience outcomes A working model for designing an employer value proposition that survives contact with the labour market A specific approach to turning current employees into a recruiting pipeline Language for separating personal brand from job title, useful for sales and client-facing roles A reframing model for adversity and change drawn from the speaker’s own career history

Why organisations work with Jason Lauritsen He turns the manager-employee relationship into a working model, not a slogan, through The Check-In Method, a named and published approach leaders can install the week after the keynote. His research seat at Quantum Workplace gave him visibility across thousands of employers and millions of engagement responses, which grounds every claim in pattern data rather than anecdote. His book Unlocking High Performance reframes performance management as a relationship discipline, endorsed by Daniel H. Pink, and is used by HR leaders as a practical redesign guide. He speaks fluently to both the CHRO and the frontline manager, which is rare. The same session lands with executives rethinking policy and with line leaders rethinking their next one-to-one. He brings the credibility of an operator who has run the system from both sides: corporate HR leadership where he helped double revenue per employee and halve turnover, and now CEO of Connected Performance Group, advising executive teams on the same problem at the source. Biography highlights CEO of Connected Performance Group, advising CEOs and executive teams on the performance systems that turn strategy into execution. Creator of the Connected Performance System, a framework for leadership clarity, alignment, and performance enablement, with original research presented at Workhuman Live Orlando 2026. Author of Unlocking High Performance (Kogan Page, 2018), a performance-management redesign endorsed by Daniel H. Pink. Co-author with Joe Gerstandt of Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships. As a corporate executive, helped double revenue per employee while cutting employee turnover in half. Former Director of Best Places to Work at Quantum Workplace, leading research across thousands of participating organisations. Biography Engagement has been one of the most measured aspects of corporate life for two decades, and it has barely moved. The data is rich, the pulse surveys run quarterly, and most managers still cannot describe what actually changes a disengaged employee’s trajectory. That gap between measurement and behaviour is the terrain Jason Lauritsen works in. Earlier in his career, as a corporate executive, he helped double revenue per employee while cutting turnover in half. He then led the research team for the Best Places to Work programme at Quantum Workplace, which gave him a cross-sectional view of engagement data across thousands of employers. The conclusion he draws from both sides is direct: employees do not experience work as a contract or a process, they experience it as a relationship, and they leave when the relationship fails. That thesis runs through two books. Unlocking High Performance (Kogan Page, 2018) argues that performance management collapses when it is built as a compliance process and works when it is built around conversation. Social Gravity, co-authored with Joe Gerstandt, maps the laws that govern how workplace relationships actually form. The Check-In Method, the framework he is best known for, translates the relationship argument into the specific moments managers can do differently on a Monday morning. As CEO of Connected Performance Group, his current work goes one layer up. The Connected Performance System treats connection as the operating mechanism through which strategy turns into execution, and locates the leadership, cultural, and operational conditions that strengthen or erode it. Cited across Forbes, Fast Company, HR Executive, Talent Management, and SHRM, his sessions give CHROs and executive teams a named system to install, not just an argument to agree with. Key speaking topics Employee engagement Connection as a performance driver Performance management redesign The manager-employee relationship Employee experience Talent retention Workplace culture Ideal for CHROs and VPs of People rethinking engagement or performance strategy HR and people-team leaders preparing a manager-effectiveness programme Executive teams whose engagement scores have plateaued and whose attrition is climbing Line manager audiences at leadership summits, where the goal is behaviour change, not theory Audience outcomes A clear model for treating the manager-employee bond as a relationship, with the specific manager behaviours that sustain it. The Check-In Method as an installable practice, including the questions managers can use in their next one-to-one. A diagnosis for why performance management processes fail, and what to redesign rather than patch. A sharper read of engagement data, so leaders stop optimising scores and start changing the experience behind them. Language HR and line leaders can share, which closes the gap between policy intent and what employees actually feel.