An Event Booker's Guide to Making a Good Choice of Leadership Speaker for your Kick-Off Meeting.

You and your team all meet in person once, perhaps twice a year. It could be a senior leadership offsite, a high performers programme or an all-staff programme. Your time together is highly valuable. So how do you make the right choice?

Yesterday, I was in the audience listening to the brilliant Professor Nick Lane, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at UCL.

The topic: “What is a feeling?”

It’s such an interesting question to get beneath the surface of how we operate as human beings. The research in this space continues to reveal new insights…

On the back of my latest book, The Big Bold Mindset® I’m thrilled to say that the new talk is being well received by audiences across the UK, Europe and globally. The talk title can be flexed to meet your specific event themes, but the core message is:

The Big Bold Mindset - Why You Can’t Navigate a New World Using an Old Set of Charts.

From talks in 2024, this has been adapted to fit conference themes such as …

Your Regional Kick-Off Meetings (RKO) is a pivotal moment for your team to align teams, set goals, and ignite motivation.

Among the essential components of a successful Kick Off Meeting, the role of an inspirational speaker is a crucial one.

I have distinct memories from 1988 listening to Steve Wright on Radio 1 playing The King of Rock n Roll by Prefab Sprout.

It was the summer of my GCSE’s and I was meant to be studying. Only I wasn’t. I was finding distractions far too easy to come by and Wrighty was definitely one of those.

Change. It’s hard to escape it these days.

Any leaders out there where change and transformation isn’t one of the top three issues on their agenda?

It’s unlikely, right? Transformation is upon us everywhere.

Do you have the right skills to lead?

What are your Big Bold Goals for this year?

Perhaps you’ve taken some time to reflect on them over the past couple weeks and had some conversations to deepen your attachment to them?

Perhaps you had some in place already and the passing of a calendar year makes no difference to you?.

How do you regain perspective?

Sometimes when there are so many things going on, so many pressures and challenges it’s hard to see the wood for the trees.

Sometimes we just need to get a fresh perspective, to regain clarity on where we are going and get a moment of peace for self reflection.

It’s when we are challenged to stop and think, that so often can create new insights.

I had such an example yesterday.

Presenting to a senior audience in a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva, the focus was on the execution excellence needed to achieve Big Bold Goals.

A popular piece of advice over the past few years has been to encourage “authentic leadership”. Leaders who are open, vulnerable and say what they really think are lauded.

While the advice may be good, Yuval Noah Harare poses an interesting caveat.