Bill Benjamin

You need to move fast, adapt to a changing environment, and deliver performance, yet your team is moving too slow when it comes to making tough decisions and are avoiding the more challenging conversations that drive results.

What is at the heart of high performance is culture. Unfortunately, most leaders misunderstand culture; they believe culture exists across the organization; it doesn’t. It exists primarily on teams. Second, they see culture as something that should be owned by the CEO and CHRO, believing it is their job to build the culture across the organization; it isn’t. Most CEO’s and CHRO’s get so overwhelmed when they think of tackling culture, that they avoid it and allow culture to be built haphazardly, which means that good people leave, and goals are not met.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 7,500 leaders that puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture. Your people will learn specific tools to own the culture on their team in the critical moments, the Last 8%, that creates culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid. When leaders feel agency and have skills to lean into the difficult, they build a high-performance culture that becomes a powerful force in your organization.

In this powerful program, your team will learn:

• What the two pillars of a high performing culture are: High Connection (psychological safety) and High Courage (ability to do hard things skillfully)
• How to build the culture on their team with our proprietary approach of Model & Own
• Specific tools to connect and coach their people to be their best in Last 8% Situations
• How to influence & engage others who are at a distance and create the conditions to keep the best and brightest

Your people are facing the biggest challenge of their careers, yet most continue to rely on their IQ and technical skills to manage through it all. It’s not enough.

To survive, your organization needs to be agile in the midst of change and challenge, and see opportunities where others do not. Your team needs to learn how to work effectively with others who are, themselves, under pressure.

In this powerful program, your team members will learn:

• Specific tools learned from working with high performers under pressure in the NFL, NBA, Olympic teams, Navy SEALs, Goldman Sachs, Intel, among others, to be more adaptable, resilient, collaborative and opportunistic
• How to manage their brain so they can think, perform and lead effectively under pressure
• The single most important daily habit that increases focus and decreases burnout
• Strategies to help their teams perform in the face of the pressure they face

This program is based on a 12,000-person study conducted for our New York Times best-selling book, Performing Under Pressure, which is available in 65 countries.

This session can be delivered for sales people and sales teams, focusing on helping them harness emotional intelligence to deal with pressure, build stronger relationships with their clients, collaborate internally and deal with the setbacks and uncertainty that sales people must overcome to be successful.

Our research has found that most people are relatively effective at getting to 92% of what they want to say in a feedback conversation. But when they get to the Last 8% of what they really want to say–the hardest part of the feedback they want to give–the part of the conversation that has consequences for the other person, they sense the potential emotional impact this feedback might have, and they back off, avoiding giving the feedback that’s needed.

This creates significant challenges for the other person: not only do they not know how or where they stand, which increases their anxiety, but they are also not given a chance to improve. Worse, they feel less psychologically safe and emotionally connected, which diminishes their performance.

The goal of this program is to give your people the insight and tools to manage their emotions to get to the Last 8% of what they want to say in any feedback conversation. The good news is that there is a burgeoning science of how to give and receive feedback that anyone can learn. It starts by becoming a ‘student of human behavior’, understanding the brain under pressure, and learning the concrete skills needed to give feedback in a way where the other person can hear it.

In this powerful program, your people will learn:

• What The Last 8% is and why it provides the biggest opportunity to learn, grow and boost their performance.
• How the brain reacts under pressure and why that is at the heart of why people avoid giving Last 8% feedback.
• Self-awareness: what their habitual way of reacting to receiving feedback is and why that matters as a signal to the other person that they are open to receiving this important feedback.
• How to start a Last 8% feedback conversation: most people do not know where to start, which causes anxiety. Along with trying to be perfect, this stops them from beginning this important conversation.
• What the key components are to building an environment of high psychological safety, and why it matters to innovation.

The cost of replacing an individual employee ranges from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. That means, a 100-person organization that provides an average salary of $50,000 will have turnover and replacement costs of approximately $800,000 to $2.6 million per year.

The worst part? 52% of people who leave say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job. In fact, they said that in the three months before leaving, nobody asked them how they felt about their job, or about their future. What is evident is a lack of empathy in their leaders. It doesn’t have to be this way.

In this powerful virtual or live program, your managers and leaders will learn:

• What the single greatest cause of a lack of empathy is (something they have control over)
• How to grow their skills of Emotional Intelligence so they can tune into the challenges their people are facing before it causes them to leave
• What empathy is and how to build it to empower your innovative and effective people who keep your teams connected and performing at a high level
• How to use brain-science-based strategies to manage their emotions so they can be resilient and a source of calm in your organization
• How to manage through disruptive change

Your team is feeling burnt out. They feel overwhelmed with too much to do and too few resources. They are feeling anxious and concerned that their work and lives are becoming too busy and frantic. Sometimes their worry doesn’t have a specific focus, it simply has become an all-encompassing, global anxiety. Without concrete skills to manage these challenges, their brains form negative behavior patterns and bad habits that negatively affect their mental and emotional health, as well as their performance.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The goal of this program is to give individuals insight and tools to manage anxiety and stress in all areas of their life. Anxiety can be defined as a feeling of worry, nervousness or unease about something with an imminent or uncertain outcome. Your people feel some sort of anxiety and stress on a spectrum, and it can vary in intensity and level of disruption of their lives.

The good news is that there are science-based strategies on how to manage anxiety and build resilience that anyone can learn.

In this interactive program, your people will learn:

• What anxiety is and, importantly, how it differs from fear
• How the brain reacts under pressure and how this can set them up to feel greater anxiety, stress, and burnout
• How to build self-awareness: the habitual way they react to uncertainty and change, and strategies to respond more effectively
• How to build the habit of resilience: we provide concrete tools to help them manage their brain and mind as they face uncertainty over the long term.
• How to bring joy back into their lives: to live more fully in the moment and improve their mental well-being.

Bill’s research organization surveys over 40,000 people a month and can leverage their proprietary research capability to assess all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 4-5 minute assessment provides the following benefits:

• Bill will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs.
• By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
• Bill will tailor/customize the keynote with key results from the survey to address what matters most to the participants
• Post program, Bill will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience but believe will help you move forward with building culture and lead your teams more effectively

Your organization, like many others, is facing big challenges: whether it is an accelerated rate of change, threat of disruption, ambitious targets or aggressive competition; your people experience these organizational challenges as pressure. If not managed skillfully, this condition can result in diminished performance, lower engagement, and an inability to deal with change. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Research is clear that some leaders are better prepared to handle and lead their people through these challenges more than others. In this powerful keynote, based on the NY Times best-selling book, Performing Under Pressure, The Science of Doing Your Best When it Matters Most, your audience will learn how to leverage pressure to help them get to the other side of performance and succeed in achieving their most challenging goals. In this cutting-edge keynote your team will learn:

• What exceptional leaders do differently from the average, to help their people manage change and perform at their best.
• How to build a culture ready to take “smart risks’ and innovate.
• Specific tools to leverage pressure and help others get to the next level of performance.