Peter Bregman

Based on his most recent book Leading with Emotional Courage: How to Have Hard Conversations, Create Accountability, and Inspire Action on Your Most Important Work, bestselling author Peter Bregman unlocks the secrets of highly successful leaders - no matter their role or level in the hierarchy - and pinpoints the missing ingredient that makes all the difference: emotional courage.

Emotional courage distinguishes powerful leaders from weak ones. It means speaking up when others are silent and remaining steadfast, grounded and measured in the face of uncertainty. It means responding productively to political opposition—maybe even bad-faith backstabbing—without getting sidetracked, distracted or losing your focus.

In this engaging and interactive talk, Peter shows audiences:

• Why emotional courage is important, and examples of its power
• Why the best leaders have confidence in themselves, the ability to connect with others, and commitment to a purpose - and how emotional courage is the key to unlocking all of those factors
• What it feels like—experientially through fun and effective exercises—to have emotional courage
• How to use emotional courage to initiate hard conversations, create accountability, and inspire focused action on your most important work.

This speech is a guide for becoming a great leader. A leader who has the power to speak with courage to align teams, inspire action, and achieve stellar results.

We squander a tremendous amount of our potential—and organizations waste a tremendous amount of their people’s potential—by focusing on the wrong things or not following through on real priorities. It’s not that people don’t try hard enough, it’s that their efforts don’t reap the benefits they could.

Drawing from his book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Peter sets out the new, simple rules for leading in a way that brings focus to an organization and makes the best use of everyone’s talents.

Organizations succeed when people use every part of who they are to take care of their top priorities in the most efficient way possible. In this counterintuitive speech, Peter shows us how getting people to fit in or fix their weaknesses works against us. Instead, he tells leaders to help people embrace their weaknesses, assert their differences, leverage their strengths, and pursue their passions.

In this engaging, story-based and very practical talk, Peter offers ideas, practices, tips, mind hacks and gentle nudges to help leaders bring focus to their people and their organization. Peter will show audiences:

• An 18-minute plan to manage their day—empowering them to get the right things done
• How to get traction, stick to their focus, ignore non-priorities, avoid the allure of unproductive busyness, and master their boundaries so they can resist distractions
• How to build a plan that places people at the intersection of their strengths, weaknesses, differences and passions, maximizing their success and impact on the organization

Seventy percent of all major change efforts fail, mostly because of rampant fear, anxiety and resistance. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Far from inevitable, resistance is a direct result of how we manage change.

Peter Bregman has successfully designed and executed major change efforts, involving thousands of people, at some of the world’s most prestigious companies of all sizes.

Peter’s experience proves that resistance is optional, an unintended consequence of the way most leaders try to execute change. His key insight: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

In this speech, Peter teaches a simple mind shift, and a few basic, easily implementable strategies that can completely transform how managers and leaders lead—and how the whole organization perceives—change.

He shares:

• Three change rules that must underlie any organization change effort
• How to use the “Engagement Continuum” to diagnose and describe their own change initiatives
• Seven strategies for engaging the workforce during a time of change that shift the responsibility of change from leaders to the people who must take the daily actions to make the change successful

The basic things we all want—to do good work, be successful, get along with others, produce value as part of a team—are surprisingly straightforward to achieve. But, more often than not, our knee-jerk reactions to the people and situations we face result in the exact opposite. We’re fighting against ourselves in a clumsy disconnect between intention and impact, wasting valuable time and energy and straining our relationships in the process.
Drawing from his most recent book, Peter points out the often funny places where our intuitive but counterproductive knee-jerk reactions get us in trouble, and he shows us how we can replace them with counterintuitive but productive ones.

Peter shows how a few small, individual changes can transform an entire organization—moving it from a silo mentality to collective leadership, and he offers practical ideas, tools and tips to help people work together in a way that they, and their entire organization, profits. Peter will show audiences:

• How to build a foundation of strength and inoculate themselves so they don’t get triggered by the things that other people do and say
• How and why we often they say the wrong things, and what to do and say instead to build relationships and get the most important things done together
• A three-step process for transforming poor habits into productive ones