NSB Logo Adrian Gostick Adrian Gostick

Adrian Gostick

Speaker

Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Bestselling Leadership Author | Organizational Culture Expert

#1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author and the world’s preeminent authority on employee engagement and high-performance cultures.

Keynote Speeches

The Best TEAM Wins: The 5 Disciplines of Today’s Most Effective Team Leaders

The vast majority of employees’ days are now spent working collaboratively, but still, 96 percent of executives cite poor teamwork as the main source of workplace failures in their organizations. It might be the most-pressing question organizations must address: How can managers lead their teams to improved performance given the volatility and challenges we face today. Based on an 850,000-person study of the most profitable, innovative work teams, New York Times bestselling author Adrian Gostick introduces his audiences to the new science of teamwork—helping leaders deal with the increased speed of change in business, global and remote employees, the rise of the Millennials, the need to work more cross-functionally across departments, and more.

Gostick’s research has discovered a set of leadership disciplines that make the biggest difference in building today’s best teams. He helps leaders: identify the drivers of each team member for maximum engagement, help new people and teams work faster & smarter, inspire greater innovation through healthy debate, build bridges across functions, cultures, and distance.

 

All In - How Great Leaders Develop a Culture of Belief and Deliver Big Results

While most leaders understand their most reliable competitive advantage comes from their people, few know how to get their teams “all in”—convincing employees to buy into the strategy they’ve put forward. If a culture is clear, positive, and strong, then people will believe what they do matters and that they can make a difference. If a culture is dysfunctional—chaotic, combative or indifferent—employees will spend more time thinking about why the people sitting next to them should be fired than getting fired up themselves. Teaming up with research giant Towers Watson, #1 bestselling author Adrian Gostick presents the findings of an unprecedented 300,000-person study conducted in the worst of the recession for his book All In. Based on this breakthrough research and his extensive consulting experience with a whos-who of successful organizations, he presents a simple roadmap that all managers can follow to create a high-achieving culture in their own teams where employees are engaged, enabled and energized.

Gostick offers specific how-tos for each step and tells fascinating stories of leaders in action that vividly depict just how these powerful methods can be implemented. Audiences will learn: the 3 research-based characteristics of the world’s most profitable, productive organizational and team cultures; the 7 steps today’s most successful leaders use to generate buy-in; how managers at any level can build a productive workgroup culture of their own where employees commit to the culture and give an extra push of effort.

 

Carrots 2.0
: How today’s managers use recognition to engage their people, retain talent, and accelerate performance

Most managers want to create cultures where their teams achieve above-and-beyond results, but for a culture to really take off teammates must encourage each other on a daily basis. The answer is in rooting for each other: having each other’s backs, appreciating strengths, and recognizing strategic behaviours. Based his #1 bestselling book The Carrot Principle, which unveiled a 10-year, 200,000- person survey, Gostick has become the preeminent authority on employee recognition. Now, he introduces us to Carrots 2.0—showing incontrovertible evidence that today’s employees respond best when they are recognized for things they are good at and for those actions where they had to stretch.

Gostick introduces audiences to new generational and industry-specific data from his 2016 proprietary survey of 14,000 working adults—helping managers link recognition to what is most meaningful to their employees. He introduces practical concepts that help managers encourage excellence, including ideas such as appreciation vs. recognition, effort vs. achievement, and praise vs. rewards. Adrian shows how great managers lead with carrots, not sticks and in doing so achieve higher: Productivity, Engagement, Retention & Customer Satisfaction.

 

What Motivates Me: How to lead and retain generations in the workplace

By 2024, 75 percent of the workforce will be Millennials and Gen Z. The best leaders are retaining more of their key, young talent by creating meaningful career discussions from day one, and are helping younger workers understand their impact on the greater purpose of the organization. In addition to learning how to help team members of all generations work together more effectively, leaders in this session will discover ways to reduce employee attrition by helping each employee understand their core motivators and sculpt the nature of their positions to better match those drivers. The truth is very few leaders know what is really motivating to their people or, even if they do, don’t know how to apply that information to day-to-day work.

Be a Better Manager by Friday: Real skills for inspiring employees, leading a team, and winning in today’s transformative marketplace
For leaders looking to drive innovation, diversity, and inclusion in their teams, many established management practices are doing more harm than good. Too many leaders are dampening their employees’ exuberance and refreshing diversity with old-school management approaches that are killing their cultures. This fresh, funny and challenging keynote presentation will debunk myths such as The Smartest Person in the Room, Treating Everyone the Same is Fair, Appreciation Comes in a Paycheque, and We’ll Let You Know if You Mess Up. Audiences will learn how to lead in such a way that today’s employees will follow—including establishing a clear future vision, enhancing diversity, increasing trust levels, and providing opportunity and growth development paths. Designed for senior leaders and managers, this session is typically customized to an organization’s specific leadership challenges.

Be a Better Manager by Friday: Real skills for inspiring employees, leading a team, and winning in today’s transformative marketplace

For leaders looking to drive innovation, diversity, and inclusion in their teams, many established management practices are doing more harm than good. Too many leaders are dampening their employees’ exuberance and refreshing diversity with old-school management approaches that are killing their cultures. This fresh, funny and challenging keynote presentation will debunk myths such as The Smartest Person in the Room, Treating Everyone the Same is Fair, Appreciation Comes in a Paycheque, and We’ll Let You Know if You Mess Up. Audiences will learn how to lead in such a way that today’s employees will follow—including establishing a clear future vision, enhancing diversity, increasing trust levels, and providing opportunity and growth development paths. Designed for senior leaders and managers, this session is typically customized to an organization’s specific leadership challenges.

Audience reviews:

  • Adrian’s messages were right on and resonated beautifully with all. His wonderful delivery of insightful leadership lessons with great humor captured the minds and hearts of all. As one participant said, ‘Adrian spoke for an hour and if he went for two hours, we’d still be with him’.
    - CEO, Danaher
  • The feedback was outstanding! Adrian made a significant and impactful contribution to our meeting and our journey as a company. Everyone is talking about “being in the wheelbarrow” and being “all-in.” We now have some highly motivated senior leaders.


    - CEO, Jeld-Wen
  • Extremely engaging and motivating talk! Most importantly, you tailored the content perfectly to ensure it was relevant to our fast-paced and forever-changing needs.
    - Executive Director, Morgan Stanley
  • What can I say, Adrian was awesome! He delivered a fantastic message that left our people inspired at our annual GM conference. We will see him again soon.


    - CEO, California Pizza Kitchen
  • The undisputed thought leader in employee motivation.

    - Global CEO, DHL Express

Speaker Biography

How do today’s best leaders accelerate business results? By engaging their employees to execute on strategy, vision, and values. In his challenging, information-packed talks, #1 bestselling leadership author Adrian Gostick provides real solutions on managing change, driving innovation, and leading high-performance teams.

Gostick is a global workplace expert and thought leader in the fields of corporate culture, leadership, and engagement. He is founder of the training and consulting company The Culture Works and author of the #1 New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle and The Best Team Wins. His books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold 1.5 million copies around the world.

As a leadership expert, he has been called “fascinating,” by Fortune magazine and “creative and refreshing” by the New York Times. Gostick has appeared on NBC’s Today Show and CNN and is often quoted in The Economist, Newsweek, and Wall Street Journal. If you Google the 30 Top Leadership Gurus, he is on the list alongside Jack Welch and Jim Collins. His consulting clients include Danaher, Bank of America, Rolls Royce, JELD-WEN and California Pizza Kitchen.

Gostick knows that even before the pandemic, anxiety was crippling the performance of workers—especially young employees. Today it is affecting productivity and leading to ghosting and burnout. In their bestselling book from Harper Business, Anxiety at Work: 8 strategies to help teams build resilience, handle uncertainty, and get stuff done, and in their keynotes/workshops, Gostick & Elton offer 8 tactics for managers to help their employees build resilience and experience psychological safety.