Bill Benjamin

The organizations that pull ahead over the next three years won’t be the ones with the best AI.

They’ll be the ones with the courage and capability to use it.

Here’s the gap we find in company after company: leadership is fully bought in — CEO-led, funding for the platforms, committed to scale. But below that level, the conviction stalls out. As one senior executive told us recently, the middle and lower ranks aren’t leaning in anywhere near as hard as the top expects. And the reason isn’t complicated: people at that level are afraid this will end in job losses, starting with their own.

What It Takes to Win Right Now

The people being asked to change how they work are rarely the ones setting AI strategy or choosing the tools. They know something is being asked of them. What they don’t have is the trust needed to take the risks AI adoption requires or a specific, actionable answer for what to do differently on Monday morning.

That’s the gap this keynote closes. It equips your people leaders to help their teams change, take risks, and move faster than your competitors, who are stuck facing the exact same challenge.

How do you do that?

Our research on the world’s most courageous, high-performing cultures — just published in Harvard Business Review, now its third-most-popular article — comes down to one thing: people need to be equipped to do hard things under pressure. Such as naming the disruption honestly while still caring for the people living through it, before anxiety hardens into avoidance and quiet resistance.

Skip that and your AI investment quietly stalls, no matter how good the tools are.

At the End of This Keynote, Your Team Will Be Able To:

• Make the hard thing safe and expected. A culture where intelligent risk is rewarded, and where acting under ambiguity, even failing, gets treated as learning, not liability.
• Lead with high care and high accountability. The human operating system for AI. You can deploy AI in weeks; trust takes longer—this is how you build the two dimensions that close the gap.
• Default to curiosity and better judgment: the two things AI can’t supply, and has only made more valuable. Your team leaves with real agency over a challenge that, right now, feels like it’s happening to them.
• It comes down to one question: will your people do the hard thing when avoidance is easier, faster, and no one’s watching? They’ll leave with a plan—and enthusiasm—to win with AI, not someday, but in the choices they make the very next morning. Because AI can hand you every answer in the world. What it can’t do is get your people to act on them.

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.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 72,000 people that is published in the Harvard Business Review, which puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture.  Your people will learn specific tools to own and model the culture on their team in the critical moments, what we call Last 8% moments, that create culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid, but are the secret to driving team performance.

In this impactful 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)
• Emotional Intelligence-based tools 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

For many leaders, the topic of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)  sounds soft and squishy.  Yet research is clear that it’s a critical competency for effective leadership and building great cultures.

With his advanced degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, Bill Benjamin was initially skeptical about EQ and any type of “soft skill” training. In this keynote, he shares his struggles early in his career as a leader, and how the EQ-based insights and strategies he teaches helped him manage his emotions so he could be more effective, empathetic (yes, you will learn empathy from a math guy!) and engaging, both at work and at home – and how it can help your team.

In this powerful program your team will learn:

• The analytics that show Emotional Intelligence is a critical competency for building great leaders
• The two key EQ-based pillars of Culture: Connection and Courage (based on a research study of 72,000 people)
• The research behind the Last 8% and why those moments matter than others
• The brain science of emotions that drive yours and others’ behaviors
• Strategies to manage your emotions and demonstrate empathy, even in Last 8% moments

With the combination of Bill’s analytical background and passionate speaking style, he has been able to engage highly technical and discerning audiences at NASA, The Federal Reserve Bank, Amazon Web Services, and teams of surgeons.

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.

Pre-program Assessment

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