David Mead

Length - ~45 mins

Who it’s for:
Leaders with a strong desire to empower their teams, but who struggle making the time for“leadership” because they feel overwhelmed by everything they have to manage.

Talk brief:
At its best, leadership is about creating the context our people need to thrive. However, many of us work in environments with increasingly more tasks to accomplish, more fires to put out and more emails to ignore. Who has time for leadership? And yet if we don’t make the time for it, our people, our culture and our performance suffer. And as a result, our customers suffer as well.

Having spent years observing and supporting leaders around the world, David offers an empowering perspective: although we can’t always control the amount of things that are put on our plates, we can employ some simple tools and ideas that can empower our people to step up and propel our organizations forward. Rather than shouldering the burden of leadership ourselves, we can learn to share it with others so that together we can accomplish more than we ever would alone.

In an inspiring and relevant talk, David shares five practices that enable us to lead by getting out of the way and empowering others to take responsibility for our shared success. Audiences will learn how the approach builds trust, enhances innovation and progress.

The vital by-product is the freeing-up of Leaders’ capacity to think, communicate and create the context within which their teams thrive.

How to get leadership out of our head and into our heart so our people can thrive?

We’ve heard about it, read about it, talked about it and it’s likely that we’ve even experienced it ourselves – the lack of meaning, fulfillment and engagement experienced by the vast majority of today’s workforce. We’ve become numb to what once felt like staggering statistics.

So many of us work in environments where we are not thriving. We see our jobs as a means to an end. We go to work because we have to, not because we want to. We look forward to the end of the day instead of the beginning of the day. We may not mind our jobs, and we may even like the people we work with, but something’s missing and we often can’t put our finger on what it is.

This commonly-felt experience of work yields negative impacts on both the individual and the organization. Unhealthy levels of stress, fear and self-protection result in lackluster performance, stale cultures and stagnant organizations.

Due to this norm that so many people experience, it seems that we almost expect our jobs to be nothing more than a necessity of life. And that there’s nothing we can do to fix that.

And that’s right. We can’t fix it. These issues are not things we “fix” like a printer with a paper jam. These issues can only be remedied when we approach leadership as a daily pursuit.

In this interactive talk, David equips leaders with simple, practical ideas to lead in a way that allows people to thrive. As a result, those thriving individuals build organizations that flourish in the long term. Using his own experience, studies and relatable examples, David will help participants realize that whether they hold a position of leadership or not, they play an active role in how engaged and fulfilled people feel in their jobs. Importantly, they will learn the value of embracing their imperfections and how that builds trust as they pursue Human Leadership.

Some of the main concepts covered in the talk include:
- Take care of the human
- Lead from the heart
- Know and live your values especially when it’s hard or unpopular
- Consistency is key
- Drop your ego
- Embrace imperfection and learn from it
- Practice Human Leadership daily
- This is more than a job, it’s a pursuit

Length - ~45 mins

Who it’s for:
Leaders who want to shift their strategy from damage control (reacting to events and circumstances) to regaining the initiative (creating possibility and getting ahead of the curve) in our fast-changing world.

Talk brief:
It’s human nature to seek the sense of comfort we feel with consistency and stability. And yet, as we enter a new decade, we look toward the future and see more change and uncertainty than ever. A Stanford University survey last year assessed business uncertainty at its highest since 2015, with the level accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The only thing that’s certain is that there is more uncertainty ahead. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is an obvious example of the unexpected.

This state of uncertainty can leave us feeling unsettled, demoralized, and anxious about the future. As a result, decision making tends to stagnate and progress slows; we become more rigid and effective leadership declines. This lack of clarity, action, and cohesion puts teams and organizations at risk of complete breakdown.

Having spent years observing and supporting leaders around the world, David offers an empowering perspective: although we can’t control uncertainty, we can control how we approach it. Rather than resisting uncertainty, what if we chose to run toward it? When we know how to embrace it, uncertainty becomes opportunity. This is what separates the leaders and organizations that thrive from those that merely survive during uncertainty.

In an inspiring and relevant talk, David explains how we can harness the attributes that make us resilient in a way that enables us to seize uncertainty as a source of opportunity and growth.

Audiences will be introduced to skills necessary to lead and thrive during unpredictable times, including:

• How to uncover and channel our innate source of courage to embrace the unknown.
• How to take on the challenges we face from a completely different perspective.
• How to lead in situations where we don’t know the answer.
• The value of prioritizing who we are being as a leader over simply a drive to get things done.
• Building relationship as the foundation of accomplishment.