Emotional Intelligence, Performance and Leadership Expert
Bill Benjamin
Speaking Fee: $10,000 to $20,000
Travels From:
Bill Benjamin At A Glance:
Bill Benjamin is a top emotional intelligence keynote speaker and a thought leader on the subjects of leadership and peak performance. Bill spends time working with senior leaders and their teams at Fortune 500 companies helping them overcome the barriers that often hold them back from reaching their full potential.
Engaging and dynamic… you’d never know he is a math and computer guy!
Bill has a rare perspective – he has advanced degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science and has 25 years of real-world business experience as a senior leader. Bill is very authentic about the fact that he struggled early in his career as a leader when he was under pressure. He shares how he has been able to apply the very same techniques he teaches to become a better leader (and husband and father) himself.
In addition to using his background in sales to motivate and inspire audiences, Bill leverages his Mathematics and technical background to take a practical and scientific approach to helping people understand how the brain responds under pressure, and how that can help increase leadership and performance. Bill is a partner at the Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP), a successful international research and training company, named one of the “Fastest Growing Companies” in the “Fast 100” ranking in PROFIT Magazine. Bill also contributed to the New York Times and Amazon bestselling book Performing Under Pressure, co-authored by IHHP’s JP Pawliw-Fry and noted psychologist Hendrie Weisinger.
The combination of Bill’s practical nature and scientific approach to leadership make him a hit with analytical audiences. His high energy level and enthusiasm has resulted in a successful track record with discerning audiences that include surgeons, U.S Marines and NASA engineers.
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Build a High-Performance Culture - A Last 8% Culture
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.
Culture is at the heart of a high-performance organization. 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%, the moments that create culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid. When leaders feel agency and have the skills to lean into the difficult, they build high-performance teams that can become strong catalyst for positive culture change 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 your best and brightest
Pre-Program Culture Assessment:
Our Culture Assessment has been used by Fortune 500 companies to understand where their culture sits on IHHP’s proprietary Culture Map. This assessment is the starting point so organizations can build a clear direction to becoming a Last 8% Culture. This assessment takes no more than 5 minutes to complete and provides the following benefits:
- The data gathered will be used to customize the program to each organization’s unique needs.
- By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
- Key insights from the assessment are used to tailor the keynote to address what matters most to the participants.
- Post program, we will deliver a Last 8% Culture Assessment Executive report that will outline how to move forward with building a Last 8% Culture and lead their teams more effectively.
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Peak Performance - Performing Under Pressure
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. -
Last 8% Conversations - Having High Impact Last 8% Conversations
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.
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The Art of Empathy - Building Emotional Intelligence in Your Leaders
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
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Managing Anxiety, Stress and Burnout - Building The Internal Skills of Resilience
Your team is feeling burned out and overwhelmed. There is too much to do and less resources to get things done as a result of the Great Resignation. They are feeling stressed at work and are concerned about their lives becoming too busy and frantic again. 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, the brain forms negative behavior patterns and bad habits that negatively affect mental and emotional health, as well as performance – in yourself and in your people.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The goal of this program is to give your teams insight and tools to effectively manage anxiety and stress at work – and at home. Anxiety can be defined as a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an imminent or uncertain outcome. We all feel some sort of anxiety and stress on a spectrum, and it can vary in intensity and how much it impacts our life.
The good news is that there is a burgeoning science and tools of how to deal with anxiety and stress at work, and build resilience that anyone can learn. It starts by becoming a ‘student of human behavior’ – understanding how the brain responds to pressure and uncertainty, and then learning concrete skills and strategies to manage emotions and the mind more effectively.
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 why this can lead to feeling more, not less anxiety, stress, and burnout.
- How to build self-awareness: they will become aware of the habitual way they react to uncertainty and change, and learn strategies to respond more effectively.
- The importance of empathy: why empathy for ourselves is one of the hallmarks of successfully managing anxiety and stress (and one of the first things we neglect).
- How to build the habit of resilience: they will learn tools and how to make them a daily habit in order to manage their brain and mind as they face uncertainty over the long term.
- How to bring joy back into their life: to live more fully in the moment and improve their mental well-being.
You really kept everyone's attention with your great stories and analogies. Your passion for what you do is refreshing. Thank you for making the conference a truly inspiring event.— Coca-Cola
This was an insightful and practical session. I liked the way you had us practice the strategies rather than just telling us about them. That way, I'll actually remember it!— Intel Corporation
In a couple of challenging situations after the session, my Squadron immediately put the techniques to use! Thanks, Bill.— Air National Guard
