Bill Benjamin

Bill Benjamin is a top emotional intelligence keynote speaker, leadership thought leader, culture expert, and contributor to the New York Times bestseller, Performing Under Pressure. He has shared the brain science of emotions with discerning audiences, including the U.S. Marines, NASA engineers, and Surgeons, as well as leadership teams at Amazon, the Fed, and Coca-Cola. 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 technical background to take a practical, scientific approach to help 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 makes him a hit with analytical audiences. His high energy level and enthusiasm have resulted in a successful track record among even the most discerning audiences. 

SPEAKING TOPICS: 

Build a High-Performance, 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 is 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, but 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 CEOs and CHROs 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 keynote, your team will learn the results from Bill's 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%, that creates culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid. When leaders feel agency and have skills to lean into the difficult, they build a high-performance culture that becomes a powerful force in your organization. In this powerful program, your team will learn:

• 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 the best and brightest

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. This program is based on a 12,000-person study conducted for Bill and his team's New York Times best-selling book, Performing Under Pressure, which is available in 65 countries. This session can be delivered for salespeople 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 salespeople must overcome to be successful. 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, and 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

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 disruptive change