Speaking

For more than 40 years Dr. Linda Henman has used humor, insight, and experience to help audiences uncover ways to accelerate growth.

Rather than relying on traditional approaches that often fall short in today’s market, Linda delivers proven strategies for immediate and lasting business results. That’s why leaders and associations repeatedly call on her to educate, entertain, and inspire.

To ensure Linda’s programs produce the results you want, all include customization to meet your most pressing business needs—to address those decisions you must get right and can’t afford to get wrong. This unique approach ensures audiences will be engaged and open to learning techniques and strategies that will translate into outcomes.

Audiences and meeting planners applaud Dr. Henman for her fast-paced, fun-filled, high-content sessions. By combining her education, practical experience, and ability to make people laugh, Linda can help you add fun and information to your conference, association meeting, or program.

Read more on Linda’s speaking programs below and contact us to learn how they can be customized for maximum impact.

Risky Business

Research tells us that people spend about 12% of their time thinking about the future. That means that a typical person will spend an hour thinking about things that have yet to happen. Why do our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions insist on projecting us into an unknown, perhaps precarious future?

Flip a three-sided coin. Some will land on the side of the risk reluctant; others will find themselves among the risk tolerant; but some will land on another side–living among the enthusiasts who eagerly embrace ambiguity, innovation, and change. This keynote is for them. Risky Business presents an amalgamation of what Linda has learned in her original research on overcoming adversity and has observed in her more than 40 years of consulting with Fortune 500 companies, privately held firms, family-owned businesses, and military organizations. Her in-the-trenches experiences spurred her to arrive at this premise: To position their organizations for more success, leaders can’t shy away from the disruptive, high-stakes, pivotal decisions about their futures.

In this keynote, Linda explains that with the right mindset, you can motivate yourself, those you lead, teach, and love–to transform their lives and your own.

How to Develop a Merger Mindset

When companies merge or acquire, shareholders usually expect synergy to kick into high gear—that one plus one will equal three. Unfortunately, as evidenced by countless failed or disappointing deals, one plus one all too often doesn’t even equal one anymore.  

The reason M & A’s most often fail? The research indicates poor post-merger integration takes the blame, but let’s not overlook the other factors that can compromise the deal: eyes off customers, lax discipline, no transparency, a clash of cultures, and the inability to anticipate unforeseen events. If you make the wrong decisions about any one these, you may suffer deal-eroding delays and create an environment that makes success rare and elusive. 

In this dynamic keynote, Linda provides breakthrough solutions, practical tools, and straightforward answers to complex pre- and post-deal questions: 

• Determine the state-of readiness for your M & A processes.
• Fully realize the intended financial and strategic results of the transaction.
• Create an overall integration approach that preserves and leverages the unique attributes and capabilities of both the parent and target companies.
• Avoid costly talent mistakes and position the integrated company to be a talent magnet.
• Prevent culture clashes and create a new high-performing, combined culture.
• Generate deal synergies and deliver unprecedented results.

How to Move Beyond Indecision

When senior leaders consistently make good decisions, little else matters; when they make bad decisions or fail to make any decision, nothing else matters. Effective decision-making stands at the center of executive leadership, with a strong strategy and effective plan for execution as proof of its existence.

A breakthrough product, dazzling service, or cutting-edge technology can put you in the game, but only rock-solid execution of a well-developed strategy can keep you there. This high-content keynote will equip audience members with pragmatic ideas so they will head home with a rock-solid plan for mixing the formula for better results.

Organizations succeed when leaders realize that they create the climate of an organization through a series of daunting decisions—decisions that sometimes force tradeoffs—sometimes messy, but ultimately advantageous tradeoffs. 

How to Move Beyond Indecision is rich with client examples on how to leverage your competitive advantage. It includes cases that illustrate how to make tough calls by moving beyond indecision and good intentions. 

• Learn the formula for making tough calls 
• Identify the key roadblocks and typical wrong turns leaders make in their decision-making. 
• Unlock decision-making potential while navigating an increasingly uncertain world.

Challenge the Ordinary

There’s little room for error in today’s global economy. It does not allow for mediocrity; the rules and players have changed; and ordinary simply won’t work anymore. If companies don’t have the best products and services and the top people delivering them, their competition will—and they will do it all over the world—as we experience shifts in economic powers and changes in business paradigms. 

Organizations will increasingly depend on cutting-edge solutions to never-before-seen problems and clever ideas for those recurring headaches that have always plagued them. Traditionally a handful of star performers have created the vast majority of valuable ideas for their organizations. These top thinkers and performers will define the talent leaders will need moving forward.

These stars don’t shine independently, however. They are not free agents; rather, these highly talented, extraordinary thinkers need the structure of an organization and effective leadership to do their best work. But traditional leadership strategies won’t work.

Come prepared to hear about and be persuaded by provocative, unorthodox ideas that are proven to work in today’s new economy.

• Abandon conventional mindsets
• Question long-help assumptions
• Kill sacred cows

Become the Leader No One Wants to Leave

People don’t robotically put themselves in harm’s way or upset their lives with social reform and political upheaval. Neither do they automatically champion organizational change that means more work, less stability, or relocation. In all these cases, magnetic leadership is required.

Magnetic Leadership™ is a form of balanced leadership that attracts, develops, and retains stars, primarily because the leader recognizes that a clear strategy is central to the success of any organization.

In this high-content, entertaining keynote, Dr. Linda Henman draws from thousands of hours of executive coaching and consulting experience to explain how leaders can become more magnetic by developing strategy, making more effective decisions, and developing the bench—all critical elements for improving performance.

This keynote is for you if:

• You’ve ever lost a great employee to another company, and it wasn’t about the money.
• You struggle with when to be fair and when to be firm.
• You’ve hired squirrels to be your top dogs.
• You don’t seem to get your messages across too well: