Hire Speaker Stephan MaraisWe conduct workshops and are featured speakers at annual industry conventions, public social forums, leadership conferences, human interest groups, and organizational retreats. Our talks are customized to meet your specific needs using the latest research of topics, real world applications from our corporate experience, audience participation; and appropriate humor. Sessions can range from a ‘kick-start’ presentation to 1/2 day seminars, and to full content agendas for retreats.

Do you have a pending conference or other event that you would like to be thought provoking, filled with best practices, solutioneering and high energy? Why don’t we explore a few ideas together? Contact us. We would be happy to be of service to you…

Here are examples of some recent speaker topics:

Achieve a Healthier Balance with Your Technology
The sophistication of automation now allows us to cross global time zones, video conference into the meeting rooms of offshore platforms, watch movies on smart phones while at the airport, answer email without having a laptop, update ourselves on the latest world news; and, be ever accessible to family distresses or work-related events.  With this volume of information and the need to be ‘ever present, it’s not uncommon to hear employees and family complain of excessive phone use, the constant re-prioritizing of agendas, or flat out reducing the volume of their daily connectedness.  In this 90-minute session, participants will learn to not be interrupt driven, establish reasonable limits on Smartphone use, evaluate the criteria for when you need to be connected; and, how to publish your working calendar to family and colleagues.

Practice Visible Leadership & Increase Employee Engagement
Being a visible leader provides motivation, increases trustworthiness, provides timely resolution to conflicts, dispels rumors and empty schemes, shows compassion in listening to other viewpoints; and, builds unity among dissimilar departmental teams.  In this session, attendees will learn use positive language to demonstrate determination on goals, place their emotional connectedness to a vision or company project, understand the leader’s power of presence; and, how to engage the hearts and minds of colleagues and staff.

Younger Managers Supervising the Veteran Staff
Often younger managers of the GenX or Millennium generation have difficulty in understanding the work behavior of the Veteran staff.  They complain they can’t earn their respect, consequently, performance is degraded.  Additionally, the Veteran staff stands as the pillars of the work community that they had direct influence in building.  What are these newer managers going to show them?  In this program participants will identify hot spots within their teams that trigger conflict, resentment, or resignation.  Participants will learn to recognize the speech phrases that are tied to social conditioning, national events, and professional affiliations.   Attendees will leave with a working strategy to avoid the triggers & create engagement guidelines for themselves & their functional departments.

Working with the Emerging Workforce
As members of Generation Y in the United States begin to enter the workforce, how do you attract this new talent and honor the core values they have that clash with the older worker?  Gen Y values personal time as a premium and will forfeit other ventures, including professional work to their personal efforts.  This can be an issue for time sensitive jobs such as, shift work in both the medical and factory industries.  This session identifies both the core values of all who attend, including worksheets that tie communication elements that are characteristic of each generation and how to use them for collaboration.

Tipping Point Leadership tied to Vision
Once teams define their vision statement, it is often a statistic that they are unable to make significant progress on achievement. Teams must:

  • Identify hot spots—the areas you are giving little time or effort to but could return the greatest impact such as, patient satisfaction, team efficiency
  • Identify cold spots—the areas you are told, see, or touch that you are giving lots of time & energy and receiving low impact from

Recruiting & Retaining Talented People
Beyond the job descriptions you may be recruiting for, how do you identify those individuals that have initiative, good value judgment, and can order job priorities in a given day? And, after you find these treasured individuals how do you motivate them to continue their best level of performance and remain a valuable part of your organization? Join us for the key elements in these areas and develop your search skills in finding the ‘talented’ players.

Developing Critical Thinking
In the course of our work lives, we learn specific tasks associated with our job positions, sometimes putting our strategic thinking on auto pilot. We perform our job responsibilities satisfactorily enough, but often we don’t develop the reflective judgment skills of ‘critical thinking’. Across industries, leaders that use ‘critical thinking’ know that they can always improve their reasoning competence. What is ‘critical thinking’? This session will help you to:

  • Raise vital questions, uncertainties, topics for debate, formulating all of these clearly & precisely for discussion
  • Gather and assess relevant information, testing the information against relevant criteria
  • Assess opposing statements & current standing arguments

 

Recent Major Speaking Engagements

  • Women Leadership in America 8/2018
  • Phoenix Leadership Project, Demonstrating Your Real Self 6/2018
  • Phoenix Journal, What is Your Legacy 4/2018
  • Center for Creative Leadership, Diversity & Inclusion  2/2018
  • Agile Leadership Network Conference  2/2017
  • Young Leaders for Diversity & Inclusion  4/2017
  • Leadership Southeast Georgia  5/2017
  • HealthSouth Rehab Retreat  5/2017
  • North East Tennessee GIS User Group    7/2017
  • Family Voices of Wisconsin     9/2017
  • World Water Day in Washington State     11/2017
  • Grantmakers for Effective Organizing 5/2016
  • Diversity Abroad Conference 4/2016
  • International Leadership Association 8/2015
  • ASCD Conference on Educational Leadership 3/2015
  • Women In Leadership Conference 3/2015
  • NewH Leadership Conference 1/2015
  • National Council of Nonprofits   3/2014
  • National Association of Secondary School Principals   2/2014