Speech Topics

Keynote, break-out speeches and short workshops focus in two areas, always tailored to specific audience interests:

The Five Core Skills for Personal Success, Great Leadership & Outstanding Results
Superior leadership is the single most important key to multiplying results for individuals, teams and organizations. Distilling the best studies, books and experience to just five practical principles gives you the tools for everyone at every level to improve daily. The cumulative effect more than triples results, incidentally increasing our ability to manage today’s escalating workloads and excel. Discover how these straight forward skills can help everyone, yet remain elusive to many. Hear the story from a leader who has developed executives to apply these for exceptional success.
(Scroll down for more or… click here)

Human Resources Trends Toward Highly Effective Management of People in Organizations
Outstanding organizations are discovering that effective HR and people management practices multiply results up to ten times – 1000% – or even more over a few years… and what those practices are. While poor organizations still doubt the value of HR or effective people management, their impact is now proven beyond doubt and understanding how they create the greatest value for everyone is critically important to being competitive in future. Where should the focus be in this most complex organizational challenge? Developing better leadership and what it takes at every level grow from five key answers to this question.
(Scroll down for more or… click here)

Topics within these broad themes are also available such as Work-life Balance, sample write-up here.

Qualifications
Dave Crisp brings direct practical experience and useful stories from leadership success in seven industries. He illustrates with good humor what works in practice to both get results and develop leaders and organization culture that motivates, engages and helps people balance their work and lives for outstanding results both for themselves and their organizations. Full bio is here and resume here. In addition to extensive hands-on experience, including heading HR for 70,000 people for 14 years, Dave continually researches best practices as they evolve and reports these in his blog and web site as well as for several publications including the national Canadian HR Reporter. He is a member of several HR organizations including Strategic Capability Network, a think tank-type organization for senior managers where he serves as a “thought leader” for HR developments. He is also a member of its international parent, the Human Resource Planning Society. Both focus on strategic developments in human resources thinking and practice. He previously was on staff, researched and wrote for HR.com, an international web site in the area, and is on the Talent panel for the Human Capital Institute.

Trends in Human Resources/Trends in Managing People in Organizations

Typical Short Blurb:
Best practices for managing people continue to evolve. Human Resources is about getting the best from everyone – even more important today. As our information age leaps forward with continual enhancements, new ideas and technologies worldwide, fundamental principles that were always present, but often glossed over, have become the foundation for success amidst this sometimes confusing evolution. A combination of enhanced leadership style and highly effective practices with people have been clearly identified as most effective by in-depth research and experience in a vast number of studies, books and research material. Here’s the bottom line.

Background: Leadership elements haven’t changed, but the model that works best is now very different from the machine age of rote assembly-line orders and strategies only from the top down. Most managers still aren’t being well equipped for the modern environment and new employee expectations, and society is still mired in the image of the conquering hero dishing out orders. Nothing destroys value faster.

The role of new technologies has leapt far beyond administrative record-keeping and policy manuals, much of which can now be outsourced… or not. More impact by far arises from other aspects of HR – leadership development and managing talent acquisition and engagement throughout the lifecycle of employees requires a broad understanding the foundation elements. These include handling diversity – not only diversity of race or culture, but skills, abilities and age (with Gen X and Y assuming increasing importance and Boomers we don’t want to lose so quickly) as well as gender and family variations.

Work-life balance, ethics, social responsibility, health, safety and wellness have assumed increasing importance as process engineering has reduced staffing and cost and emphasized results. How these get dealt with makes a huge difference to people’s ability and eagerness to produce.

New means of communication from email and Intranets to internal and external blogs, web communities and even virtual reality systems are beginning to raise many questions for management and HR. HR practitioners need to know the pros and cons as these come into play. Measuring results, a growing challenge before, is becoming even more complex.

Dave is happy to discuss what’s new and important in any of these areas or provide an overview of what’s changing overall. (back to top)
Leadership for Outstanding Results/The Five Skills for Great Leadership

Typical Short Blurb:
Leadership elements haven’t changed. Thousands of books, studies and speakers identify the same principles. What’s different is the mix and balance of skills leaders must use to achieve and sustain maximum results. Understanding how the skills fit together is far more important now the machine age has given way to the information age and brought us a new type of ‘knowledge’ worker who needs and expects very different things from leadership. The good news is just five core skills enable excellence and sustainability. They’re skills everyone knows, but few coordinate effectively. The advantage comes from looking at them clearly and focusing on the ones that make the difference.

Background: People don’t leave organizations; they leave bad leaders. Teams or even entire companies are held back or catapulted to success by the approach and skills of their leadership. The typical strategy meeting isn’t nearly as important to results as the day-to-day management behavior of an organization’s people.

Command and control, the style of leadership we all think of from movies and war stories, still works and will likely continue to be of great value during crises. Most work situations require more these days. Coaching style leadership entails getting and keeping people directly engaged in the process, in decisions, in working together. The role of leaders hasn’t so much changed as become more complex.

This evolution, which started some 50 years ago, has gathered momentum. Now we see it applied as the “learning organization,” a title truly earned by only a few great organizations such as Toyota, Southwest Air and to some extent Walmart. It enables them to exceed their competitors’ achievements not just by a solid margin, but by many times. These results stem directly from their leaders and the cultures those leaders managed to spread throughout these organizations.

The good news is we know exactly what works best and most people have the skills. The bad news is most people don’t use them or know how to use them as effectively as they could. A little knowledge and a little practice makes an enormous improvement in most people’s results. If you improve almost everyone by 10% per year for free by developing a growth-oriented culture, the cumulative productivity is spectacular. And it truly is free for those organizations that stick to these relatively easy principles consistently. (back to top)

Sample Sub-Topic Write-up: Creating Balance: Health and Wellness in Outstanding Organizations

What do you do when the work just doesn’t slow down? Most organizations face this puzzle today – one Dave Crisp needed to solve for himself and to help others not only survive, but thrive in fast-moving, tight budget situations. The solution – take charge! And help others take charge! Both leaders and associates play a tremendous role in assisting each other to both stay well and get outstanding results for your team. It’s not either/or, but how you manage both together that makes for the healthiest workplaces. Everyone has a role to play! Discover the short solution to better balance.

Not your typical approach to wellness: Dave’s unique take on managing people and stress grew as he led and developed leaders for nearly 25 years in some of the most high-stress organizations in Canada, including heading Human Resources for Hudson’s Bay Company and its 70,000 people through massive, turbulent mergers and nearly 110 re-organizations in 14 years. He learned from Zen readings on finding calm in the midst of furious action. A calming influence, he was able to show people how to manage effectively in their own roles while helping others through more positive leadership – so much so employees voted it a “best company to work for” three years in a row. (back to top)

Bookmark and share this post

Speech Topics

Site Pages/Articles

Blogroll

Archives