Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation by Harnessing Personal Leadership

The business environment has never been more challenging than it is right now, and senior leaders are the ones bearing the pressure and responsibility. Levels of trust in authority figures are as low as they’ve ever been. But what if we could turn every individual employee and contributor in an organization into a leader?

Disrupting the Victorian model of work - the hierarchy, the siloes, the risk aversion and being busy over being productive - may be the shot in the arm that a team needs to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Blaire Palmer can show your organization how to empower individuals to go beyond being merely ‘team players’ to create a culture of Personal Leadership. This in turn will fill your organization with motivated, engaged, and fundamentally collaborative cultures during times of change. The conventional models of topdown leadership are no longer enough for organizations to truly thrive, but if everyone taps into their own inner strength, creativity, sense of purpose and curiosity, the company will be able to weather any storm, together.

Blaire uses her extensive experience to propose inspiring but practical solutions to help audiences tap into their own inner leader and motivate their employees to do their best work every single day.

Key Takeaways:

• Why it is no longer enough to have leadership at the top
• How every contributor to an organization can be their own best leader
• How to meaningfully create a collaborative approach to deal with disruption and challenges
• The link between empowered employees and loyal employees
• Enabling individuals to understand their own personal contribution within an infrastructure
• How to do away with egos in senior management to allow all employees to do their best work

The ideal audience: Organizations that have ‘tried everything’ to create an energized workforce post-pandemic and are ready to do something different.

A Brilliant Gamble: Busting the Myths of Change

If there’s one thing we know by now, it’s that change is a constant. New challenges - from generative AI to a cost of living and supply crisis - are being thrown at us every day. If teams are not ready to meet this new future head-on, it is hard to see how they will survive in a challenging work landscape.

Technology is revolutionizing the landscape of work and business but that only makes your people a more valuable asset. And unless you understand people, you won’t know what to do with technology. Meeting disruption with an equally disruptive organizational mindset is key to pushing teams to reach their full potential. Blaire Palmer will use this speech to challenge audiences to rethink their assumptions about both technology and people, as well as the role of the leader in creating organizations that are fit for the future.

Key Takeaways:

• What teams need in order to thrive in uncertainty
• The challenges and opportunities presented by disruptive technology
• How to create a leadership culture that can weather the ever-changing workplace landscape

The ideal audience: Organizations that often find themselves on the back foot when new challenges arise.

Seeking Expansiveness: Embracing Individuality

Inclusion is a huge buzzword right now. But what does it mean to your organization? If it ends at the hiring stage, you won’t be creating thriving, loyal, motivated teams. You’ll simply be meeting a quota with no discernible benefit to your business or the clients you serve.

Inclusion has to be about every individual bringing the unique parts of themselves to work, and using them to inform and enrich the work they’re doing for you every day. Whether that is leveraging the different perspectives and experiences of people at different stages of their life, from new Gen Z hires to women in midlife, or the unique knowledge brought by employees from different cultures to your own, Blaire Palmer brings her own personal experiences of navigating the world of work in different seasons of life, and in different challenging work environments, to challenge ideas about what diversity really means. Blaire asks teams to consider: what if organizations harnessed this uniqueness, and created a working culture that encouraged employees to solve challenges through their expansiveness?

In addition to this, Blaire knows it’s impossible to talk about inclusivity without dealing with the challenges of hybrid working and collaboration. Although leaders claim to want to embrace flexibility, there are unique challenges to leading a distributed team. Instead of getting caught up in the details of ‘two days in the office or three?’ Blaire offers holistic oversight to these collaborative working challenges that focus on harnessing that broader overview of individuals and company culture.

Blaire will inspire and energize your team to think about a future of work and leadership that enables everyone - with their own strengths and needs - to thrive for you.

Key Takeaways:

• How to approach diversity and inclusion as a gift to a workplace
• Meeting people in the team in their uniqueness
• Creating a culture that prioritizes wellness in exchange for individuals doing their best work

The ideal audience: Organizations that often find themselves on the back foot when new challenges arise.