Bill Benjamin

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 are 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; it doesn’t. It exists primarily on teams.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 72,000 people that is published in the Harvard Business Review, which puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture.  Your people will learn specific tools to own and model the culture on their team in the critical moments, what we call Last 8% moments, that create culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid, but are the secret to driving team performance.

In this impactful program, your team will learn:

• What the two pillars of a high performing culture are: High Connection (psychological safety) and High Courage (ability to do hard things skilfully)
• Emotional Intelligence-based tools 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

During times of uncertainty, the human brain defaults to protection and not risk. But taking risks–trying new ways of doing things, naming inconvenient truths, having feedback conversations – is exactly what’s needed during times of change.  What does that mean for you as a leader? You—and your organization—must take more risks just to keep up. Every time you back away from a risk you know you should be taking, you slow down your organization and this impairs your ability to adapt to the uncertain, changing environment you face.

In this powerful program, you will learn from our proprietary study of 34,000 people (published in Harvard Business Review) that found a quantifiable gap between the risks people know in their gut they should be taking and the actual risks they take. In other words, people don’t have the full conversation they want to have, or they put off making the hardest decisions. In these and other situations we’ve studied, people always wish they’d acted and taken the risk sooner. This research showed the gap is 7.56%. We named this gap, the Last 8%.

Specifically, you will learn:

• What the norms are on a team that slows down their speed of execution and ability to deal with uncertainty. In a study of 72,000 people, we found 67% of teams do not have a culture that is conducive to the amount of risk required today.
• Concrete tools to manage your brain in Last 8% moments so you can lead more effectively under pressure
• How to create a culture on your team that enables people to operate and execute at the speed required to deal with the challenges and uncertainty you face.

• Specific tools learned from working with high performers under pressure in the NFL, NBA, Olympic teams, Navy SEALs, Goldman Sachs, 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

• What The Last 8% is and why it provides the biggest opportunity to learn, grow and boost their performance.
• How the brain reacts under pressure and why that is at the heart of why people avoid giving Last 8% feedback.
• Self-awareness: what their habitual way of reacting to receiving feedback is and why that matters as a signal to the other person that they are open to receiving this important feedback.
• How to start a Last 8% feedback conversation: most people do not know where to start, which causes anxiety. Along with trying to be perfect, this stops them from beginning this important conversation.
• What the key components are to building an environment of high psychological safety, and why it matters to innovation.