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How to create a positive culture and a happy workplace

Silvia Garcia

travels from France, Spain

TEDx speaker, former Global Director of the Happiness Institute at Coca-Cola and expert on positive leadership and mental health

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Silvia Garcia's speeches spark the journey to make people thrive. Sourcing from her experience as Global Director of the Happiness Institute of Coca Cola, she delivers powerful tips through real life examples on how to increase performance, creativity, trust, wellbeing, and resilience. Companies wishing to create a competitive advantage using the science of happiness to unleash their collective genius, boost trust, become more agile and favor collaboration and performance find in Silvia the perfect keynote speaker.

Why you should book Silvia Garcia for your next event

  • She offers valuable insights while sharing her experiences to leaders, HR managers and communications specialists across the world.
  • Silvia always uses the latest research on neuroscience, happiness and positive psychology in her keynotes to ensure that her clients can benefit and learn.
  • She delivers keynotes on the topic of positive leadership and creating happy workplaces.

Have you ever wondered who was responsible for Coca-Cola’s association with happiness ? Or why during the past 15 years, Coca-Cola employees’ consistently over delivered in creativity and performance ? As International Marketing Director and President of the Happiness Institute for Coca-Cola Silvia was the organization’s expert on emotions and how they influence our decisions.

She oversaw the marketing and leadership strategies for 198 countries. Silvia has lived in the US, France, Ireland, Sweden and Spain. Multicultural, she knows how to engage with all types of audiences with awe-inspiring work-related examples of applying the science of happiness at work.

Highly demanded all around the world, her speeches have been said to change “lives and companies”. Silvia is a worldwide expert on positive leadership and happiness at work.
Her clients range from organizations such as the World Business Forum, AXA, Lilly, or Google to local businesses. Whether your objectives are related to your organization’s vision and culture, or to boosting your bottom line results, Silvia will be eye-opening on how the science of happiness can help you or your organization become more profitable, happier and successful.

Her uniqueness lies in the convergence of behavioral sciences (neuroscience, positive psychology) and hands-on experience in complex changing business environments.

See keynotes with Silvia Garcia
Keynote by Silvia Garcia

How to synergize AI's possibilities with human potential to create a brighter future

AI will help organizations attain higher results providing they know how to adapt and evolve to maintain trust, from their employees, from their customers and from their stakeholders.

Silvia will explore the latest AI advancements and cutting-edge research on human potential, so that we use both of them to forge a better future. She’ll discuss the specific areas of business where AI can significantly enhance capabilities, as well as the aspects of business where human potential is irreplaceable and essential for success.

Keynote by Silvia Garcia

Fueling Happiness

40% of our happiness is based on our actions alone. In this interesting talk, Silvia will explain the importance of having a Culture of Happiness at work. With examples and research from neuroscience and positive psychology, Silvia will make her audience understand how and why happiness is an important part of business.

Happiness at work creates tangible benefits such as increasing innovation x3, sales up to 40% or productivity, while reducing costs associated to disengagement and mental health.

Audience takeaways:

  • The audience will learn that happiness is not a result of being successful – it’s a requirement to become successful. They will go home knowing that they have the power and tools to change their performance and success rate.
Keynote by Silvia Garcia

Starting or Growing a Culture of Happiness at work based on science

In this informative keynote, Silvia Garcia will go through the eight ingredients that are required to create a culture of happiness at work. This keynote is based on science and research and will undoubtedly be beneficial to anyone looking to change culture and increase happiness or starting a company.

Audience takeaways:

  • The audience will discover the incredible advantage of having a culture of happiness at work and get important insights and tools to change their strategy, communication and culture to foster the eight important ingredients.
Keynote by Silvia Garcia

Eight things the most resilient companies do to build employees' mental health

There are not those who are happy and those who are not. Everyone has its share of struggles, but some know how to use their mental resilience, emotional capital, and physical resources to navigate challenges and come out stronger and happier. Silvia surprised the audience with eight scientifically proven things people and organizations can do right now.

Audience takeaways:

  • How much of our mental health and happiness comes from our genes, how much comes from our background, and how much we can really influence (over 50%!).
  • What is happening right now has a powerful grit on our happiness but it is only temporary. If you see things as permanent and yourself as powerless, struggles will take a permanent toll on your happiness. The remedy is action! And the time is now!
Keynote by Silvia Garcia

ON/OFF – Killing stress before it kills you

This inspiring keynote uncovers the mechanism of stress as Silvia takes her audience through the strategies and tools needed to use stress as an advantage to boost performance.

Audience takeaways:

  • The audience will learn how to control stress and stop harmful habits that lead to stress. Silvia teaches her audience how to recharge the body and soul and avoid burning out.
Keynote by Silvia Garcia

Why A Positive Culture Is The Ultimate Economic Advantage

In this eye-opening keynote, Silvia Garcia explains how positive leadership and happiness at work lead to results and economic growth. The audience will also discover the consequences of not engaging in a culture of happiness at work.

Audience takeaways:

  • The audience will learn how to encourage happy and productive employees as well as how to implement a culture of happiness at work that can actually be measured to show progress. This keynote is relevant for corporate managers, HR, founders and CEOs.
Other keynotes by Silvia Garcia

Custom keynotes

Silvia can create specific talks to your needs. Some of the topics include:

  • Marketing: The Coca-Cola secret recipe to create brands that people love.
  • Customer Experience: Clients can forget what you said or did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. A neuroscientific guide to creating valuable relationships.
  • Happiness at work / Emotional Wellbeing / Purpose: Why top performing companies are using happiness at work as a competitive advantage and how you can create a culture that sustains the seven plus 1 science-based pillars that fuel it.
  • Effective leadership: The secrets of highly effective teams. Eight science-based tools to lead for human success.
  • Innovation: How to use the right emotions to fuel innovation and creativity.
  • Generation Z / Multigenerational workforce: How to unleash the potential of generation Z: understanding the forces that have shaped their needs, and learning how to create a flourishing work culture for them.
Watch Silvia Garcia in action

Silvia Garcia | TEDxToulouseBusinessSchool (with English subtitles)

Watch Silvia Garcia in action

GWS 2017: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty? ...The Glass is “Refillable”! | Silvia Garcia

See keynotes with Silvia Garcia

References

Perhaps the speaker who stood out the most on Day 2 was Silvia Garcia, in charge of the Coca-Cola Happiness Foundation. She talked about happiness and how it has a positive impact on just about everything from our productivity to the economy.

BAM

Very responsive, a pleasure to work with, and delivered a high quality and impactful keynote.

Oliver Armstrong

Campbell Soup Company

Leadership: Art & Science Part 1 - If you Care about Business, you must Care about People first

“The business of business is people”

Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, based his business on people and made this his priority for his company’s culture. Herb grew Southwest from scratch, from a regional carrier with only a few destinations to a consistently profitable company–even in the early 1990s, when oil prices were skyrocketing and the airline industry was losing billions. He achieved this by showing he cared for every one of his 50,000 employees who operated more than 4,000 flights daily to more than 100 destinations.

“We could have made more money if we furloughed people. But we don’t do that. And we honor them constantly. Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions of grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine.” – Herb Kelleher

Why is caring about people so important? This is because people will follow you through hard times and struggles on the basis of how you make them feel. How you make them feel will be the fuel for how well they perform and consequently how well your company will perform. Joe Nocera wrote an article in the New York Times entitled “The Sinatra of Southwest Feels the Love” about two different airlines’ results based on how differently they cared for their employees. From the piece we learned that the same day that American Airlines held its annual meeting, Southwest held theirs. American Airlines was losing money, and its chief executive officer complained from the podium that the state of the industry was unsustainable. Members of both the Flight Attendant’s Union and the Pilot’s Union, in the middle of combative contract negotiations, picketed the meeting and handed out anti-management fliers.

By contrast, the Southwest meeting was a lovefest. The company had made $645 million in 2007, but that wasn’t the top of the shareholders’ minds. They had come to pay respect to Kelleher. When he entered the room, they stood as one, cheering wildly. Southwest’s pilots were also in contract negotiations, but instead of picketing they published an ad in USA Today to thank their founder.

This happened because emotion lies behind every decision we make. Emotions come before behavior. Modern brain scanning technology allows us to see how the areas of the brain related to feelings light up before the areas related to rational thinking and evaluation. If you make people feel good, they will perform their best and they will be loyal to you. On the contrary, when you make someone feel stressed or scared, their fight or flight mechanism is activated. This a spiral of negative consequences: bad cognitive functions, uncontrolled risk-taking, less collaboration, less creativity, decision-making that isn’t thoughtful, less engagement and ultimately less productivity.

Our human brain considers emotions to be so vital for our survival that it stores them in one area of the brain called hippocampus. It uses them to quickly make a decision when you encounter a similar situation (your brain tells itself, “hey, I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends”).

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

To create a culture where people trust you, trust each other, and trust the company, the first step is to start truly caring about people. This can be achieved by adopting these three leadership behaviors:

1. Listen to people with a main goal of understanding them, don’t just prepare your reply ahead of time. Many leaders feel they are expected to have the answers or to have the last word, thus they quickly take any opportunity to give their opinion. Create time and space for others to talk to you. Don’t interrupt when employees speak, keep your thoughts until the very end, when everyone else has had a chance to talk.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” – Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

2. Hold people accountable for telling you the truth and vice versa. Hard truths need to be told with honesty and sensitivity. If you care, you can tell people everything. If you have established a relationship based on care and trust, it is easier to tell someone something unpleasant when it is delivered in an honest yet caring way.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth” – William Faulkner

3. Give people control and autonomy. Most companies are not even aware of the amount of control and restriction that pull down each person’s autonomy. Most of us are familiar with inherited work cultures of processes that tell people what to do and even what words to say in every possible situation. As customers, we have all experienced this when talking to a representative at a call center which is such a frustrating common situation of a horrible customer experience – so common that it was used as the premise for a popular iRabbit ad.

“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement” – Daniel H. Pink

Whether your company starts by removing excessive control or by adopting radical new ways of working such as holacracy, there is always a sweet spot between your needs and the needs of your employees.

Read part 2 here!

Leadership: Art & Science Part 2 - Revise your reward system! It might be putting your company at high stake

This is the second part of Silvia’s blog series. Make sure you read part 1 If you Care about Business, you must Care about People first

There are few leaders that have heard about the neurological reward and contentment systems, both at the origin of decisions your employees make. We all know there is a quick way to get people to do what you want them to; ask someone to do something in exchange of a high enough reward and you’ll get an immediate response. Most motivational programs at businesses are built around this. It works for the short term but is proven ineffective for the longer term.

Our brain is biologically inclined to instant gratification and reward. Why? Because motivation and reward seeking are key to our survival. As a species, when our reward system is tickled, it releases dopamine (the hormone that gave us the motivation to endure dangers and tiredness to hunt prey) and cortisol (the hormone that gave us an extra kick of energy when running after the prey). As leaders, we seek to create that type of excitement about goals in our teams (e.g. end year bonus or performance bonus).

However, we need to be careful with this approach because dopamine and cortisol are such powerful drivers of our behavior that the desire to obtain the reward and/or the fear not to get it, can take over our critical thinking and ethical decisions.

Let’s take an example. What role did, what appears to be, an overstimulated reward seeking system play for NASA in 1986?

On January 28th 1986 NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, the first aircraft to carry a non-professional astronaut on the crew, including a school teacher. NASA was the icon of American technological accomplishments, we were in the Space race era, and the US government was eager to see the Challenger in orbit, fearing that doing it quickly, could give an advantage over Russia. The Challenger was going to be the first spaceship able to make it to space, come back home, and be reused in new launches; thus, greatly reducing the cost of the Space Race for America. NASA had done 24 launch assessments to verify the viability of the final launch of the Challenger. Seven out of twenty-four of those assessments concluded that the rubbers that sealed the fuel, called O-rings, had problems when performing under low temperatures. The weather forecast for January 28th, 1986 was 23 F (-5 Celsius) so the day before the launch, NASA scientists called a meeting with the O-ring manufacturer, Morton Thiokol. Morton Thiokol was a proud NASA provider and their business leaders’ primary motivation was NASA’s satisfaction. Morton Thiokol engineers’ primary motivation was to make things work. Thus, fearing the consequences of low temperatures, Morton Thiokol engineers recommended NASA to postpone the Challenger’s launch. NASA was less than pleased to hear that.  Morton Thiokol business leaders asked NASA to let them have a private conversation with their engineers. Roger Boisjoly, one of the engineers attending that meeting remembered how their leaders put pressure on them to reconsider the launch on the following day; telling them that it was a strategic decision and not a technical one. The four senior leaders voted in favor of recommending that NASA pursue with the launch of the Challenger, despite the recommendation not to do so by all the engineers.  The following day, millions of people, including children expecting to receive the first lesson on space, were watching, when 73 seconds after launch, the Challenger spaceship disintegrated and the seven members of the crew died.

What caused the tragedy? Although the first investigations focused on understanding the defective feature of the O-ring’s rubber components that sealed the fuel deposits; later investigations have focused on the essential role of the short-term reward culture at the time.

Reward is the fuel of our dopamine circuit. However, there is the possibility of too much and too little dopamine. It is a matter of balance. Most companies either over-stimulate or under-stimulate employees’ short reward system. Avoid this pitfall.

Read part 3 here!

Leadership: Art & Science Part 3 - Never forget Serotonin

This is the third and final part of Silvia’s blog series on leadership. Make sure you read part 1 If you Care about Business, you must Care about People first and part 2 Revise your Reward System! It might be putting your Company at High Stake

What distinguishes great leaders from the masses is that they build a culture that combines dopamine and serotonin. In other words, leaders combine the excitement, created by stimulating the reward (dopamine), with the meaning, satisfaction and pride that each employee gets when their contentment (serotonin) circuit is activated.

Serotonin is also a neurotransmitter, but instead of creating addictive, aggressive, and risky behaviors when over-stimulated, the serotine circuit makes people feel part of something meaningful, bigger than themselves. They feel satisfied and grateful.

To activate the contentment circuit, leaders need to put emphasis on demonstrating values over outputs, and they need to reward employees for acting on those values. In my last blog post, I discussed what happened when NASA didn’t listen to their engineers in 1986 (link). What would have happened if the Morton Thiokol employees would have been rewarded on doing the right thing to make sure their products contributed to the safety of the spaceship launch, instead of being rewarded and pressured to keep clients satisfied, no matter the cost? Although an aggressive reward system on outputs can benefit the short-term economic performance of a business, rewarding on values and creating the right culture helps companies outperform in the long run.

Costco and Walmart have very different leadership styles that cascade into their values and culture. Jim Sinegal, Costco’s founder says his mission is to keep their employees happy. Stakeholders satisfaction is a by-product of Costco’s focus on employees. He personally visits outlets to say hello to the workers. He also makes sure that employees are paid a fair wage and that everyone has health insurance. Costco pays their employees 65% more than Walmart, whose employees have been in the news a few times this year complaining about salaries and benefits. In 2008, when the recession was hitting hard, Costco avoided layoffs unlike most retailers. Jim Sinegal explained it himself in an interview with the Seattle Times:

“ We said … two things: No. 1, we want to drive our business to succeed, so we’re going to lower prices and try to drive more business into our buildings. And in addition, our employees … deserve our loyalty. They needed it just as much then as they ever did, or more. So we said, let’s see how we can get through this thing without having layoffs”

Costco employees generate 200% higher sales than Sam’s Club, Walmart’s wholesale branch. Costco’s employees’ very low rotation saves the wholesaler millions of dollars per year. Moreover, the way employees are trusted and treated makes Costco enjoy the lowest theft ratio in the whole industry.

What about the economic results. Costco’s shares grew 200% while Walmart’s grew 50% between 2003 and 2013. Recently Nasdaq wrote “shares of Costco have surged nearly 84% over the last five years, which tops the S&P 500’s roughly 73% climb. Investors should also note that Costco crushed Walmart’s 11% gains over this stretch”.

Walmart’s employees reward system is under-stimulated, with low salaries and benefits; while their stress system, the fear center, is on high alert due to a culture that emphasizes too much performance and a sense of urgency and immediate results or else. The words of Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder are a perfect example of the culture he created:

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton

Costco created a culture of contentment by putting values before outcomes. During the crisis, they could have made more money on the short term by making employees redundant, but instead they showed their loyalty to the employees by not adding additional worry.

Mastering the art and science of leadership is the solution to growth beyond success (dopamine). It is the way to ensure greater individual and company value (serotonin).

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