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. Second, they see culture as something that should be owned by the CEO and CHRO, believing it is their job to build the culture across the organization; it isn’t. Most CEO’s and CHRO’s get so overwhelmed when they think of tackling culture, that they avoid it and allow culture to be built haphazardly, which means that good people leave, and goals are not met.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 7,500 leaders that puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture. Your people will learn specific tools to own the culture on their team in the critical moments, the Last 8%, that creates culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid. When leaders feel agency and have skills to lean into the difficult, they build a high-performance culture that becomes a powerful force in your organization.

In this powerful 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 skillfully)
• How to build the culture on their team with our proprietary approach of Model & Own
• Specific tools to connect and coach their people 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.

In addition, becoming risk averse is the opposite of what is needed to operate at the speed required to adapt to the challenges organizations face today. The key word here is faster.

This focus on speed has spread to every industry and every function of a company: product development, supply chain, technology and tools, sales and marketing, digital transformation, everything. Organizations today don’t need economies of scale; they need economies of speed.

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 (to be published in Harvard Business Review in 2025) 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. What did we learn about the other 33% that can help you move at speed and be successful?
• What one thing in common the top performers in the world we have worked with have, whether Olympic athletes or Navy Seals, who need to manage their emotions in life-or-death situations, or employees and leaders at fortune 500 companies who need to deliver results in high stress Last 8% situations that allowed them to flourish in uncertain environments?
• Concrete tools to manage your brain so you can lead more effectively under pressure in your Last 8% moments
• How to create a culture on your team that enables people to operate  

Your people are facing the biggest challenge of their careers, yet most continue to rely on their IQ and technical skills to manage through it all. It’s not enough.

To survive, your organization needs to be agile in the midst of change and challenge, and see opportunities where others do not. Your team needs to learn how to work effectively with others who are, themselves, under pressure.

In this powerful program, your team members will learn:

• 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

This program is based on a 12,000-person study conducted for our New York Times best-selling book, Performing Under Pressure, which is available in 65 countries.

This session can be delivered for sales people and sales teams, focusing on helping them  harness emotional intelligence to deal with pressure, build stronger relationships with their clients, collaborate internally and deal with the setbacks and uncertainty that sales people must overcome to be successful.