Michael Bungay Stanier
PROFILE
Michael Bungay Stanier has shaped how organizations around the world make being coach-like an essential leadership competency. His book The Coaching Habit is the best-selling coaching book of this century, with over a million copies sold and more than fifteen thousand five-star reviews on Amazon.
In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching, and in 2023, he won the coaching award from Thinkers 50, “the Oscars of management.” Michael was the first Canadian Coach of the Year, has been named a Global Coaching Guru since 2014, and was a Rhodes Scholar. His most recent book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, shows how to create psychological safety by building the Best Possible Relationship with the key people at work.
Michael is the host of the Change Signal podcast, which cuts through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change management. Michael founded Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that had helped hundreds of organizations transform from advice-driven to curiosity-led.
Michael is a compelling speaker and facilitator who combines practicality, humour, and an unprecedented degree of engagement with the audience. He’s spoken on stages and screens
around the world in front of crowds of ten to ten thousand, and his TEDx talks have been watched by more than two million people.
En route to today—and these are essential parts of his origin story—Michael knocked himself unconscious as a labourer by hitting himself in the head with a shovel, mastered stagecraft at law school by appearing in a skit called Synchronized Nude Male Modelling, and his first paid piece of writing was a Harlequin Romance-esque story involving a misdelivered letter… and called The Male Delivery.
SPEAKING TOPICS
The Five Question Leader
Participants learn how to be more coach-like. Coaching is a powerful leadership behaviour. But coaching comes with baggage: it’s difficult, it’s “HR”, it’s a black box. But what if being more coach-like could be an everyday leadership act that everyone in an organization could practice? What if we could “un-weird” coaching? In this practical and engaging session, we dig into and make real the five questions that anyone can use to stay curious longer and be more coach-like.
The New Rules of Change
The old change playbook is broken. You know this to be true. Here’s what nobody ‘fessing up about organizational change: The old playbook is broken. You know this to be true, You’ve watched smart people with good intentions create expensive disasters. Organizational change isn’t just faster and messier and more relentless than it used to be. It’s fundamentally different. Yet most of us are still navigating with yesterday’s map. If you’re leading change and feeling the pressure, what you’re missing isn’t more advice. There’s already an avalanche of trademarked methodologies, bestselling frameworks, and TED talks out there. Some terrible, much mediocre, most designed for a world that no longer exists. What’s missing is the operating system update.
How to Work with (Almost) Anyone
Participants learn how to create their best possible working relationships with almost anyone. Your happiness and success depend on your working relationships. The people you manage. Your boss. Key collaborators. Important clients. Most of us leave the health and fate of these relationships to chance. We hope for the best, and immediately get into the work. But every relationship gets dinged at some point, and when that happens, most of us don’t know what to do about it. We are resigned to the fact that this is what happens: relationships always get a little broken, or a little stale, or a little worse. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. Carry on. In this practical and interactive session, you’ll learn how to reverse that trend and build the best possible working relationship with anyone. (Well, almost anyone.) You will leave with a renewed optimism about the quality of your working relationships, a determination to actively manage them, and a plan to get things started.
