A keynote speaker at a gathering of senior execs—whether an intimate CxO roundtable of 20 or 500 of the top VPs/SVPs/C-Level leaders of a multinational organization—can do so much more than merely deliver an educational and fully motivational keynote speech on important leadership topics.
In this article, I'll explain what I've heard from so many senior leaders about the shared challenges they face that a gathering like this can help solve: a meeting that is usually quite rare and, when you take into account time away from work, travel costs, and production costs, can be quite a significant investment.
Top Leader Events & Senior Executive Meetings: What Is At Stake?
When senior leaders and execs come together—whether a 20-person C-Level team or the top 500 managers of an enterprise—it’s a relatively rare moment in the life of an organization. It is also very costly.
Many leaders spend most of their time in their region, business unit, or function. They are no doubt focused on their own targets and the competition for resources they believe they need to deliver, which is a necessary reality in large organizations.
Each arrives at a gathering with their own assumptions and mental models about what the ambitions are for growth and change—and their own perspective and insights from the unique part of the industry that their business unit or function engages with.
With large organizations that have diversified offerings and/or activities spread across geographies and economies, this naturally leads to a diverse, even fragmented, view of the industry, the organization as a whole (rather than as parts), and the likely futures of both.
On top of the silos that naturally arise in vertical or matrix organizations, senior leaders may not know each other as people at all. They may have never met some, even most, of their peers or spent more than a few hours on Zoom with them. This is even more likely in the post-pandemic reality we find ourselves in.
Each business unit or function may have its own sub-culture, determined by the current boss as well as previous executives, as well as idiosyncratic historical factors like mergers and acquisitions, product successes and failures, and local customs.
For example, a Chinese business unit that was recently acquired and also had a controlling boss for many years may have a wildly different team climate and culture than a century-old head office in Geneva or New York. The latter may have a wildly different climate and culture to a specialist R&D lab in Israel or Silicon Valley/Beach.
This means that not only may the strategic vision lack alignment in terms of cognitive coherence—particularly if it involves innovation or business/digital transformation, which are famously nebulous concepts and mean very different things to different people—but the culture of the top team may also lack a sense of cohesion from an emotional point of view.
Both challenges can be mission-critical and block the success that the senior team aspires to deliver and is being evaluated on, both individually and collectively, by the Board.
The Issues Faced By Senior Leadership Teams
In other words, there are two major challenges that most, if not all, senior executives of larger organizations encounter that can sabotage and even scupper their business strategies and undermine and xxx the culture of the organization.
Strategic Misalignment & Cognitive Incoherence
Cognitive incoherence occurs when the beliefs of senior leaders about the past, present, and future of the business do not align fully with each other and/or fit the world as it is. This is what usually underlies misalignment in the strategic vision and plan of the top team.
In my experience of advising corporations and institutions, such misalignment and incoherence are rampant when it comes to a strategic agenda that includes significant change, real innovation, or business/digital transformation.
This is because, unlike a simple growth-through marketing-and-efficiencies strategy, innovation, major change, and transformation are widely and wildly misunderstood by senior leaders, who may never have had to lead or manage such journeys and processes in decades of career progression.
Many will simply not share the same ideas and beliefs about such challenging strategies.
If the top team had the time to unpack all their business model assumptions—beliefs about customer needs and competitor activities, operating models and finance models, access to resources, and ideas about how the future will unfold—they are unlikely to match.
This is an existential threat to the business. As Dartmouth Professor Sydney Finkelstein states in his book Why Smart Executives Fail: "Failures are caused by flawed mindsets that throw off a company’s perception of reality And delusional attitudes that keep this inaccurate reality in place." When top teams don't agree on the fundamentals of innovation and transformation, underperformance, at a minimum, is likely.
Given the radical complexity, relentless change, and ruthless uncertainty that are the hallmarks of the age we work and live in, strategic misalignments and cognitive incoherence are highly likely to emerge in top teams.
With little time to reflect alone and together, cognitive incoherence will likely creep in. This is entropy in action: the tendency of things to move toward disorder over time unless huge amounts of energy are invested. Top team events then must work hard to overcome entropy and build coherence so that they can genuinely work together as a team to deliver complex collaborative actions that drive the change they want to see.
Annual or bi-annual management gatherings offer the perfect opportunity to invest in such cognitive coherence building. And, as you will see, a keynote speaker who understands this can be part of a big win.
Top Team Cultural Fragmentation & Emotional Dissonance
Emotional dissonance and cultural fragmentation are what happens when a large group has not had the time, space, opportunity, and sometimes permission to proactively build trust, strong interpersonal relationships, a sense of shared values, and a positive team climate.
Such dissonance impacts everyone, from the SLT itself—where distrust and misunderstandings will likely lead to more internal competition and conflict that wastes critical resources and blocks innovation- and transformation-critical collaboration—to frontline workers who may struggle to feel safe, trusting, and connected with their colleagues and line managers.
Dissonance and distrust travel up and down the hierarchy, undermining the stability and security people need to perform at their best; and unleashing drama, tensions, and mayhem that drain organizations of the energy and discretionary effort needed to innovate, adapt, and transform to external change and complexity.
Annual or bi-annual management gatherings offer the perfect opportunity to invest in building more emotional resonance and cultural cohesion. But it is unlikely to be maximized and optimized just with drinks and dinner alone. Again, a keynote speaker can help.
The Opportunity for a Keynote speaker: unlock coherence and cohesion
Given this, a keynote speaker can add significant value to a senior leadership team gathering way beyond mere information and inspiration.
This is even more valuable when the aims include innovation, significant change, and business o digital transformation, given these are much not Business As Usual.
While a speaker cannot solve all the complex and tough challenges above, they can:
Boost Strategic Alignment & Cognitive Coherence
For me, this means opening up a shared understanding of an important topic, from psychological safety in the culture to what breakthrough innovation is and isn’t.
I am often briefed to help senior leaders understand what truly transformational leadership is, why it is a competing advantage, and what it looks like in action—and provide an executive team audience with a shared understanding of some of the science underlying transformational leadership.
I am also often able to provide a top team with a shared understanding of the deep code, concepts, ideal approaches to, and brain science of breakthrough innovation and business/digital transformation—as well as the key blockers and unlockers of them that senior executives must look out for.
I am often asked to create strategic alignment around what change really is and isn't, blowing open the myths that surround change—and how the top team and their reports can unlock agility and a "change mindset"—and the safety and trust needed to cultivate both.
If a speaker provides a common language, a collective grammar, and shared tools for talking about and implementing these complex topics, top leaders can then work to find even more coherence within the sessions and conversations after the headline keynote—and in the days and months after the event because they can communicate with ideas and concepts that mean the same to all.
Build Team Cohesions By Deepening Emotional Resonance & Bonding
For me, this means helping a team of leaders during the keynote to bond deeper with their colleagues, many of whom they will not know well. I want them to leave with an emotional sense of belonging and the feeling that they share more than what separates them.
I have found that the way to do this is to move from a conventional one-way expert to a user keynote to a more interactive and even experiential keynote format. I often do a 90-minute or even 2-hour experiential keynote for senior leadership teams that takes them on a mental and emotional journey. This is hard to do in 40 minutes!
They should leave feeling that they are all dealing with similar issues and challenges, that they all feel stressed and anxious to similar degrees about leading in such complexity and change (and that this is not just normal but that to pretend one doesn't feel challenged is decidedly abnormal!), and they all share the same brains and nervous systems with which to rise to their individual and collective challenges.
For me, this means that as well as inspiring and encouraging courage and conviction, it also means opening up sensitive moments of mutual belonging, common humanity, and shared vulnerability.
Ultimately, my aim is to not just expand the minds but also transform the hearts of those attending the executive meet-up... and then focus both cognitive coherence and emotional resonance on igniting change.
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