Heather McGowan

Featured Keynote Programs

Amidst the turbulence of today's rapidly changing societal, cultural, and technological landscapes, leaders face a compelling imperative to adopt a radically different approach to leadership. The question arises: should leaders prioritize the engagement of their employees or solely pursue tangible results? It's a nuanced issue with a seemingly paradoxical answer: both are essential, as they are mutually reinforcing elements required for superior performance.

Whether focusing on the future of work or simply on the task at hand, today's leaders must adeptly undertake three key responsibilities to foster high-performing teams: establishing conditions for thriving (craft culture), navigating imperfect and evolving information (decision making), and nurturing talent (build organizational resilience).

Crafting Culture involves creating an environment conducive to growth, which necessitates fostering trust, transparency, and psychological safety. In a world plagued by various distractions, from the loneliness epidemic to political polarization, recognizing shared values can alleviate tensions without delving into divisive discussions. Trust serves as the foundation for achieving optimal performance.

Leadership Decision-making, once a straightforward process for those deemed unquestioned experts relying solely on individual intelligence, now requires the adeptness to harness collective intelligence. Many leaders find themselves guiding teams composed of individuals possessing skills and knowledge they themselves lack.

Building Organizational Capacity: Previously, leaders were primarily assessed based on immediate results. However, in the current landscape characterized by a tight labor market and the departure of baby boomers, prioritizing talent development is imperative for navigating uncertainty and ensuring sustained business continuity.

Today's leaders must concurrently drive exceptional performance while fortifying organizational resilience. Through sharing insights, research, analogies, and case studies, McGowan's discourse elucidates why embracing this three-pronged approach is both the future of work and the pathway to superior performance today. 

The success of any organization hinges entirely on the performance of its people and, more specifically, their ability to collaborate. We are uncivil and increasingly dysfunctional. Our increasing polarization is robbing performance. Loneliness, spanning across all demographic groups, has been intensifying for decades, culminating in what the surgeon general deems an epidemic. As social beings, our collaborative nature has propelled us to the top of the food chain. It is now believed Homo Sapiens emerged ahead of other human ancestors not because we were stronger or faster or had larger brains, we did not, but because of our ability to both communicate and collaborate.  However, our growing isolation is reshaping our brain function. When individuals feel lonely, their amygdala triggers a "fight or flight" response and activates our sympathetic nervous system, fostering an "us" vs. "them" hostile response. Moreover, a rapid amalgamation of social, cultural, and technological shifts, though inherently apolitical, has been politicized, exacerbated by social media echo chambers that reinforce our biases, reducing our ability to trust and collaborate. In the end civility is lost and with it trust, engagement, performance, growth, and profitability. 

To navigate your organization through inevitable change cycles—whether adapting to AI, restructuring, launching new products, or simply sustaining success—it's imperative to keep your team focused and cohesive, through minimizing interruption and internal conflicts. Heather's presentation delves into the origins of our current state of distraction and division, drawing on research to pinpoint key factors contributing to distraction, while offering strategies to foster cohesion and concentration within your organization.

Note: This discussion does not revolve around politics or personal views, but rather explores the biological and cultural factors that have divided us, alongside practical leadership tools for managing an increasingly fractured and distracted workforce with techniques to lead profitable growth and performance through focus on shared vision and purpose. 

Throughout much of the history of work, talent has traditionally been gauged by physical outputs. Despite the advent of transformative technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, one undeniable truth remains: the defining characteristic of this era is the ability to harness the potential of your workforce to drive profitable growth.

Research consistently highlights the pivotal role of human capital, which contributes a staggering 90% of enterprise value in the S&P 500. While technology, particularly generative artificial intelligence, increasingly handles routine tasks, the real competitive advantage lies in the performance of augmented human talent and creativity.

We've now entered the era of human value, where humans are recognized as assets to cultivate rather than expenses to minimize. No matter how impressive technology may be, its effectiveness is ultimately determined by the humans who utilize it.

In this presentation, explore strategies for navigating and mastering this challenging yet exhilarating new landscape, where we not only learn from technology but also collaborate and innovate alongside it. This paradigm shift encourages us to view technology as a partner in our journey, rather than a mere tool to be wielded.

In today's dynamic and rapidly evolving work environment, maintaining peak performance while preventing burnout is paramount. Ignoring societal polarization does little to mitigate distractions. To help our teams stay focused and excel, it's crucial to realign them with shared values, their desired impact on the world, and a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves—offering profound opportunities for growth.

This enlightening discussion explores the art of cultivating resilient teams capable of thriving amidst adversity while prioritizing well-being.  Drawing on cutting-edge research and practical approaches, this presentation delves into the transformative potential of authentic leadership, effective communication, empathy as a performance driver, and fostering a highly performance workplace culture. Discover actionable strategies to nurture resilience through emphasizing the importance of trust-building and psychological safety, both crucial for organizational health and sustainable, profitable growth.

In an age characterized by rapid technological progress within a globally interconnected economy, traditional work functions have undergone fragmentation, automation, and technological enhancement—particularly with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence. This shift necessitates a reassessment of education systems, workforce development strategies, organizational frameworks, talent management approaches, and even individual perspectives. Whereas previously we learned to work, we now must work continually to learn.

While the pursuit of closing a perpetual skills gap has been ongoing, Heather advocates for prioritizing hiring based on behaviors that facilitate heightened performance, irrespective of given skills and talents. McGowan suggests prioritizing candidates who demonstrate an intrinsic connection to purpose, an agile learning mindset adaptable to market fluctuations, and, significantly, behaviors indicative of a continual desire for improvement and growth.

During this presentation, Heather will distill recent research findings and provide actionable insights for organizations seeking to attract, cultivate, and retain talent characterized by a propensity for continuous learning and adaptability.

The global pandemic didn’t only change where work takes place, it’s altering where work fits in our lives. The combination of a shift in leadership from Boomer and GenX to GenX and Millennial and the entrance of Generation Z into the workforce is altering the fundamental values around work.

Based upon her upcoming book, The Empathy Advantage, this talk examines labor shortages that are shifting the power from employers to employees, creating an empowered workforce. In this RUPT (Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical, and Tangled) world, leaders must make four shifts (mindset, approach, culture, and behavior) to effectively navigate a world that has transformed overnight from linear to complex.

The factory default settings have all been removed, from who works (diversity as a norm), where work takes place (home, office, anywhere, hybrid), what we do for work (exploration over routine tasks), how we lead (inspiration over fear), and why we work in the first place (purpose, values, impact).

In this talk, buckle up for a fast-paced and inspirational overview of the post-pandemic world comprising an empowered and engaged workforce.

When Heather E McGowan and Chris Shipley wrote The Adaptation Advantage (April 2020, Wiley) even they didn’t realize just how quickly their predictions would come to pass. Then the coronavirus global pandemic required an immediate and dramatic shift in work, learning, and leading. The predictions they made for the next three to five years occurred over the following three to five weeks. Overnight, companies remapped supply chains, pivoted product lines, and transformed to distributed work-from-home organizations. Entire university and school systems adopted virtual delivery exclusively, something many said they would never do.

This new normal requires a laser focus on culture, purpose, trust, and psychological safety as we embark on the largest social experiment in human history. The virus has accelerated our future of work, expedited our human transformation to digital creation, and placed an even greater burden on leaders to inspire and motivate human potential.

Even as the pandemic subsides, our new ways of working will remain. With Heather’s strategies in place, those transformations can be for the better.

Organizational leaders have far more influence over those they lead and manage than previously understood, recent research shows. The results-oriented management approach that drives productivity at the expense of workers’ mental health and safety reaches far beyond the workplace. In fact, leadership styles can affect the lives and futures of workers’ children.

A series of recent studies show that leader behavior is impacting society not just in business performance outcomes, but through the daily lives of workers and their children. It is fair to conclude that how one leads today will fundamentally affect the workforce of future generations. Given the magnitude of this impact, we must think differently about leadership. A more empathetic leadership style best serves companies, communities, societies and the formation of the next generation workforce.

In this talk Heather will share highlights from various studies on the impact of leadership on both mental health, thriving, and performance to help organizations attract, nurture, and retain leaders that create high performing teams without burn out.

Today and in the future of work, the most in-demand skill will never be the one you have now— it’s the one you can develop tomorrow. Humans have an unmatched ability to learn and adapt from living in climates previously uninhabitable to creating tools that can, at first blush, seem to outperform our abilities.

Consider the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) released about fifty years ago. When ATMs became widespread it was assumed the position of bank tellers would be outsourced to history when, in fact, the position of bank teller has grown continuously and slightly faster than the labor force as a whole. While tellers required per branch location declined, the demand for branch locations increased and along with it the demand for bank tellers.

What does all this mean? That the future of work is human. Once we escape our outdated seeking of single-disciplinary skill sets in fear of being replaced by technology, we can focus on developing our uniquely human skills, notably our ability to learn and adapt to emerging technologies. In this talk, Heather will share how the forces of atomization (jobs broken into job fragments addressable by outsourcing), automation (robots, process automation, etc.) and augmentation (humans leveraging technology to extend their potential) will work in concert constantly changing but not replacing human cognitive and physical labor.