Laura Gassner Otting

Demographic shifts in the workforce have led to conversations about purpose and meaning that have heretofore never been had. Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers alike are all demanding that their work matters more. And, yet, only one-third of the US workforce reports that they are actively engaged in their work. Why? Because we are using an outdated scorecard which measures the value of a job – title, money, prestige, among others – without adding in the most important part of the equation: the employee. We know that engaged workers are 22% more productive and profitable for their employers, but what recruits the employee doesn’t retain them. In this talk, 20-year executive search veteran Laura Gassner Otting teaches leaders how to unlock their employees’ engagement to not only make them limitless, but make their companies and their profits limitless too.

Many of us spend our lives pursuing a singular idea of success, one that was created for us by someone else. We give votes to those who shouldn’t even have voices and strive to go faster and faster even as we find ourselves falling further and further behind. We chase gold stars, we check all the boxes, we Lean In – and we still feel incomplete.

In this keynote, Laura Gassner Otting teaches you how to ignore the rules that created your limits, align your energies and your actions, and do work that really matters so that you can live your best life. Often described as “a kick in the ass surrounded by a warm hug,” Laura brings both tough love and wisdom and offers a no-holds-barred look at what it really takes to get out of your own way and earn your success today.

Aimed at entrepreneurs and misfits, idealists and dreamers, as well as anyone seeking to align who they are with what they do, this talk lights a fire within that catalyzes energy and excitement towards becoming the change agent needed to maximize impact.

Self-doubt and uncertainty consign great ideas to limbo, hindering your team from exploring the big opportunities that will differentiate your company and disrupt the marketplace. That changes now.

Through this interactive experience, Laura catalyzes the confidence of audience members, so that your up-and-coming talent can fully embody that aspirational state of leadership, and leave understanding what they need to do to activate that leader inside of themselves.

Together, they explore this mindset, the actions it inspires and how, together, they create a momentum of contagious confidence which can’t be reversed. Audience members leave with a physical manifestation of their own personalized roadmap directing them to find and own the very core of their leadership voice, and with the confidence to make that dream a reality.

Do you feel called to serve? Have what it takes to solve the big problems? Each time we hear of a terrible situation, in our homes, our communities, our places of work, or the world at large, we ask ourselves, “How Can I Help?” As a result, we get in the way of actually helping.

In this talk, which first debuted on the TEDxCambridge stage and shared online thousands of times, Laura implores audiences to stop asking this question and to ask a better one, one that brings a fundamental shift in how we go about solving our most vexing of problems.

This presentation reframes the question and gets entrepreneurs, staff, donors, volunteers, and investors out of their own way, avoiding the martyrdom, the burnout, and the malaise that sets in overtime with entrepreneurs and founders so that we can finally solve the big problems that plague us all. (Spoiler alert! It also works with our little everyday problems, too!)