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The 26 leadership speakers below are the ones drawing the most attention going into 2026, and the reason they are in demand is measurable. Global manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, and Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report attributes most of the recent decline in overall employee engagement to that single group.
This is not a ranking. Nobody on this list is number one, and the order carries no judgment. What these 26 share is that they are actively researching, publishing, and working with organizations right now, and that each brings a specific method rather than a general enthusiasm for leadership.
TLDR
- Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.
- Manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and that decline accounts for most of the overall drop.
- Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, which makes manager capability the highest-leverage place to intervene.
- The 26 speakers below cluster around four themes: decision-making under pressure, accountability as a system, human connection at work, and talent as a leadership responsibility.
- The list is unranked and presented in random order.
Why Is Demand for Leadership Speakers Rising in 2026?
Demand is rising because the management layer is under measurable strain and organizations have run out of cheaper fixes. Gallup's 2026 data show global employee engagement at 20% in 2025, the lowest reading since 2020 and the first time it has declined in two consecutive years, at an estimated cost of $10 trillion in lost productivity, or roughly 9% of global GDP.
The decline is concentrated. Manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with a five-point drop between 2024 and 2025 alone. Individual contributor engagement held near 19% across the same period. Managers once enjoyed an engagement premium over the people they lead. That premium has nearly disappeared.
Managers used to enjoy an engagement premium at work, but they are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead.
The pressure is compounding rather than easing. Organizations are flattening, which widens spans of control, and Gallup research on span of control finds that manager engagement declines as teams get larger, though talent and training offset the effect. AI adoption adds another layer: Gallup's AI research finds that fewer than a third of U.S. employees in AI-implementing organizations strongly agree their manager actively supports their team's use of the technology.
What Makes Manager Capability the Highest-Leverage Investment?
Manager capability is the highest-leverage investment because no other single factor explains as much variation in team outcomes. Gallup's long-running analysis found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, a finding drawn from studies of 27 million employees and more than 2.5 million work units.
The selection problem compounds it. Gallup estimates that roughly one in ten people possess high natural talent to manage, and that companies miss on managerial talent in 82% of their hiring decisions. Managers who do have that talent contribute about 48% higher profit than average managers.
The financial case is equally direct. McKinsey reports that organizations with strong managers realize 21 times greater total shareholder return than those with weak managers, and its research on activating middle managers through capability building documents programs that produced a 51% increase in core problem-solving competencies among participants.
Middle managers can be the most burned-out employees in an organization, but they are often the last to get a coach.
McKinsey makes the structural version of this argument in Middle managers are the heart of your company and in the research behind Power to the Middle, which reframes the middle layer as the connective tissue between strategy and execution rather than a cost center to be thinned.
Who Are the 26 Trending Leadership Speakers for 2026?
The 26 speakers below are presented in random order. Each entry describes their background, the specific framework or method they teach, and the organizations that have booked them.
Heather Younger
Turning Care Into a Measurable Leadership Practice
Heather R. Younger, J.D., CSP, is the founder and CEO of Employee Fanatix and the creator of the Caring Leadership framework. She has facilitated more than 30,000 employee experiences and built her work on analysis of over 40,000 employee comments. Inc. named her one of its Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts.
She is the author of The Art of Caring Leadership and The Art of Active Listening. Her keynote confronts the common dismissal of care as soft, presenting it as operational, measurable, and owned by leaders, and connecting it directly to turnover, trust, and execution speed.
Booked by: United Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, CDC, Prudential, DuPont, Xerox
Arshay Cooper
First All-Black Rowing Team on Belief and Brotherhood
Arshay Cooper grew up on Chicago's West Side and joined what became the first all-Black high school rowing team in the United States. His memoir A Most Beautiful Thing was adapted into a documentary narrated by Common, and his follow-up, Let Me Be Real With You, reached number one on USA Today's bestseller list.
He co-founded the A Most Beautiful Thing Inclusion Fund, and has spoken to members of Congress, the Obama Foundation, the NBA and WNBA, and audiences at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. His leadership message centers on unity, service, and what happens when someone is given a reason to believe a different outcome is available.
Booked by: JP Morgan, Vanguard, SC Johnson, Obama Foundation, NAACP, Harvard, Stanford
Nathan Jamail
Serve Up, Coach Down: Leading From the Middle
Nathan Jamail spent two decades in sales leadership, including a tenure as an executive director at a Fortune 100 company where he built and led seven number-one producing teams across five states and Puerto Rico. He teaches in the MBA program at SMU's Cox School of Business, where he has earned more than 18 teaching excellence awards.
His Serve Up, Coach Down framework deliberately inverts conventional servant-leadership advice. Leaders in the middle, he argues, tend to defend upward and coddle downward, when the alignment that actually produces performance runs the other way.
Booked by: Fortune 100 sales organizations; SMU Cox School of Business
Lisa Bodell
Killing the Complexity That Stops Teams From Working
Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, a global innovation and simplification firm whose clients include Google, Netflix, Pfizer, SAP, AT&T, Citigroup, and the U.S. Navy. She is the bestselling author of Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins, a TED speaker, and a Forbes contributor.
Her argument is that when important work is not getting done, the problem is usually the work rather than the people. Her sessions run as live working labs rather than lectures, and audiences leave with tools to eliminate the complexity that drives burnout and stalls innovation.
Booked by: Google, Netflix, Pfizer, SAP, AT&T, Citigroup, Cisco, Merck, U.S. Navy
Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan
Former Microsoft Leader on Thriving Through the Permacrisis
Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan has spent three decades in high-velocity environments, as a business and people leader at Microsoft, as founder and CEO of The Infinite Impact Group, and as an executive coach with over 13,000 hours advising leaders at Amazon, Google, Meta, Nissan, Starbucks, and the U.S. Military. She has partnered extensively with Dr. Brene Brown on Dare to Lead.
She is candid that she learned this the hard way, normalizing the grind and wearing exhaustion like armor. Her Built to Thrive system came out of that turning point. Under sustained pressure, clarity fades and adaptive capacity erodes long before performance visibly breaks.
Booked by: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nissan, Starbucks, U.S. Military, YUM! Brands
Learn more about Lakshmi | Connect on LinkedIn
Urs Koenig
NATO Peacekeeper on Humility as a Leadership Strength
Urs Koenig signed up as a NATO peacekeeping commander and United Nations peacekeeper in his fifties, after decades as an executive coach, professor, and ultra-endurance champion. What he found there reshaped what he thought he knew about leading, and became the bestselling book Radical Humility.
His framework lays out five shifts that move leadership from heroic to humble, arguing that self-awareness and psychological safety are performance levers rather than soft concerns. He has delivered the message to teams at Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, and SHRM, and works across four continents.
Booked by: Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, SHRM, Vistage, University of Melbourne
Tiffany Dufu
Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less
Tiffany Dufu is President of the Tory Burch Foundation and the author of the bestselling Drop the Ball, which Gloria Steinem introduced. She founded The Cru, acquired by Luminary in 2023, was a launch team member of Lean In, and was President of The White House Project.
She has raised over $25 million toward the advancement of women and girls, and has been named to Entrepreneur's 100 Powerful Women. Her keynote reframes delegation and boundary-setting as the mechanism by which ambitious people get the important things done.
Booked by: Bank of America, Merrill; corporate women's leadership programs
Alison Levine
Everest Expedition Captain on Decisions Under Real Risk
Alison Levine served as team captain of the first American Women's Everest Expedition, has climbed the highest peak on every continent, and skied to both Poles. In 2008 she became the first American to traverse 600 miles across West Antarctica to the South Pole, hauling 150 pounds of gear behind her.
She holds an MBA from Duke and taught in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point. Her New York Times bestseller On the Edge carries a foreword by Mike Krzyzewski. The keynote covers decision-making when conditions refuse to cooperate.
Booked by: Fortune 500 companies, professional sports teams, World Economic Forum at Davos
Learn more about Alison | Connect on LinkedIn
Adrian Gostick
Gratitude and Recognition as Measurable Performance Levers
Adrian Gostick is the founder of The Culture Works and the author of the #1 New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work. The books have sold more than 1.5 million copies and been translated into 30 languages.
He is named on the Thinkers50 Coaches50 list and delivers roughly 60 keynotes a year. Recent material addresses workplace anxiety directly, covering how managers can hold standards while helping teams stay steady under sustained pressure.
Booked by: Cisco, Rolls-Royce, Danaher, Bank of America, American Express, Merck
Seth Yelorda
Organizational Psychologist on Leading With Clarity
Seth Yelorda is a keynote speaker, leadership coach, and organizational development consultant, and the founder of Vision Clarity Consulting in Riverside, California. He holds an MBA and a master's in organizational psychology, with doctoral work in organizational behavior.
His Lead with Clarity framework treats ambiguity as the root cause of slow execution and misalignment. His sessions focus on decision-making, ownership, and measurable results, moving teams from fragmented priorities to shared accountability. The content is built to be applied the week after the event.
Booked by: Healthcare systems, universities, nonprofits, and corporate leadership teams
Learn more about Seth | Connect on LinkedIn
Jason Greer
Labor Negotiator on What Employees Actually Need Heard
Jason Greer is the founder and president of Greer Consulting, a labor and employee relations firm in St. Louis, and is widely known as the Employee Whisperer. He has worked with organizations including Nike, Activision Blizzard, and the U.S. Army on retention and workplace investigations.
He is a bestselling author of People Matter Most and a regular commentator on CNBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. The through-line of his work is unglamorous and practical: organizations lose people long before anyone files paperwork, and the warning signs are usually visible to anyone paying attention.
Booked by: Nike, Activision Blizzard, U.S. Army
Martha McSally
Combat Fighter Pilot on Leading Under Relentless Pressure
Colonel Martha McSally (USAF, ret.) was the first American woman to fly a fighter jet in combat and the first to command a fighter squadron. Across a 26-year Air Force career she logged 325 combat hours in the A-10 and earned the Bronze Star and six Air Medals. She later served in the U.S. House and Senate, and is the author of Dare to Fly.
Her keynote inverts the usual order of leadership advice. Using her WEDGE framework, named for her fighter pilot call sign, she argues that self-leadership comes before systems and tactics, and that composure under pressure is built long before the pressure arrives.
Booked by: Defense Credit Union Council; corporate and association audiences
Learn more about Martha | Connect on LinkedIn
Ramon ‘CZ’ Colon-Lopez
Highest-Ranking Enlisted Leader on Decisive Command
Ramon Colon-Lopez was born and raised in Puerto Rico and served 33 years in the U.S. military, finishing as the fourth Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior enlisted position in the armed forces, responsible for advising on the readiness of 2.4 million personnel.
He kept notes across decades of combat and senior command in thirteen Moleskine notebooks, and those became Carnivore Leadership, an argument that leaders must be actively decisive rather than waiting for events to resolve themselves. His keynote translates high-consequence military decision-making into boardroom terms.
Booked by: Defense Credit Union Council; Fortune 500 and association audiences
Learn more about Ramon | Connect on LinkedIn
Paul Epstein
Former NFL and NBA Executive on Playing Offense
Paul Epstein spent fifteen years as a business executive inside the NFL and NBA, including work with the San Francisco 49ers, where the job was selling out stadiums in markets whose teams were losing. He is the author of The Power of Playing Offense and Better Decisions Faster, and in 2022 SUCCESS magazine named him among its thought leaders who get results.
His keynote reframes leadership as a posture rather than a title. Audiences leave with his Head-Heart-Hands decision framework and a practical playbook for what to prioritize and what to decline, built for teams operating under pressure and uncertainty.
Booked by: San Francisco 49ers; NFL and NBA franchises
Ann Hiatt
Fifteen Years Beside Bezos and Eric Schmidt
Ann Hiatt worked directly for Jeff Bezos at Amazon from 2002 to 2005, then spent twelve years at Google, working alongside Marissa Mayer and becoming the company's first Chief of Staff, reporting to Eric Schmidt. She now advises CEOs and leadership teams globally.
Her book Bet on Yourself, with a foreword by Eric Schmidt, sets out the habits and long-game strategies she observed at close range. What makes her valuable to a leadership audience is the vantage point: the view from immediately beside the founder, watching how decisions were actually made rather than how they were later described.
Booked by: Global CEO and leadership team advisory; SXSW, Valencia Digital Summit
Alison Wood Brooks
Harvard Scientist on the Hidden Mechanics of Conversation
Alison Wood Brooks is the O'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where her course TALK is one of the most popular electives on offer. Her award-winning research on the behavioral science of conversation has been cited in the New York Times and Harvard Business Review.
Her 2025 book TALK became a national bestseller. For leadership audiences the argument lands hard: every relationship is built through a sequence of conversations, and the small choices inside each one either build trust or quietly erode it.
Booked by: Harvard Business School; corporate and executive education audiences
Learn more about Alison | Connect on LinkedIn
Jay Van Bavel
Neuroscientist on Shared Identity and Team Performance
Jay Van Bavel is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU and Director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation. He has published more than 150 academic papers, including in Science, Nature, and PNAS, and ranks among the top 1% of cited researchers worldwide. He has consulted with the White House, United Nations, and World Health Organization.
He co-authored The Power of Us, winner of the APA William James Book Award. For leadership audiences the practical payoff is how to build a shared identity strong enough to drive collaboration without tipping into us-versus-them.
Booked by: Airbnb, Uber, Amazon; White House, UN, EU, WHO
Learn more about Jay | Connect on LinkedIn
Garry Ridge
WD-40's Former CEO on Cultures People Love
Garry Ridge served as CEO and Chairman of WD-40 Company for 25 years, during which market capitalization grew from roughly $250 million to $3.5 billion and employee engagement stayed above 93%. He is co-author, with Ken Blanchard, of Helping People Win at Work.
His central idea is that a learning moment, meaning any outcome that gets shared openly for everyone's benefit, replaces the fear that stops people from surfacing problems. He delivers the material with Australian candor and a willingness to describe his own failures.
Booked by: WD-40 Company; global corporate leadership audiences
Bruce Tulgan
The Undermanagement Epidemic and How to Fix It
Bruce Tulgan founded RainmakerThinking in 1993 and has worked with tens of thousands of managers at organizations from Aetna to Walmart. He is the author or co-author of 21 books, including It's Okay to Be the Boss and The Art of Being Indispensable at Work. He lectures at the Yale School of Management.
His research identified what he calls the undermanagement epidemic: most managers provide too little guidance, coaching, and correction rather than too much. His keynote pushes against a generation of advice about empowerment and autonomy.
Booked by: Aetna, Walmart, U.S. Army, YMCA
Joe McNamara
Marine Commander on Readiness Before the Pressure Hits
Joe McNamara is a former combat-decorated U.S. Marine Corps ground force commander who led Marines through multiple deployments in Afghanistan before being selected to command and develop the drill instructors at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. He later earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina.
He now runs Iron Leader Team. His Send Me philosophy of prepared, willing, and decisive, along with the Triple Threat framework of character, communicator, and competitor, is built for organizations where hesitation carries a cost. He presents leadership as responsibility rather than theory.
Booked by: College football programs; corporate and athletic leadership teams
Robyn Benincasa
Adventure Racing World Champion on Extreme Team Synergy
Robyn Benincasa is a World Champion adventure racer who has competed in close to 40 expedition-length events, including Eco-Challenge and Primal Quest, racing through the jungles of Borneo and the Himalayan peaks of Tibet. She is a Guinness World Record endurance kayaker and spent over 20 years as a full-time San Diego firefighter.
Her New York Times bestseller How Winning Works is the basis for her most requested keynote. She founded the Project Athena Foundation, which helps survivors of medical and traumatic setbacks complete endurance challenges, and was named a CNN Hero in 2014.
Booked by: Starbucks, Deloitte, Microsoft
Jody Carrington
Psychologist on Reconnecting Teams That Have Come Apart
Dr. Jody Carrington is a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and founder of Carrington and Company. She spent fifteen years as a child psychologist before turning her attention to the adults who hold everyone else. Her books Kids These Days and Teachers These Days have sold over 150,000 copies.
Her work centers on reconnection: rupture in relationships is inevitable, repair is a learnable skill nobody teaches, and teams that can repair outperform teams that avoid conflict. She delivers it with humor and considerable bluntness.
Booked by: Educators, healthcare, first responders, corporate leadership audiences
Liz Wiseman
Multipliers: Leaders Who Make Everyone Around Them Smarter
Liz Wiseman is CEO of The Wiseman Group and a former Vice President at Oracle, where she ran Oracle University over seventeen years. She wrote the New York Times bestsellers Multipliers and The Multiplier Effect, and the Wall Street Journal bestsellers Rookie Smarts and Impact Players. Thinkers50 gave her its top achievement award for leadership.
The Multipliers research identifies five disciplines that separate leaders who extract full capability from their teams from those who unintentionally suppress it, a framework now used by name inside many organizations.
Booked by: Apple, Amazon, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla
Chad Foster
Went Blind at 21, Then Closed Billion-Dollar Deals
Chad E. Foster lost his eyesight as a young adult and went on to become the first blind person to graduate from the Harvard Business School leadership program. He built the first CRM software accessible to visually impaired users, something Oracle had said was not possible.
His book Blind Ambition and the framework built from it have been delivered more than 200 times across six continents. The keynote functions as a method for executing when the path forward is not visible, which is a condition most leadership advice quietly assumes away.
Booked by: Google, Salesforce, IBM, GE, Microsoft, Caterpillar
Robert ‘Cujo’ Teschner
Fighter Pilot Debriefs as a System for Accountability
Robert Teschner is a retired F-15 and F-22 fighter pilot, a former instructor at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, and a former F-22 squadron commander. From 2004 to 2006 he served as the Air Force's subject matter expert on post-mission debriefing, authoring work the service still uses. He retired at the rank of full Colonel.
He founded VMax Group and wrote the bestselling Debrief to Win. His keynote makes an unusual argument: accountability fails in most organizations because it is treated as judgment rather than as a repeatable learning process. He gives leaders a cadence they can run the following week.
Booked by: Corporate, IT leadership, and association audiences
Learn more about Robert | Connect on LinkedIn
Mike Sarraille
Navy SEAL on Winning the War for Talent
Mike Sarraille is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer and former Recon Marine and Scout-Sniper who served 20 years in Special Operations, including with Joint Special Operations Command, and completed ten combat deployments. He is a recipient of the Silver Star, six Bronze Stars for Valor, and a Purple Heart.
He is the author of The Talent War and The Everyday Warrior, and leads Sports Illustrated's Everyday Warrior Nation. His keynote takes the assessment and selection principles used by special operations and applies them to how organizations attract, select, and develop people, reframing talent as the responsibility of every leader.
Booked by: Corporate leadership and operations audiences across industries
What Themes Connect These Speakers' Work?
Four themes recur across the 26, and they map closely onto what the workplace data identifies as the pressure points. The first is decision-making under incomplete information, which is the shared subject of the military and expedition speakers on this list.
The second is accountability treated as a system rather than a judgment, an argument made most directly through structured debriefing and recognition practice. The third is human connection at work, covering repair after conflict, conversation as a learnable skill, and the burnout that Gallup finds hitting leaders hardest: leaders report substantially more stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness than individual contributors.
Leaders are substantially more likely than individual contributors to report experiencing a lot of stress, anger, sadness and loneliness the previous day.
The fourth is talent as a leadership responsibility rather than an HR function. That theme connects to McKinsey's finding that organizations waste their middle managers by loading them with administrative work instead of coaching, and to Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis, which links business-unit engagement to profitability, productivity, turnover, and safety outcomes.
How Should You Evaluate a Leadership Speaker?
Evaluate a leadership speaker on whether they teach a transferable method, not on whether their story is compelling. A gripping narrative produces a good hour. A named framework with steps your managers can run the following week produces behavior change.
Three practical filters help. Ask what the audience will do differently on Monday, and treat a vague answer as a signal. Ask whether the speaker offers reinforcement beyond the keynote, since McKinsey's capability-building research finds that one-time interventions rarely stick and that learning works best when integrated into the flow of work. Ask whether the content matches the level in the room, because a frontline manager audience and a senior leadership offsite need different material even from the same speaker.
Finally, weigh recency. Leadership content ages quickly, and speakers actively publishing new research or books tend to bring frameworks built for current conditions rather than for the workplace of a decade ago.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this list of leadership speakers ranked?
No. The 26 speakers appear in random order and no ranking is implied or calculated. Ranking speakers against one another would require a scoring methodology that does not meaningfully exist for keynote quality.
What does "trending" mean in this context?
Trending refers to speakers whose leadership work is currently drawing attention through new books, active research, recent client work, and consistent public publishing. It is a description of present activity rather than a measure of career achievement.
Why is manager engagement declining?
Gallup's 2026 report points to organizational flattening, widening spans of control, and AI-driven restructuring as contributing factors. South Asia saw the largest regional decline at eight points in 2025, alongside a drop in the percentage of managers, suggesting employers are cutting management roles.
Can declining manager engagement be reversed?
Yes. Gallup found that within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025, nearly quadruple the global average. These organizations span every region and industry, which indicates the outcome depends on practice rather than on sector or geography.
What is the difference between a keynote and a leadership workshop?
A keynote is typically 45 to 90 minutes and is designed to shift how an audience thinks about a problem. A workshop runs longer with a smaller group and builds applied skill through exercises and participants' own scenarios. Several speakers on this list offer both formats.
How often should this kind of list be updated?
Annually is reasonable for the roster and quarterly for the underlying data. Gallup publishes State of the Global Workplace each year, and the engagement figures cited here reflect the 2026 edition covering calendar year 2025.
What Comes Next in This Series?
This is the first installment in a series covering trending speakers by topic. Subsequent lists will cover sales, artificial intelligence, company culture, and employee engagement, using the same unranked format and the same standard: speakers who are actively working, actively publishing, and teaching something specific enough to apply.
The 26 leadership speakers below are the ones drawing the most attention going into 2026, and the reason they are in demand is measurable. Global manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, and Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report attributes most of the recent decline in overall employee engagement to that single group.
This is not a ranking. Nobody on this list is number one, and the order carries no judgment. What these 26 share is that they are actively researching, publishing, and working with organizations right now, and that each brings a specific method rather than a general enthusiasm for leadership.
TLDR
- Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.
- Manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and that decline accounts for most of the overall drop.
- Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, which makes manager capability the highest-leverage place to intervene.
- The 26 speakers below cluster around four themes: decision-making under pressure, accountability as a system, human connection at work, and talent as a leadership responsibility.
- The list is unranked and presented in random order.
Why Is Demand for Leadership Speakers Rising in 2026?
Demand is rising because the management layer is under measurable strain and organizations have run out of cheaper fixes. Gallup's 2026 data show global employee engagement at 20% in 2025, the lowest reading since 2020 and the first time it has declined in two consecutive years, at an estimated cost of $10 trillion in lost productivity, or roughly 9% of global GDP.
The decline is concentrated. Manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with a five-point drop between 2024 and 2025 alone. Individual contributor engagement held near 19% across the same period. Managers once enjoyed an engagement premium over the people they lead. That premium has nearly disappeared.
Managers used to enjoy an engagement premium at work, but they are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead.
The pressure is compounding rather than easing. Organizations are flattening, which widens spans of control, and Gallup research on span of control finds that manager engagement declines as teams get larger, though talent and training offset the effect. AI adoption adds another layer: Gallup's AI research finds that fewer than a third of U.S. employees in AI-implementing organizations strongly agree their manager actively supports their team's use of the technology.
What Makes Manager Capability the Highest-Leverage Investment?
Manager capability is the highest-leverage investment because no other single factor explains as much variation in team outcomes. Gallup's long-running analysis found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, a finding drawn from studies of 27 million employees and more than 2.5 million work units.
The selection problem compounds it. Gallup estimates that roughly one in ten people possess high natural talent to manage, and that companies miss on managerial talent in 82% of their hiring decisions. Managers who do have that talent contribute about 48% higher profit than average managers.
The financial case is equally direct. McKinsey reports that organizations with strong managers realize 21 times greater total shareholder return than those with weak managers, and its research on activating middle managers through capability building documents programs that produced a 51% increase in core problem-solving competencies among participants.
Middle managers can be the most burned-out employees in an organization, but they are often the last to get a coach.
McKinsey makes the structural version of this argument in Middle managers are the heart of your company and in the research behind Power to the Middle, which reframes the middle layer as the connective tissue between strategy and execution rather than a cost center to be thinned.
Who Are the 26 Trending Leadership Speakers for 2026?
The 26 speakers below are presented in random order. Each entry describes their background, the specific framework or method they teach, and the organizations that have booked them.
Heather Younger
Turning Care Into a Measurable Leadership Practice
Heather R. Younger, J.D., CSP, is the founder and CEO of Employee Fanatix and the creator of the Caring Leadership framework. She has facilitated more than 30,000 employee experiences and built her work on analysis of over 40,000 employee comments. Inc. named her one of its Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts.
She is the author of The Art of Caring Leadership and The Art of Active Listening. Her keynote confronts the common dismissal of care as soft, presenting it as operational, measurable, and owned by leaders, and connecting it directly to turnover, trust, and execution speed.
Booked by: United Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, CDC, Prudential, DuPont, Xerox
Arshay Cooper
First All-Black Rowing Team on Belief and Brotherhood
Arshay Cooper grew up on Chicago's West Side and joined what became the first all-Black high school rowing team in the United States. His memoir A Most Beautiful Thing was adapted into a documentary narrated by Common, and his follow-up, Let Me Be Real With You, reached number one on USA Today's bestseller list.
He co-founded the A Most Beautiful Thing Inclusion Fund, and has spoken to members of Congress, the Obama Foundation, the NBA and WNBA, and audiences at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. His leadership message centers on unity, service, and what happens when someone is given a reason to believe a different outcome is available.
Booked by: JP Morgan, Vanguard, SC Johnson, Obama Foundation, NAACP, Harvard, Stanford
Nathan Jamail
Serve Up, Coach Down: Leading From the Middle
Nathan Jamail spent two decades in sales leadership, including a tenure as an executive director at a Fortune 100 company where he built and led seven number-one producing teams across five states and Puerto Rico. He teaches in the MBA program at SMU's Cox School of Business, where he has earned more than 18 teaching excellence awards.
His Serve Up, Coach Down framework deliberately inverts conventional servant-leadership advice. Leaders in the middle, he argues, tend to defend upward and coddle downward, when the alignment that actually produces performance runs the other way.
Booked by: Fortune 100 sales organizations; SMU Cox School of Business
Lisa Bodell
Killing the Complexity That Stops Teams From Working
Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, a global innovation and simplification firm whose clients include Google, Netflix, Pfizer, SAP, AT&T, Citigroup, and the U.S. Navy. She is the bestselling author of Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins, a TED speaker, and a Forbes contributor.
Her argument is that when important work is not getting done, the problem is usually the work rather than the people. Her sessions run as live working labs rather than lectures, and audiences leave with tools to eliminate the complexity that drives burnout and stalls innovation.
Booked by: Google, Netflix, Pfizer, SAP, AT&T, Citigroup, Cisco, Merck, U.S. Navy
Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan
Former Microsoft Leader on Thriving Through the Permacrisis
Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan has spent three decades in high-velocity environments, as a business and people leader at Microsoft, as founder and CEO of The Infinite Impact Group, and as an executive coach with over 13,000 hours advising leaders at Amazon, Google, Meta, Nissan, Starbucks, and the U.S. Military. She has partnered extensively with Dr. Brene Brown on Dare to Lead.
She is candid that she learned this the hard way, normalizing the grind and wearing exhaustion like armor. Her Built to Thrive system came out of that turning point. Under sustained pressure, clarity fades and adaptive capacity erodes long before performance visibly breaks.
Booked by: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nissan, Starbucks, U.S. Military, YUM! Brands
Learn more about Lakshmi | Connect on LinkedIn
Urs Koenig
NATO Peacekeeper on Humility as a Leadership Strength
Urs Koenig signed up as a NATO peacekeeping commander and United Nations peacekeeper in his fifties, after decades as an executive coach, professor, and ultra-endurance champion. What he found there reshaped what he thought he knew about leading, and became the bestselling book Radical Humility.
His framework lays out five shifts that move leadership from heroic to humble, arguing that self-awareness and psychological safety are performance levers rather than soft concerns. He has delivered the message to teams at Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, and SHRM, and works across four continents.
Booked by: Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, SHRM, Vistage, University of Melbourne
Tiffany Dufu
Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less
Tiffany Dufu is President of the Tory Burch Foundation and the author of the bestselling Drop the Ball, which Gloria Steinem introduced. She founded The Cru, acquired by Luminary in 2023, was a launch team member of Lean In, and was President of The White House Project.
She has raised over $25 million toward the advancement of women and girls, and has been named to Entrepreneur's 100 Powerful Women. Her keynote reframes delegation and boundary-setting as the mechanism by which ambitious people get the important things done.
Booked by: Bank of America, Merrill; corporate women's leadership programs
Alison Levine
Everest Expedition Captain on Decisions Under Real Risk
Alison Levine served as team captain of the first American Women's Everest Expedition, has climbed the highest peak on every continent, and skied to both Poles. In 2008 she became the first American to traverse 600 miles across West Antarctica to the South Pole, hauling 150 pounds of gear behind her.
She holds an MBA from Duke and taught in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point. Her New York Times bestseller On the Edge carries a foreword by Mike Krzyzewski. The keynote covers decision-making when conditions refuse to cooperate.
Booked by: Fortune 500 companies, professional sports teams, World Economic Forum at Davos
Learn more about Alison | Connect on LinkedIn
Adrian Gostick
Gratitude and Recognition as Measurable Performance Levers
Adrian Gostick is the founder of The Culture Works and the author of the #1 New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work. The books have sold more than 1.5 million copies and been translated into 30 languages.
He is named on the Thinkers50 Coaches50 list and delivers roughly 60 keynotes a year. Recent material addresses workplace anxiety directly, covering how managers can hold standards while helping teams stay steady under sustained pressure.
Booked by: Cisco, Rolls-Royce, Danaher, Bank of America, American Express, Merck
Seth Yelorda
Organizational Psychologist on Leading With Clarity
Seth Yelorda is a keynote speaker, leadership coach, and organizational development consultant, and the founder of Vision Clarity Consulting in Riverside, California. He holds an MBA and a master's in organizational psychology, with doctoral work in organizational behavior.
His Lead with Clarity framework treats ambiguity as the root cause of slow execution and misalignment. His sessions focus on decision-making, ownership, and measurable results, moving teams from fragmented priorities to shared accountability. The content is built to be applied the week after the event.
Booked by: Healthcare systems, universities, nonprofits, and corporate leadership teams
Learn more about Seth | Connect on LinkedIn
Jason Greer
Labor Negotiator on What Employees Actually Need Heard
Jason Greer is the founder and president of Greer Consulting, a labor and employee relations firm in St. Louis, and is widely known as the Employee Whisperer. He has worked with organizations including Nike, Activision Blizzard, and the U.S. Army on retention and workplace investigations.
He is a bestselling author of People Matter Most and a regular commentator on CNBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. The through-line of his work is unglamorous and practical: organizations lose people long before anyone files paperwork, and the warning signs are usually visible to anyone paying attention.
Booked by: Nike, Activision Blizzard, U.S. Army
Martha McSally
Combat Fighter Pilot on Leading Under Relentless Pressure
Colonel Martha McSally (USAF, ret.) was the first American woman to fly a fighter jet in combat and the first to command a fighter squadron. Across a 26-year Air Force career she logged 325 combat hours in the A-10 and earned the Bronze Star and six Air Medals. She later served in the U.S. House and Senate, and is the author of Dare to Fly.
Her keynote inverts the usual order of leadership advice. Using her WEDGE framework, named for her fighter pilot call sign, she argues that self-leadership comes before systems and tactics, and that composure under pressure is built long before the pressure arrives.
Booked by: Defense Credit Union Council; corporate and association audiences
Learn more about Martha | Connect on LinkedIn
Ramon ‘CZ’ Colon-Lopez
Highest-Ranking Enlisted Leader on Decisive Command
Ramon Colon-Lopez was born and raised in Puerto Rico and served 33 years in the U.S. military, finishing as the fourth Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior enlisted position in the armed forces, responsible for advising on the readiness of 2.4 million personnel.
He kept notes across decades of combat and senior command in thirteen Moleskine notebooks, and those became Carnivore Leadership, an argument that leaders must be actively decisive rather than waiting for events to resolve themselves. His keynote translates high-consequence military decision-making into boardroom terms.
Booked by: Defense Credit Union Council; Fortune 500 and association audiences
Learn more about Ramon | Connect on LinkedIn
Paul Epstein
Former NFL and NBA Executive on Playing Offense
Paul Epstein spent fifteen years as a business executive inside the NFL and NBA, including work with the San Francisco 49ers, where the job was selling out stadiums in markets whose teams were losing. He is the author of The Power of Playing Offense and Better Decisions Faster, and in 2022 SUCCESS magazine named him among its thought leaders who get results.
His keynote reframes leadership as a posture rather than a title. Audiences leave with his Head-Heart-Hands decision framework and a practical playbook for what to prioritize and what to decline, built for teams operating under pressure and uncertainty.
Booked by: San Francisco 49ers; NFL and NBA franchises
Ann Hiatt
Fifteen Years Beside Bezos and Eric Schmidt
Ann Hiatt worked directly for Jeff Bezos at Amazon from 2002 to 2005, then spent twelve years at Google, working alongside Marissa Mayer and becoming the company's first Chief of Staff, reporting to Eric Schmidt. She now advises CEOs and leadership teams globally.
Her book Bet on Yourself, with a foreword by Eric Schmidt, sets out the habits and long-game strategies she observed at close range. What makes her valuable to a leadership audience is the vantage point: the view from immediately beside the founder, watching how decisions were actually made rather than how they were later described.
Booked by: Global CEO and leadership team advisory; SXSW, Valencia Digital Summit
Alison Wood Brooks
Harvard Scientist on the Hidden Mechanics of Conversation
Alison Wood Brooks is the O'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where her course TALK is one of the most popular electives on offer. Her award-winning research on the behavioral science of conversation has been cited in the New York Times and Harvard Business Review.
Her 2025 book TALK became a national bestseller. For leadership audiences the argument lands hard: every relationship is built through a sequence of conversations, and the small choices inside each one either build trust or quietly erode it.
Booked by: Harvard Business School; corporate and executive education audiences
Learn more about Alison | Connect on LinkedIn
Jay Van Bavel
Neuroscientist on Shared Identity and Team Performance
Jay Van Bavel is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU and Director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation. He has published more than 150 academic papers, including in Science, Nature, and PNAS, and ranks among the top 1% of cited researchers worldwide. He has consulted with the White House, United Nations, and World Health Organization.
He co-authored The Power of Us, winner of the APA William James Book Award. For leadership audiences the practical payoff is how to build a shared identity strong enough to drive collaboration without tipping into us-versus-them.
Booked by: Airbnb, Uber, Amazon; White House, UN, EU, WHO
Learn more about Jay | Connect on LinkedIn
Garry Ridge
WD-40's Former CEO on Cultures People Love
Garry Ridge served as CEO and Chairman of WD-40 Company for 25 years, during which market capitalization grew from roughly $250 million to $3.5 billion and employee engagement stayed above 93%. He is co-author, with Ken Blanchard, of Helping People Win at Work.
His central idea is that a learning moment, meaning any outcome that gets shared openly for everyone's benefit, replaces the fear that stops people from surfacing problems. He delivers the material with Australian candor and a willingness to describe his own failures.
Booked by: WD-40 Company; global corporate leadership audiences
Bruce Tulgan
The Undermanagement Epidemic and How to Fix It
Bruce Tulgan founded RainmakerThinking in 1993 and has worked with tens of thousands of managers at organizations from Aetna to Walmart. He is the author or co-author of 21 books, including It's Okay to Be the Boss and The Art of Being Indispensable at Work. He lectures at the Yale School of Management.
His research identified what he calls the undermanagement epidemic: most managers provide too little guidance, coaching, and correction rather than too much. His keynote pushes against a generation of advice about empowerment and autonomy.
Booked by: Aetna, Walmart, U.S. Army, YMCA
Joe McNamara
Marine Commander on Readiness Before the Pressure Hits
Joe McNamara is a former combat-decorated U.S. Marine Corps ground force commander who led Marines through multiple deployments in Afghanistan before being selected to command and develop the drill instructors at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. He later earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina.
He now runs Iron Leader Team. His Send Me philosophy of prepared, willing, and decisive, along with the Triple Threat framework of character, communicator, and competitor, is built for organizations where hesitation carries a cost. He presents leadership as responsibility rather than theory.
Booked by: College football programs; corporate and athletic leadership teams
Robyn Benincasa
Adventure Racing World Champion on Extreme Team Synergy
Robyn Benincasa is a World Champion adventure racer who has competed in close to 40 expedition-length events, including Eco-Challenge and Primal Quest, racing through the jungles of Borneo and the Himalayan peaks of Tibet. She is a Guinness World Record endurance kayaker and spent over 20 years as a full-time San Diego firefighter.
Her New York Times bestseller How Winning Works is the basis for her most requested keynote. She founded the Project Athena Foundation, which helps survivors of medical and traumatic setbacks complete endurance challenges, and was named a CNN Hero in 2014.
Booked by: Starbucks, Deloitte, Microsoft
Jody Carrington
Psychologist on Reconnecting Teams That Have Come Apart
Dr. Jody Carrington is a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and founder of Carrington and Company. She spent fifteen years as a child psychologist before turning her attention to the adults who hold everyone else. Her books Kids These Days and Teachers These Days have sold over 150,000 copies.
Her work centers on reconnection: rupture in relationships is inevitable, repair is a learnable skill nobody teaches, and teams that can repair outperform teams that avoid conflict. She delivers it with humor and considerable bluntness.
Booked by: Educators, healthcare, first responders, corporate leadership audiences
Liz Wiseman
Multipliers: Leaders Who Make Everyone Around Them Smarter
Liz Wiseman is CEO of The Wiseman Group and a former Vice President at Oracle, where she ran Oracle University over seventeen years. She wrote the New York Times bestsellers Multipliers and The Multiplier Effect, and the Wall Street Journal bestsellers Rookie Smarts and Impact Players. Thinkers50 gave her its top achievement award for leadership.
The Multipliers research identifies five disciplines that separate leaders who extract full capability from their teams from those who unintentionally suppress it, a framework now used by name inside many organizations.
Booked by: Apple, Amazon, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla
Chad Foster
Went Blind at 21, Then Closed Billion-Dollar Deals
Chad E. Foster lost his eyesight as a young adult and went on to become the first blind person to graduate from the Harvard Business School leadership program. He built the first CRM software accessible to visually impaired users, something Oracle had said was not possible.
His book Blind Ambition and the framework built from it have been delivered more than 200 times across six continents. The keynote functions as a method for executing when the path forward is not visible, which is a condition most leadership advice quietly assumes away.
Booked by: Google, Salesforce, IBM, GE, Microsoft, Caterpillar
Robert ‘Cujo’ Teschner
Fighter Pilot Debriefs as a System for Accountability
Robert Teschner is a retired F-15 and F-22 fighter pilot, a former instructor at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, and a former F-22 squadron commander. From 2004 to 2006 he served as the Air Force's subject matter expert on post-mission debriefing, authoring work the service still uses. He retired at the rank of full Colonel.
He founded VMax Group and wrote the bestselling Debrief to Win. His keynote makes an unusual argument: accountability fails in most organizations because it is treated as judgment rather than as a repeatable learning process. He gives leaders a cadence they can run the following week.
Booked by: Corporate, IT leadership, and association audiences
Learn more about Robert | Connect on LinkedIn
Mike Sarraille
Navy SEAL on Winning the War for Talent
Mike Sarraille is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer and former Recon Marine and Scout-Sniper who served 20 years in Special Operations, including with Joint Special Operations Command, and completed ten combat deployments. He is a recipient of the Silver Star, six Bronze Stars for Valor, and a Purple Heart.
He is the author of The Talent War and The Everyday Warrior, and leads Sports Illustrated's Everyday Warrior Nation. His keynote takes the assessment and selection principles used by special operations and applies them to how organizations attract, select, and develop people, reframing talent as the responsibility of every leader.
Booked by: Corporate leadership and operations audiences across industries
What Themes Connect These Speakers' Work?
Four themes recur across the 26, and they map closely onto what the workplace data identifies as the pressure points. The first is decision-making under incomplete information, which is the shared subject of the military and expedition speakers on this list.
The second is accountability treated as a system rather than a judgment, an argument made most directly through structured debriefing and recognition practice. The third is human connection at work, covering repair after conflict, conversation as a learnable skill, and the burnout that Gallup finds hitting leaders hardest: leaders report substantially more stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness than individual contributors.
Leaders are substantially more likely than individual contributors to report experiencing a lot of stress, anger, sadness and loneliness the previous day.
The fourth is talent as a leadership responsibility rather than an HR function. That theme connects to McKinsey's finding that organizations waste their middle managers by loading them with administrative work instead of coaching, and to Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis, which links business-unit engagement to profitability, productivity, turnover, and safety outcomes.
How Should You Evaluate a Leadership Speaker?
Evaluate a leadership speaker on whether they teach a transferable method, not on whether their story is compelling. A gripping narrative produces a good hour. A named framework with steps your managers can run the following week produces behavior change.
Three practical filters help. Ask what the audience will do differently on Monday, and treat a vague answer as a signal. Ask whether the speaker offers reinforcement beyond the keynote, since McKinsey's capability-building research finds that one-time interventions rarely stick and that learning works best when integrated into the flow of work. Ask whether the content matches the level in the room, because a frontline manager audience and a senior leadership offsite need different material even from the same speaker.
Finally, weigh recency. Leadership content ages quickly, and speakers actively publishing new research or books tend to bring frameworks built for current conditions rather than for the workplace of a decade ago.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this list of leadership speakers ranked?
No. The 26 speakers appear in random order and no ranking is implied or calculated. Ranking speakers against one another would require a scoring methodology that does not meaningfully exist for keynote quality.
What does "trending" mean in this context?
Trending refers to speakers whose leadership work is currently drawing attention through new books, active research, recent client work, and consistent public publishing. It is a description of present activity rather than a measure of career achievement.
Why is manager engagement declining?
Gallup's 2026 report points to organizational flattening, widening spans of control, and AI-driven restructuring as contributing factors. South Asia saw the largest regional decline at eight points in 2025, alongside a drop in the percentage of managers, suggesting employers are cutting management roles.
Can declining manager engagement be reversed?
Yes. Gallup found that within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025, nearly quadruple the global average. These organizations span every region and industry, which indicates the outcome depends on practice rather than on sector or geography.
What is the difference between a keynote and a leadership workshop?
A keynote is typically 45 to 90 minutes and is designed to shift how an audience thinks about a problem. A workshop runs longer with a smaller group and builds applied skill through exercises and participants' own scenarios. Several speakers on this list offer both formats.
How often should this kind of list be updated?
Annually is reasonable for the roster and quarterly for the underlying data. Gallup publishes State of the Global Workplace each year, and the engagement figures cited here reflect the 2026 edition covering calendar year 2025.
What Comes Next in This Series?
This is the first installment in a series covering trending speakers by topic. Subsequent lists will cover sales, artificial intelligence, company culture, and employee engagement, using the same unranked format and the same standard: speakers who are actively working, actively publishing, and teaching something specific enough to apply.
