50 Leading Keynote Speakers on Empathetic Leadership

Introduction

The leaders most often described as empathetic are not the ones who avoid hard conversations. They are the ones who have them first. This is the insight that separates the best keynote speakers on empathetic leadership from the noise, and the one that most lists on this topic quietly ignore.

Empathetic leadership is not about being nice. It is not about softening every message, validating every grievance, or treating emotional disclosure as an invitation to counsel. At its most effective, empathetic leadership is a discipline that combines genuine emotional understanding with the clarity and courage to act on what you see. The leader who understands why a team member is disengaged and then does nothing about it has not demonstrated empathy. Neither has the leader who can name their team's feelings but cannot lead them through a difficult restructure with honesty and care. It helps to distinguish between three terms often used interchangeably. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone from a distance. Empathy is putting yourself in their position and genuinely experiencing their perspective. Compassion is empathy that moves to action. The best speakers on this topic work with all three.

The urgency of this conversation is not abstract. The 2025 Businessolver State of Workplace Empathy Survey found that 96 per cent of employees believe empathy is important for a healthy workplace, yet only 50 per cent feel their organisation actually demonstrates it. A 2024 EY survey found that 90 per cent of workers said empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction and that employees who feel seen by their leaders are 1.5 times more likely to stay. These are not soft metrics. They are business fundamentals, and they are becoming more important, not less, as AI accelerates, hybrid work complicates human connection, and a workforce shaped by multiple generations demands to be led in ways that feel genuinely human. This list was deliberately built to surface voices that most readers will not yet have encountered, moving past the household names that dominate every leadership shortlist. What follows are 50 of the most valuable, credible, and actionable voices on empathetic leadership currently speaking on global stages. To explore how Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, can bring these ideas into your organisation through workshops, keynotes, and facilitated sessions, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Empathetic Leadership Matters: The Stakes

The most important argument for empathetic leadership is not that it makes people feel better. It is that it makes organisations perform better, and the evidence for this claim has now crossed the threshold from interesting research into business-critical data.

Research from Gallup across 2024 and 2025 has consistently found that the manager relationship is the single biggest driver of employee engagement, and that the core of that relationship is whether an employee feels genuinely seen and understood. Teams led by empathetic managers show 12 per cent higher productivity and 27 per cent lower turnover on average. In healthcare, compassionate leadership has been directly linked to better patient outcomes in studies from the UK National Health Service and Johns Hopkins. The arrival of AI in the workplace has intensified the stakes further. As more analytical, administrative, and creative tasks shift to automated processes, the leadership behaviours that remain distinctly human, listening, sensing, adapting, caring, are becoming the primary source of competitive advantage. Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter argue in More Human, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2025, that organisations developing leaders capable of combining technological intelligence with deep humanity will outperform those that optimise for efficiency alone.

The cost of getting this wrong is also significant. Empathy without boundaries produces leaders who absorb everyone else's pain and lose themselves in it, what the speakers on this list variously describe as empathy fatigue, compassion overload, and the empathy dilemma. The goal is not maximum empathy. It is empathy that is sustainable, boundaried, and paired with the clarity to act on what you understand. Jonno White facilitates sessions for leadership teams on exactly this balance, helping senior leaders build the team culture and have the difficult conversations that this work demands. To bring Jonno into your next offsite or leadership development day, email jonno@consultclarity.org. For more on one of the foundational elements of empathetic team culture, check out the blog post "21 Proven Ways to Build Vulnerability Based Trust" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/vulnerability-based-trust.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected against four criteria. First, genuine credibility in the field: published books, original research, named frameworks, or sustained practice working directly with leaders and organisations on empathy, human connection, and the conditions for psychological safety. Second, active contribution: each voice is currently producing content, delivering keynotes, or building programmes that represent their best current thinking. Third, geographic and disciplinary diversity: the list spans practitioners, researchers, consultants, and keynote specialists across Australia, the UK, Canada, the United States, India, continental Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Fourth, a deliberate editorial choice to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered, rather than recycling the same household names that appear on every other list on this topic.

Category 1: The Research Foundations

The most credible voices on empathetic leadership are those who have done the work to understand it scientifically, not just experienced it intuitively. This category features researchers and academics whose work provides the evidence base that practitioners, consultants, and keynote speakers around the world draw on. The common thread in this group is that empathy is not a feeling to be cultivated but a capability to be studied, developed, and measured.

1. Jamil Zaki | Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab

Jamil Zaki is a full Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, where he has spent over a decade studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning empathy in human behaviour. His work directly challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in the leadership conversation: that empathy is a fixed personality trait you either have or you do not.

In his book Hope for Cynics, published in 2024, Zaki argues that cynicism rather than lack of empathy is the greatest organisational threat, and that leaders can train themselves to resist its pull even in difficult environments. His Harvard Business Review article on sustainable empathy has become required reading in leadership development programmes globally, and his work with SAP through a multi-cohort manager development programme translates decades of neuroscience into practical leadership behaviours. He is one of the few researchers in this space who genuinely moves between academic rigour and corporate relevance without losing either.

2. Rasmus Hougaard | Potential Project

Rasmus Hougaard is the founder and managing partner of Potential Project, a global leadership development firm working with IKEA, Accenture, and Unilever, and was nominated by Thinkers50 as one of the eight most important leadership thinkers in the world.

In Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, co-authored with Jacqueline Carter and published by Harvard Business Review Press, Hougaard argues that compassion without wisdom produces leaders who are caring but ineffective, while wisdom without compassion produces leaders who are effective but corrosive. His most recent book More Human, also from Harvard Business Review Press and published in 2025 and co-authored with Jacqueline Carter, argues that AI acceleration makes human leadership capabilities more, not less, commercially valuable. He writes for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fortune, and coaches C-suite executives across every continent.

3. Jacqueline Carter | Potential Project

Jacqueline Carter is a Senior Partner at Potential Project and co-author with Rasmus Hougaard of both Compassionate Leadership and The Mind of the Leader, both published by Harvard Business Review Press, as well as More Human published in 2025.

Where Hougaard leads with the research and strategic case, Carter brings the practical application lens, drawing on twenty years helping Cisco, Disney, Accenture, and the Royal Bank of Canada navigate the human challenges large-scale change produces. Her keynotes combine data from Potential Project's research across thousands of leaders in nearly 100 countries with grounded stories of what compassionate leadership looks like in ordinary leadership moments. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Leader to Leader, and is one of the most informed and practically useful speakers on compassionate leadership globally.

4. Dolly Chugh | NYU Stern

Dolly Chugh is the Jacob B. Melnick Term Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias, a book that addresses the gap between a leader's intentions and their actual impact on the people they lead.

Her research on "bounded ethicality" explores why well-intentioned leaders still create workplaces where people do not feel seen or understood, and what specific behavioural changes can close the gap. This is one of the most practically useful research frameworks for organisations wanting to move beyond empathy as aspiration toward empathy as measurable behaviour change. She is an active LinkedIn contributor and a sought-after speaker on the intersection of empathy, ethics, and everyday organisational behaviour at scale.

5. Khalil Smith | NeuroLeadership Institute

Khalil Smith is a researcher and practitioner at the NeuroLeadership Institute, specialising in the application of neuroscience to the practical challenges of organisational leadership, with a specific focus on the neurological foundations of trust, belonging, and empathetic communication.

His contribution to the empathetic leadership conversation is the scientific underpinning of why empathy is not just morally desirable but neurologically necessary for teams to perform at their best. His frameworks translate brain-science findings into leadership behaviours that can be practised and measured, making him a particularly valuable voice for data-driven organisations that need the business case, not just the human case, for investing in empathetic leadership culture.

Category 2: The Empathy Architects

These are the speakers and authors who have built the most widely used frameworks, models, and tools for understanding and practising empathy at work. Their names are attached to the specific concepts and methodologies that other practitioners draw on, and their work has shaped the vocabulary of the current global conversation. Meeting these voices is how most leaders first encounter empathetic leadership as a named and structured discipline.

6. Mimi Nicklin | Empathy Everywhere

Mimi Nicklin is the world's most visible keynote speaker specifically dedicated to empathy as a leadership skill. As founder and CEO of Empathy Everywhere, she has reached over five million people through keynotes, training programmes, and her three bestselling books including Softening the Edge and The Connection Prescription.

Ranked the number one EQ keynote speaker in the USA for 2026 and number one Workplace Wellbeing Leader in Malaysia on LinkedIn, she has shared stages with Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Steven Bartlett, and appeared live on the BBC to an audience of 85 million viewers. Her Listening-Led Leadership framework translates empathy's commercial value into a named, measurable leadership discipline. She argues that organisations lose approximately nine trillion US dollars annually to the empathy gap, and that the most scalable solution is not cultural programmes but individual leader behaviour change, trained systematically across leadership tiers.

7. Maria Ross | Red Slice

Maria Ross is the author of The Empathy Edge and The Empathy Dilemma, and the host of The Empathy Edge podcast, featuring over 200 episodes with executives, researchers, and practitioners across every dimension of empathy in leadership.

Her Five Pillars of Effective Empathetic Leadership, self-awareness, self-care, clarity, decisiveness, and joy, provide a structured framework for leaders balancing genuine care with high performance, accountability, and personal boundaries. The Empathy Dilemma, published in 2024, won the 2025 Nautilus Book Award Silver in Business and Leadership. She is a TEDx speaker, LinkedIn Learning instructor with courses on leading with empathy, and a keynote speaker for organisations including Salesforce and The New York Times.

8. Shola Kaye | Shola Kaye Ltd

Shola Kaye is an award-winning keynote speaker and author based in the UK whose work sits at the intersection of empathy, inclusive leadership, and brave communication. She is the creator of The Inclusion Launchpad and the E.Q. Accelerator, and her keynote From Empathy to Equity addresses the gap between leaders who feel empathy and leaders who act on it in ways that change the team's experience.

A LinkedIn Learning instructor, TEDx speaker, and communications specialist with a background in IT consultancy and research at the US Centers for Disease Control, she has been cited in Forbes and appeared on the BBC. Her work is particularly powerful for organisations that have done the empathy conversation and are now asking what actually changes as a result.

9. Justin Bariso | Independent

Justin Bariso is the author of EQ Applied: The Real-World Guide to Emotional Intelligence, one of the most widely read practical guides to emotional intelligence for working leaders, and a columnist for Inc. magazine.

Based in Germany and writing for global audiences, he brings a European perspective to a conversation dominated by North American voices. His LinkedIn content regularly attracts tens of thousands of engagements, making him one of the most effective translators of complex psychological concepts into leadership language that resonates with busy practitioners. He is one of the clearest voices on the difference between performing empathy as a social skill and actually developing it as a leadership capability.

10. Krister Ungerboeck | Talk SHIFT Movement

Krister Ungerboeck is an award-winning former CEO, keynote speaker, and the author of 22 Talk SHIFTs, a framework exploring how specific word choices in leadership communication change outcomes.

His Talk SHIFT framework is built on the insight that most leaders damage their relationships not because they lack compassion but because they use language that inadvertently signals distance, judgement, or blame. A former CEO of one of the world's largest family-owned software companies in event management software, he has lived the tension between results-oriented leadership and human-centred communication from the inside. His work is particularly resonant for leaders in high-accountability environments who know empathy matters but are uncertain how to deploy it without appearing to lower their standards.

Category 3: The Human Connection Practitioners

These speakers have built their entire professional practice around the science and practical reality of human connection in organisational life. Their authority comes from years of doing the work inside organisations, not from observing it from a distance. They are the voices organisations bring in when the empathy conversation needs to move from concept to capability, from the keynote to the Tuesday morning meeting.

11. Liesel Mindrebo Mertes | Handle with Care Consulting

Liesel Mindrebo Mertes is the founder of Handle with Care Consulting and one of the most distinctive voices on workplace empathy in the practitioner space. Her authority on the topic is rooted in lived experience: following the death of her infant daughter Mercy Joan, she emerged with a clear-eyed understanding of what people need when they bring disruption and grief into the workplace, and what leaders typically get wrong.

Her keynotes focus on the specific moments where empathy matters most, when a team member returns after bereavement, when restructure creates uncertainty that leaders cannot resolve, when the gap between what someone needs and what a manager knows how to offer becomes a source of further harm. She is a certified holistic lifestyle coach with an MBA from Indiana University, and her most recent keynote on empathy as the leadership skill of 2026 is drawing strong bookings across North American conference circuits.

12. Michael Lee Stallard | ConnectionCulture Group

Michael Lee Stallard is co-founder of ConnectionCulture Group and the author of Connection Culture: The Competitive Advantage of Shared Identity, Empathy, and Understanding at Work and Fired Up or Burned Out.

His Connection Culture framework identifies three types of workplace connection: being valued as a person, having a voice in decisions, and sharing vision and purpose. He demonstrates through research how the absence of any one of these creates disengagement and turnover, and how leaders can build all three deliberately. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Fox Business News, and he is particularly sought after for healthcare, corporate, and education leadership audiences navigating post-pandemic disconnection in hybrid environments.

13. Sara Ross | BrainAMPED

Sara Ross is a keynote speaker and bestselling author whose book Dear Work, Something Has to Change was the foundation of her pioneering multi-year study on workplace vitality, exploring the intersection of organisational culture, emotional intelligence, and energy management.

She was named a 2023 Woman of Influence by SUCCESS Magazine and is a Global Gurus Top 30 Motivational Speaker for 2025. Her work specifically addresses the conditions under which leaders can sustain both empathy and performance without burning out themselves or their teams. She is the founder and Chief Vitality Officer of BrainAMPED, a leadership research firm, and is sought after for keynotes and workshops across corporate leadership audiences at organisations including Microsoft, Deloitte, and PepsiCo.

14. Liane Davey | 3COze Inc.

Liane Davey is a team effectiveness expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track.

Her work addresses one of the most important tensions in empathetic leadership: the relationship between empathy and productive conflict. Davey argues that the most empathetic leaders are not those who avoid conflict but those who understand that healthy, boundaried disagreement is itself an act of care for the team and the work. She calls the avoidance of necessary conflict "conflict debt," and her frameworks are widely used in executive team development. She writes for Harvard Business Review and is a regular contributor to Forbes.

15. Karin Hurt | Let's Grow Leaders

Karin Hurt is the co-founder of Let's Grow Leaders and co-author of multiple books including Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates, one of the most consistently practical voices on how leaders can build psychological safety through specific communication habits.

Her work specifically addresses what she calls the "lost voices" problem, the many ways in which leaders inadvertently signal that honesty is unwelcome, and how to create the conditions in which teams bring their best thinking rather than the answer they believe the boss wants to hear. She is a prolific and engaging LinkedIn contributor and a sought-after keynote speaker for corporate leadership audiences and manager development programmes globally.

16. David Dye | Let's Grow Leaders

David Dye is the co-founder of Let's Grow Leaders alongside Karin Hurt, and co-author of their books on leadership communication, innovation culture, and the habits of leaders who produce both psychological safety and high performance.

His work focuses particularly on the leadership behaviours that produce what he and Hurt call "courageous cultures," environments where both empathy and accountability are present, where people feel safe enough to raise problems and trusted enough to solve them. Together, Hurt and Dye have built one of the most coherent and practically useful bodies of work in the empathetic leadership space, and they are particularly valuable for mid-level managers and team leaders developing their practice within real organisational constraints.

Category 4: The Inclusion and Belonging Voices

Empathetic leadership and inclusive leadership are not the same thing, but they are inseparable in practice. These speakers work at the intersection of both, and they make the specific, often uncomfortable argument that empathy without awareness of identity, power, and systemic context is incomplete at best and harmful at worst. Their work is essential for organisations where the empathy conversation has stalled because it has stayed too safe.

17. Wema Hoover | Independent

Wema Hoover is a global executive and former head of diversity, equity, and inclusion for Google, Sanofi, and Pfizer, bringing a rare combination of corporate executive experience and DEI strategic expertise to the empathetic leadership conversation.

Her keynotes address the specific challenge of empathetic leadership in diverse, global organisations, where empathy is complicated by cultural difference, power dynamics, and the historical weight of exclusion. She argues that empathy without awareness of identity and power is incomplete, and that the most empathetic leaders are those who can hold both the emotional truth of an individual and the systemic context that shapes it. She is an active LinkedIn contributor and particularly sought after for global organisations navigating cultural transformation.

18. Sal Naseem | Independent

Sal Naseem is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and public servant based in the UK who was recognised by Favikon in 2025 as the second most influential voice in the world on diversity and inclusion on LinkedIn, and as a Top 10 Global Voice on Anti-Discrimination in 2024.

His book True North: A Story of Racism, Resilience and Resisting Systems of Denial is a deeply personal account of navigating institutional barriers with moral courage. He has been named by Diversity PowerList among the 50 Most Influential Changemakers in the UK and has been featured on BBC Panorama. His keynotes on moral courage and hopeful leadership speak directly to the experience of leaders who must hold care for both the people they lead and the principles they refuse to compromise.

19. Michelle Silverthorn | Inclusion Nation

Michelle Silverthorn is the founder and CEO of Inclusion Nation and the author of Authentic Diversity: How to Change the Workplace for Good, a keynote speaker whose work addresses the practical steps organisations take, or fail to take, to move from empathising about difference to actually changing the lived experience of their teams.

She argues that leaders who feel empathy about inequality but do not change systems are engaged in a form of performative care that ultimately damages trust rather than building it. Her frameworks for inclusion are grounded in lived experience as a Black immigrant woman navigating North American corporate life, and in research on what actually changes exclusionary cultures. She is particularly sought after by organisations that have done the values work and the conversation work and are now asking what they do differently.

20. Nadia Nagamootoo | Avenir Consulting

Nadia Nagamootoo is the founder of Avenir Consulting in the UK and a keynote speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of inclusion, empathetic leadership, and sustained organisational change.

Her practical consulting background, working with organisations to build cultures of belonging rather than simply conducting diversity audits, gives her a grounded perspective on what empathetic leadership looks like when it has been systematically developed across a leadership tier rather than left to individual personality. She is an active LinkedIn contributor on inclusion and empathetic leadership, and her work is particularly relevant for HR leadership audiences and senior leaders wanting to build empathy into their leadership systems rather than hoping it emerges organically.

21. Mariana Atencio | Independent

Mariana Atencio is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, author of Perfectly You: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your World, and one of the most compelling voices on empathy, authentic leadership, and the experience of difference in North American corporate and public life.

Born in Venezuela and navigating a career in US media, she brings a lived specificity to the empathetic leadership conversation that most speakers on this topic lack. Her keynotes address how leaders can genuinely create belonging for team members whose experience of the organisation is shaped by factors the leader has never personally navigated. She is an active LinkedIn contributor and a sought-after speaker for diversity summits, HR leadership events, and corporate conferences where empathy and authentic leadership intersect.

22. Hamza Khan | Independent

Hamza Khan is a keynote speaker, author of Leadership, Reinvented: How to Foster Empathy, Servitude, and Influence in the New Age of Management, and one of Canada's most prominent voices on empathetic leadership for the millennial and Gen Z workforce.

His work addresses how the leadership expectations of younger workers have fundamentally changed what empathy looks like in practice, not as a generational grievance but as a structural leadership challenge. He is an active LinkedIn contributor with a substantial following built through original content on empathetic management, purpose-driven culture, and what it means to lead people who expect to be seen as whole human beings. He is sought after for corporate keynotes, HR conferences, and university leadership programmes.

Category 5: The Research-Backed Practitioners

These speakers combine academic or research credentials with active practitioner experience, making them some of the most rigorously grounded voices in the keynote circuit. They speak from evidence and from implementation, having both studied what works and personally tried to make it work inside real organisations. Their work is particularly valuable for audiences that require the intellectual case as well as the emotional one.

23. Claire Yorke | Deakin University

Claire Yorke is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security at Deakin University in Australia and the author of Empathy in Politics and Leadership: The Key to Transforming our World, published by Yale University Press in October 2025.

Her work examines how empathy functions not just in organisational settings but in political leadership, international relations, and the governance of complex global systems. She began her career in the Houses of Parliament before working at Chatham House, subsequently served as a Marie Curie Fellow in Denmark and a Kissinger Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. She brings to the empathetic leadership conversation a perspective on what it means to lead empathetically when the stakes extend beyond team performance to national policy and international diplomacy.

24. Danielle Harlan | Center for Advancing Leadership and Human Potential

Danielle Harlan is the founder and CEO of the Center for Advancing Leadership and Human Potential, an organisation focused on developing the specific leadership capacities that produce inclusive, high-performing cultures, with empathy as a central capability.

Her keynotes and research address what she calls the "leadership gap," the distance between the leadership capability organisations say they need and the capability their leaders actually demonstrate under pressure. Her frameworks connect empathetic leadership behaviours to measurable outcomes: reduced turnover, increased psychological safety scores, improved decision quality, and higher innovation rates. She is an active LinkedIn contributor and sought after for executive leadership programmes and talent development conferences.

25. Vlatka Hlupic | Management Shift Solutions

Vlatka Hlupic is a Professor at Hult International Business School and the author of The Management Shift and Humane Capital, two books that make the case for a fundamental shift in how organisations are led, from command-and-control models to empathetic, purpose-driven, and intrinsically motivating approaches.

Her Management Shift Solutions consulting practice works with organisations to develop what she calls Emergent Leadership, a style characterised by empathy, trust, autonomy, and purposeful collaboration. Based in the UK with a global reach across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region, her work is particularly relevant for leadership teams navigating the transition from traditional hierarchical management to the more fluid, human-centred models that retain talent in a post-pandemic workforce.

26. Raj Sisodia | Tecnologico de Monterrey

Raj Sisodia is a co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement and the FEMSA Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise at Tecnologico de Monterrey. He is the co-author of Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose with Jagdish N. Sheth, named one of the ten best business books of 2007, and the co-author of Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business with John Mackey.

His research across hundreds of globally successful companies demonstrates that organisations led by genuinely empathetic leaders consistently outperform their peers on virtually every commercial metric over the long term. His work provides a particularly compelling bridge between the "soft" conversation about empathetic leadership and the language of operational excellence and measurable performance, making him a valuable voice for business audiences sceptical that caring about people is compatible with delivering strong financial results.

27. Ryan Niemiec | VIA Institute on Character

Ryan Niemiec is Education Director at the VIA Institute on Character and one of the world's leading authorities on character strengths in positive psychology, with a specific focus on how strengths including the empathy-related virtues of humanity and kindness can be systematically developed in leaders and teams.

His work provides a research-based framework for building empathetic leadership not as a communication technique but as a character strength that can be measured, developed, and applied in context. He is the author of multiple books including Mindfulness and Character Strengths, and the creator of numerous positive psychology programmes used in organisations, healthcare settings, and leadership development contexts globally.

28. Subir Chowdhury | ASI Consulting Group

Subir Chowdhury is the chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group and one of the world's leading quality management and leadership improvement consultants, having worked with organisations ranging from General Motors to the US Department of Defense. He was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2023.

His book The Difference: When Good Enough Isn't Enough makes the case that the single greatest driver of organisational performance is what he calls a "caring mindset," the combination of straightforwardness, thoughtfulness, accountability, and resolve that characterises leaders who produce lasting results. Chowdhury's work provides a bridge between the "soft" conversation about empathetic leadership and the language of operational excellence and measurable performance, making him a particularly valuable voice for manufacturing, logistics, and corporate audiences sceptical of leadership development as a category.

Category 6: Future of Work and AI Voices

The empathetic leadership conversation has collided with the AI conversation in ways that are reshaping what it means to lead people. As automated processes take over more of the cognitive and analytical work of organisations, the human capacities that remain distinctly irreplaceable, listening, understanding, caring, adapting, are becoming strategically central rather than peripherally nice-to-have. These speakers are at that intersection, and their work is increasingly relevant for any organisation asking what distinguishes human leadership from algorithmic management.

29. Heather E. McGowan | Independent

Heather E. McGowan is a future-of-work strategist and keynote speaker named by Forbes as one of the Top Futurists globally and by Inc. magazine as one of the Top Management and Leadership experts.

Her book The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce, co-authored with Chris Shipley, argues that the post-pandemic workforce has fundamentally shifted its relationship to work and that leaders who build intrinsic motivation, create genuine belonging, and demonstrate empathy as a strategic discipline will outperform those who rely on extrinsic pressure and authority. She has delivered keynotes to audiences at Google, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, Mastercard, and FedEx, and is one of the clearest voices on how AI acceleration makes human leadership capabilities more commercially valuable, not less.

30. Sophie Wade | Flexcel Network

Sophie Wade is a future-of-work strategist, keynote speaker, and the author of Empathy Works: The Key to Competitive Advantage in the New Era of Work, making the direct commercial case for empathy as the central capability for leaders navigating the empowered, multi-generational, globally distributed workforce of the 2020s.

She is a LinkedIn Learning instructor with courses on empathetic leadership and emotional intelligence completed by over half a million learners globally, and she hosts the Transforming Work with Sophie Wade podcast. Her perspective is particularly valuable for technology companies and global enterprises navigating the human complexity of distributed teams, where empathy cannot rely on physical presence and must instead be demonstrated through the quality of attention, communication, and follow-through.

31. Erica Dhawan | Independent

Erica Dhawan is the author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance, one of the most cited books on empathetic communication in digital and hybrid work contexts.

Her research on digital body language identifies how the absence of physical cues in written, video, and asynchronous communication leads to systematic misunderstanding, distrust, and exclusion, and how empathetic leaders counteract this. She has been named by Thinkers50 as one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world. Her keynotes for corporate audiences across technology, finance, healthcare, and professional services translate the empathy conversation into the specific communication habits of leaders who work primarily through screens.

32. Liz Fosslien | Independent

Liz Fosslien is an author and illustrator whose work makes the science of emotions in the workplace accessible, visually memorable, and immediately actionable for leaders who find the traditional leadership development genre difficult to engage with.

Her books No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, both co-authored with Mollie West Duffy, have reached audiences who would not typically engage with leadership development literature. She is one of the most effective popularisers of empathetic leadership ideas in the current landscape, translating research on emotional intelligence, empathy, and psychological safety into beautifully designed, story-rich experiences that genuinely shift how leaders think about their emotional relationship to work.

33. Mollie West Duffy | Independent

Mollie West Duffy is the co-author, with Liz Fosslien, of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings, two of the most widely read books on emotional intelligence and empathetic leadership for working professionals.

She brings an organisational design perspective to the empathetic leadership conversation, grounded in her work at IDEO and her understanding of how culture, systems, and incentives shape whether leaders can actually demonstrate the empathy they theoretically possess. Her work is particularly valuable for organisational designers, HR leaders, and culture practitioners wanting to understand the structural conditions under which empathetic leadership thrives or fails, not just the individual behaviours of leaders themselves.

34. Jennifer Moss | Work Better Institute

Jennifer Moss is a workplace mental health researcher, journalist, and the author of The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It, one of the most important books on the intersection of empathetic leadership and employee wellbeing published in the last decade. She was named the 2026 Golden Gavel Honoree by Toastmasters International.

Her work demonstrates that most corporate wellness programmes fail because they address the symptoms of burnout rather than the leadership conditions that cause it, and that empathetic leaders who address workload, autonomy, fairness, community, and values at a systemic level are the most effective burnout prevention mechanism available to any organisation. She is based in Canada and is a sought-after keynote speaker for healthcare, technology, and corporate leadership audiences globally.

Category 7: Courage and Communication

Empathetic leadership is, at its core, a communication discipline. The leaders who demonstrate it most consistently are those who have developed specific habits of language, attention, and courage that allow them to be genuinely present with the people they lead. These speakers have built their practice around those specific habits, and their work is among the most practically actionable on this list. For more on the communication practices that build high-trust, empathetic teams, see the blog post "25 Best Emotional Intelligence Keynote Speakers (2026)" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/emotional-intelligence-keynote-speakers.

35. Timothy Clark | LeaderFactor

Timothy Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor and the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, one of the most widely cited frameworks in the current conversation about leadership, inclusion, and empathetic culture.

His four-stage model traces the development of psychological safety from inclusion safety through learner safety, contributor safety, and challenger safety, providing one of the most structured and practically applicable maps of what empathetic leadership actually produces in team behaviour. He is a LinkedIn Top Voice, an Oxford-trained social scientist, and a prolific content creator, and his frameworks are being used in leadership development programmes across hundreds of organisations globally.

36. Petra Velzeboer | PVLZ Consulting

Petra Velzeboer is a CEO, keynote speaker, and author of Begin with You, a book on mental health and wellbeing for leaders that addresses the most personal dimension of empathetic leadership: whether leaders can extend genuine empathy to themselves before they attempt to extend it to others.

Her background gives her work a distinctive authority: she grew up in a cult, which provides a particularly clear-eyed understanding of what it means when an organisation's culture is built on compliance and fear rather than genuine care and trust. Her keynotes address burnout prevention, compassion fatigue, and the specific leadership practices that either deplete or replenish a leader's emotional capacity. She is based in the UK and delivers globally, and is one of the clearest voices on why sustainable empathetic leadership requires leaders to attend to their own wellbeing as a prerequisite.

37. Christopher D. Connors | Independent

Christopher D. Connors is a bestselling author, emotional intelligence expert, and keynote speaker whose books The Champion Leader and Emotional Intelligence for the Modern Leader provide practical frameworks for translating EQ research into daily leadership behaviour.

His keynotes combine emotional intelligence science with intensely practical application, equipping leaders with specific, repeatable tools for managing their own emotions under pressure, reading the room in high-stakes situations, and communicating in ways that build trust rather than erode it. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies and has been described by clients as one of the most actionable EQ speakers available for leadership teams that need to move from theory to behaviour in a single session.

38. Erin Thorp | Inside Out Empathy

Erin Thorp is the author of Inside Out Empathy and a keynote speaker based in Canada whose work addresses the most personal dimension of empathetic leadership: the leader's own emotional experience.

Her civil engineering background combined with an Associate Certified Coach credential through Integral Coaching Canada gives her work a distinctive credibility with technically trained leaders, scientists, and engineers who have been told that their emotions are professionally irrelevant. Thorp challenges this directly, demonstrating that the leaders most able to understand and respond to the emotions of others are those who have done the inner work to understand their own. Her content specifically addresses how five generations in a diverse workforce require leaders to develop an emotional range they were never trained for.

39. Steve Farber | Extreme Leadership Institute

Steve Farber is the founder of the Extreme Leadership Institute and the author of The Radical Leap, The Radical Edge, and Greater Than Yourself, books that make the case for love as the foundational principle of extraordinary leadership.

Farber uses the word "love" in the leadership context deliberately and provocatively, arguing that the leaders who produce the most extraordinary results are those who genuinely and actively care about the people they lead and the work they do together. His framework of Extreme Leadership is built on four principles: cultivate love, generate energy, inspire audacity, and provide proof. He is one of the senior voices in the current empathetic leadership conversation, having built his practice over two decades, and his work is particularly powerful for audiences sceptical of the softer dimensions of leadership who need the concept reframed in terms of courage and commitment.

40. Chester Elton | The Culture Works

Chester Elton is co-founder of The Culture Works and co-author, with Adrian Gostick, of multiple bestselling books on recognition and workplace culture including Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results and Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done.

His work on gratitude-led culture provides one of the most practical and research-grounded bridges between the empathetic leadership conversation and the daily habits of leadership. He and Gostick have surveyed more than a million workers across dozens of industries and found consistently that the single most reported cause of low engagement and high turnover is that employees do not feel genuinely valued by the leaders above them. His frameworks are specifically designed to help leaders demonstrate the kind of consistent, specific, personalised recognition that makes people feel seen.

41. Steph Clarke | Independent

Steph Clarke is a keynote speaker, facilitator, and learning and development professional based in the UK whose work focuses on human-centred leadership, empathy, and the conditions that allow people to do their best work.

Her content on LinkedIn addresses the practical, day-to-day application of empathetic leadership in real organisations, making her one of the more grounded and practitioner-oriented voices in the current conversation. She works with organisations navigating the gap between empathy as a stated leadership value and empathy as a lived leadership behaviour, and her facilitation experience makes her particularly effective in helping leadership teams develop not just the language of empathetic leadership but the habits and systems that sustain it over time.

42. Beth Kanter | Independent

Beth Kanter is a nonprofit leadership consultant, author, and keynote speaker who is the co-author of The Happy, Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact Without Burnout and Well-Being in the Nonprofit Workplace.

Her work on empathetic leadership is grounded in the specific context of mission-driven organisations, where leaders are often running on values and purpose but running out of energy and care. She demonstrates through her research and facilitation that empathetic leadership in nonprofit and social sector contexts requires the same structural and cultural conditions as in corporate environments, including clear boundaries, workload management, and leaders who extend the same care to themselves that they extend to their teams. She is an active LinkedIn contributor with a substantial audience in the nonprofit and social impact leadership space.

Category 8: The Globally Diverse Voices

The empathetic leadership conversation is fundamentally global, but most of the resources covering it are not. This final category features speakers who bring perspectives, cultural experiences, and disciplinary contexts that most lists on this topic entirely ignore. Their presence on this list is not a gesture toward diversity. It is a recognition that some of the most important thinking about empathetic leadership is happening in contexts that the dominant anglophone conversation has not yet noticed.

43. Simerjeet Singh | Cutting Edge Learning Systems

Simerjeet Singh is one of India's most prominent international keynote speakers, with over 400 corporate clients globally, a YouTube audience of over 1.6 million subscribers, and keynote experience across Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Las Vegas, and dozens of other markets. A 2025 BW Businessworld feature described him as one of the most impactful Indian leadership voices reaching global stages.

His work on leadership empathy addresses a specific challenge underserved in the Western-dominated conversation: how leaders navigate empathy in high-context cultures where emotional expression is governed by different norms, where hierarchy shapes what people feel safe to say, and where the assumption that vulnerability equals strength requires cultural adaptation. His keynote on Emotional Intelligence for Leaders has been delivered to thousands of professionals across technology, banking, hospitality, and education globally.

44. Rene Carayol | Carayol Associates

Rene Carayol is one of the UK's most recognised keynote speakers and leadership advisers, a former board director of IPC Media and Pepsi, and a consistent voice on the commercial case for empathetic, strengths-based, and inclusive leadership over two decades.

His Spike framework, which identifies and amplifies the distinctive strengths of individual leaders rather than trying to fix their weaknesses, is one of the most widely cited leadership development models in UK corporate life. His keynotes have been delivered to senior leadership audiences across the UK, Africa, and the Middle East, and he is one of the voices on this list who has done the most sustained work connecting empathetic leadership to the specific cultural contexts and organisational norms of non-Western business environments.

45. Monika Chutnik | Independent

Monika Chutnik is a cross-cultural leadership expert and keynote speaker based in Poland with a global reach across European and multinational organisations. She works at the intersection of diversity, intercultural leadership, and empathy, addressing the specific challenges that arise when leaders are expected to demonstrate empathy across cultural contexts that define emotional expression, directness, hierarchy, and trust differently.

Her work is particularly valuable for multinational organisations navigating leadership development across diverse cultural contexts, where a one-size-fits-all empathy model produces misunderstanding rather than connection. She is an active LinkedIn contributor on cross-cultural leadership and one of the few European voices in the empathetic leadership space whose work is grounded in both lived intercultural experience and rigorous academic training.

46. Oji Udezue | Independent

Oji Udezue is a technology product and people leader, author, and speaker based in Nigeria and working globally, who writes and speaks on empathetic leadership specifically in the context of high-growth technology organisations and distributed global teams.

His work addresses the empathetic leadership challenge in fast-moving, pressure-heavy technology environments where the default culture often valorises speed, intensity, and individual performance over care, connection, and collaborative trust. He brings an African perspective to a conversation that rarely includes one, and is an active LinkedIn contributor on the human dimensions of building technology organisations that actually retain and develop the people within them.

47. Douglas E. Noll | Noll Law Office

Douglas E. Noll is a lawyer, mediator, and author of Empathy Leadership, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster, and De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less, which translates the neuroscience of emotional de-escalation into practical leadership tools.

His work in high-stakes environments, including maximum-security prisons and international conflict mediation, gives him a credibility in the empathetic leadership space that few speakers can match. He demonstrates that empathy is not a luxury for pleasant working environments but a practical leadership capability for the most difficult, charged, and high-stakes situations any leader will ever face. His work is particularly powerful for leaders in legal, criminal justice, government, and high-conflict organisational environments.

48. Holly Ransom | Emergent Global

Holly Ransom is the CEO of Emergent Global and one of Australia's most prominent global leadership speakers, having interviewed former US President Barack Obama during his 2018 visit to Australia and delivered keynotes and hosted conversations at the World Economic Forum and across corporate, government, and education sectors in over 25 countries.

Her work on leadership consistently addresses the human dimensions of genuine influence, specifically how the leaders who create authentic followership are those capable of connecting with the emotional reality of the people they lead rather than simply communicating the intellectual case for a direction. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Harvard Kennedy School graduate, and author of The Leading Edge, and is one of Australia's most active and credible voices on the intersection of empathy, purpose-driven leadership, and sustainable high performance.

49. Sam Cawthorn | Speakers Institute

Sam Cawthorn is the CEO and founder of Speakers Institute and one of Australia's most celebrated keynote speakers. The author of Bounce Forward: How to Transform Crisis into Success, he was pronounced dead on the scene following a car accident in 2006 before being resuscitated and rebuilding his life with the loss of his right arm.

His keynotes address how empathy functions in the context of adversity, how leaders who have genuinely experienced loss, crisis, and recovery understand the emotional landscape of their teams at a depth that leaders without that experience rarely reach. He has delivered keynotes to audiences at Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, and the Australian Department of Defence, and is one of the most impactful and sought-after keynote speakers in Australia and globally.

50. Jonno White | Clarity Group Global

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based keynote speaker, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally. Host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries, and founder of The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders.

The people on this list are the thinkers. Jonno White is the person organisations bring in when they are ready to act on what they say. Through Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, StrengthsFinder sessions, executive team offsites, and keynote sessions that give teams practical tools they use on Monday morning, Jonno helps organisations build the team culture, have the difficult conversations, and lead the changes that empathetic leadership demands. He achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating at the ASBA 2025 National Conference and works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across Australia, UK, USA, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, India, and Europe. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. To book Jonno for your next keynote, offsite, or facilitated session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Any list of this kind involves difficult decisions. Brené Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most lists like this. Their work has shaped the field for over a decade and their contributions are foundational. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered. Beyond these three, several other strong voices were seriously considered but did not make the final list. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School, whose work on psychological safety is the most cited research in this space, was considered but her focus is primarily on team learning rather than the keynote empathetic leadership conversation specifically. Jeff Weiner, former CEO of LinkedIn, is one of the most articulate corporate advocates for compassionate management, but his social presence operates at a very large broadcast scale. Several others were in strong consideration but had shifted focus away from this specific topic in their most recent content.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Empathetic Leadership

The first and most common mistake is confusing empathy with the avoidance of difficult conversations. Leaders who believe that empathetic leadership means sparing people from hard truths are not demonstrating care. They are demonstrating conflict avoidance while calling it compassion. The most empathetic thing a leader can do is often to have the conversation that everyone else in the room is avoiding, to say clearly and kindly what is true, and to do it before the cost of not saying it becomes even higher. This is precisely what the best speakers on this list challenge their audiences to do.

The second mistake is treating empathy as a fixed personality trait rather than a trainable skill. Multiple researchers on this list, Jamil Zaki first among them, have demonstrated through rigorous neuroscience that empathy is not a gift that some people are born with and others are not. It is a capacity that can be developed, strengthened, and applied deliberately. Organisations that use "I'm just not naturally empathetic" as a leadership excuse are operating on a false premise.

The third mistake is empathy without boundaries, what Maria Ross describes as the empathy dilemma. Leaders who absorb every emotional signal from their team without a container for their own wellbeing quickly burn out, and burned-out leaders cannot be empathetic. The goal is sustainable empathy, which requires self-awareness, self-care, and the ability to hold space for another person's experience without taking full responsibility for resolving it.

The fourth mistake is confusing empathy with agreement. An empathetic leader can fully understand why a team member is frustrated, genuinely acknowledge that frustration, and still hold firm on the decision or expectation that prompted it. Empathy does not require the leader to change their mind. It requires the leader to listen without dismissal and respond without contempt.

The fifth mistake is applying empathy inconsistently, demonstrating care for some team members in some circumstances and withdrawing it under pressure. Inconsistency in empathetic behaviour is more damaging than a consistent absence of it, because it creates an environment where people cannot predict whether their emotional reality will be met with care or dismissal depending on the leader's workload or stress level.

Implementation Guide: Taking Action

The first step in engaging with the empathetic leadership voices on this list is not to read all 50 of their books. It is to identify the one or two dimensions of this conversation that are most relevant to your specific leadership challenge right now. If your team struggles to raise problems early, Timothy Clark's work on psychological safety is your starting point. If your leadership team avoids the honest conversations that performance requires, Liane Davey's writing on productive conflict is what you need. If you are leading across cultures and finding that your empathetic instincts are producing misunderstanding rather than connection, Monika Chutnik's cross-cultural leadership frameworks are the right lens.

The second step is to choose your format deliberately. Keynote speakers are extraordinarily effective at shifting a room's understanding of why something matters. They are rarely sufficient on their own for building the capability to act on that understanding. The best use of the speakers on this list is as the opening of a conversation that continues in workshops, facilitated team sessions, and sustained leadership development work. To bring Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, into your organisation to facilitate the team sessions that turn these ideas into practice, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

The third step is to measure what changes. Empathetic leadership is often treated as an unmeasurable quality, but it is not. Psychological safety scores, engagement survey results, turnover rates, the frequency and quality of one-on-one conversations, and the degree to which difficult truths reach leadership in time to act on them are all measurable proxies for empathetic leadership culture. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in from Brisbane costs less than engaging high-profile local providers, and his global experience across Australia, UK, USA, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, India, and Europe means he brings genuinely cross-cultural insight to the session. Whether virtual or face to face, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is empathetic leadership and how is it different from being a nice boss?

Empathetic leadership is the ability to understand and genuinely respond to the emotional reality of the people you lead, in a way that makes them more capable, more engaged, and more willing to bring their full selves to the work. It is different from simply being a nice boss because niceness is often conflict-avoidant, inconsistent, and untethered to any deliberate framework. Empathetic leaders are often harder to work for than merely pleasant ones, because they hold people to higher standards while simultaneously ensuring that those people feel genuinely understood and supported.

Is empathetic leadership trainable, or do you either have it or you do not?

The neuroscience is clear: empathy is trainable. Jamil Zaki's research at Stanford demonstrates that people who believe empathy is a fixed trait are less empathetic than those who believe it is a skill that can be developed. The belief itself shapes the behaviour. Every speaker on this list who has built a training programme, framework, or methodology for developing empathetic leadership does so on the premise that the capacity can be grown deliberately.

How does empathetic leadership coexist with high performance and accountability?

This is the question at the centre of the current conversation. The short answer, argued most rigorously by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, and most accessibly by Maria Ross, is that empathy and accountability are not opposites but complements. Leaders who understand their team's emotional reality are better positioned to have the honest, boundaried conversations that accountability requires, because they have the trust necessary to make those conversations land without damaging the relationship.

How was this list compiled?

The 50 voices on this list were selected based on genuine credibility in the field, active contribution through current content and speaking, geographic and disciplinary diversity spanning Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA, India, continental Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and a deliberate editorial choice to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered. The list moved past household names to include researchers, practitioners, consultants, and keynote specialists whose work is directly and rigorously focused on empathetic leadership as a named discipline.

Can I hire someone to facilitate an empathetic leadership workshop for my team?

Yes. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes in 150+ countries. He works with leadership teams to build the culture, have the difficult conversations, and implement the changes that empathetic leadership demands. To book Jonno for your next workshop, keynote, or executive offsite, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than expected.

What is the difference between empathy, sympathy, and compassion?

Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone from a distance. Empathy is putting yourself in their position and genuinely experiencing their perspective, understanding their internal world without losing your own. Compassion is empathy that moves to action, the motivation that arises from genuine understanding to do something about what you see. The most effective empathetic leaders on this list work with all three: they understand, they feel with, and they act.

Final Thoughts

The fifty voices on this list share a common conviction that will not resolve itself into a comfortable consensus: empathy is hard, and it is worth it. It is hard because it requires leaders to be genuinely present with people who are struggling, uncertain, or in pain, while simultaneously holding the responsibility to lead those people toward something better. It is worth it because the research consistently shows that teams led with genuine empathy outperform, outlast, and outinnovate teams led with anything less.

What these speakers also share is an impatience with the version of this conversation that stays theoretical. Every person on this list is asking leaders to do something differently on Monday, not just think differently about leadership. They are offering tools, frameworks, practices, and in several cases proof, that empathetic leadership is not a personality type but a discipline that any leader can develop if they are willing to do the work.

Jonno White works with leadership teams to translate these ideas into action, through Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, StrengthsFinder sessions, executive team offsites, and keynote addresses that give audiences the practical frameworks they need to lead more empathetically in the moments that matter. His book Step Up or Step Out, available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD, explores the difficult conversations and accountability structures that empathetic leadership demands. To discuss how Jonno can support your organisation, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For a natural next read, check out "21 Proven Ways to Build Vulnerability Based Trust" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/vulnerability-based-trust.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 21 Proven Ways to Build Vulnerability Based Trust

Vulnerability-based trust is the foundation of every high-performing team. Patrick Lencioni introduced this concept in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, arguing that the absence of trust is the most fundamental dysfunction a team can have. Without vulnerability-based trust, team members spend their energy managing their image, hiding weaknesses, and avoiding the honest conversations that produce great results. Unlike predictive trust, where you simply expect someone to behave consistently based on past patterns, vulnerability-based trust requires team members to be genuinely open about their limitations, mistakes, and areas where they need support.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/vulnerability-based-trust