24 First-Time Manager Keynote Speakers to Book in 2026

Last updated: August 2026

Keynote speakers on the first-time manager transition are specialists who address the shift from delivering work personally to delivering results through other people. The strongest options combine a named framework, evidence of work with newly promoted managers, and a format that extends past a single talk. This directory compiles 24 verified options.

As of August 2026, this directory lists 24 verified speakers. The Chartered Management Institute found in 2023 that 82 percent of people entering management positions had no formal management and leadership training, based on a YouGov survey of more than 4,500 UK workers and managers. That is the room your speaker will be standing in front of.

I'm Jonno White, and I compile this directory. I also work as a leadership consultant and keynote speaker in this field, so I have kept my own practice out of the list below and disclosed that interest here rather than burying it. You can read more about me and how I work.

On this page

How this directory was compiled | What the evidence says | What separates a first-time manager specialist | The 24 speakers | How to choose for your audience | What these speakers charge | What a keynote can and cannot change | What this directory does not cover | Your next step | Questions event organisers ask

How this directory was compiled

This is a compiled directory rather than a league table, and the entries are listed alphabetically by surname so that no position implies a judgment about who is better.

Every entry was re-verified in August 2026 against the speaker's own website, an authoritative institutional page or their publisher's listing. Four criteria decided inclusion: demonstrated focus on the move from individual contributor to people leader, a named framework or body of published work on that shift, current and verifiable professional standing, and a working link to a page the speaker, their institution or their publisher controls.

Some people listed here deliver mainly through programmes, cohorts and workshops rather than main-stage keynotes. Each entry says which, and where keynote delivery was not separately verified the entry says so.

The verification pass changed the page in three material ways. One entry had been described in the present tense as holding a role at the Center for Creative Leadership, and the Center's own current page now lists that position as former, so the present-tense claim was removed. Several role descriptions were corrected, and every speaker fee figure previously shown on this page was removed because none traced to a source the speaker publishes.

The third change concerns me. An earlier version of this page listed me as an entry, at the top. Including yourself in your own directory is not a defensible practice, so my entry has been removed and the count moved from 25 to 24. My own availability now sits clearly outside the list, further down this page.

Several compiled findings came out of that pass, computed from the entries listed here rather than from a survey. There are 24 entries naming 25 people, because one entry is a two-person partnership.

Seven of the 24 focus wholly or mainly on the first-time or new manager audience rather than on leadership in general. Five are positioned primarily for technology and engineering audiences. Twenty-one have written at least one book about the move into management or about a core management skill.

On background, eight are practitioner coaches or programme founders, six are current or former academics, six are former senior operators who moved into speaking, and four publish assessment-based or platform-based programmes. Four published new or revised work during 2026. None of the 24 publishes a keynote fee on their own website.

If you believe something on this page is wrong or out of date, please get in touch and it will be corrected. For the wider process of hiring a speaker, including briefs, bureaus and contracts, see the complete guide to hiring keynote speakers in Australia and New Zealand.

What the evidence says

The first-time manager problem is a training gap, not a talent gap. The Center for Creative Leadership found that almost 60 percent of first-time managers said they never received any training when they moved into their first leadership role. Ann Francke OBE, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, describes the underlying cause as "promotions based on technical competence that ignore behaviour and other key leadership traits".

That is why I would rather slow a team down long enough to name the real decision than help it move quickly in five different directions. Booking a speaker for new managers is one of those decisions, and it is usually made in a hurry.

The job has also become structurally harder, though not in the way most coverage suggests. Gallup reports that the average number of people reporting to a US manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, while the median held steady at about five to six. The gap between those two numbers matters: a minority of very large teams is pulling the average up, so most new managers are still leading small teams, and a talk pitched entirely at the megateam problem will miss the room.

Gallup's Jim Harter, chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing, puts the conclusion plainly: "manager talent trumps span of control".

The skill gap has a specific shape. DDI assessed more than 70,000 manager candidates and found that only 19 percent demonstrate strong delegation ability, while identifying delegation as the single most effective skill for preventing burnout. Tacy M. Byham, chief executive of DDI, summarises it as "emerging leaders are struggling to transition from being 'doers' to 'delegators,'" which is exactly the shift a first-time manager keynote has to land.

When I am working with a leader on that shift, I look for the smallest real move that changes what people will see or experience next. Delegation rarely fails because someone has not heard the theory. It fails because nobody has named the first task that will actually leave their desk this week.

The cost of getting it wrong shows up in retention. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, based on 10,796 leaders, found that 71 percent report significantly higher stress since stepping into their current role, and that 40 percent of stressed leaders have considered leaving leadership altogether to protect their wellbeing.

What separates a first-time manager specialist

A general leadership speaker addresses vision, strategy and motivation. A first-time manager specialist addresses the identity change from being measured on personal output to being measured on somebody else's.

The practical difference shows up in content. A specialist covers delegation, feedback, one-to-one meetings, managing people who were peers last month, and the discomfort of no longer being the most competent person in the room on the actual work. A generalist covers all of that at the altitude of principle, which sounds excellent and changes nothing on Monday.

That preference is a bias I will own: I prefer one tool a leader uses on Monday to ten ideas that sound impressive and disappear by Friday. It is also why the "best for" line on every entry below describes an audience rather than a quality score.

The 24 speakers

Makeda Andrews

Makeda Andrews is a leadership coach who works almost exclusively with new managers. She is the founder of The Impactful Leader and the creator of The New Manager Accelerator, a twelve-week programme combining self-paced training, live coaching, practical tools and role play. Her programme modules cover mindset, connection and clarity in a manager's early months.

Best for: organisations that want a specialist to run a new manager cohort. Her verified delivery is programme-based rather than main-stage keynote work, so confirm keynote availability directly.

Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier teaches managers to stay curious longer and give advice more slowly. He is the author of The Coaching Habit and the founder of MBS Works, and a tenth anniversary edition of the book was published in March 2026. The book is built around seven essential questions a manager can use in place of jumping to a solution.

Best for: organisations trying to build a coaching habit into managers from their first day in the role.

Sara Canaday

Sara Canaday works on the behavioural habits high performers have to unlearn when they start managing. She is the author of Leadership Unchained, a member of the National Speakers Association and an instructor for LinkedIn Learning. She works with organisations on strengthening leadership and improving performance through those behavioural shifts.

Best for: corporate events aimed at high-potential talent moving into management.

Todd Dewett

Todd Dewett pairs live keynote delivery with a LinkedIn Learning catalogue used by learners in more than one hundred countries. He is a keynote speaker and LinkedIn Learning author, and his catalogue includes new manager fundamentals alongside feedback, change and managing teams. He is also a TEDx speaker.

Best for: large corporate events that need energy in the room without losing practical substance.

Kevin Eikenberry

Kevin Eikenberry has built a body of work around the specific problem of managing people who were recently your peers. He is the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group and co-author of From Bud to Boss with Guy Harris. The group runs Bud to Boss workshops alongside its speaking work, and he has spent close to thirty years in leadership development.

Best for: organisations that promote from within and see the peer-to-manager transition repeatedly.

Paul Falcone

Paul Falcone brings senior human resources experience to the parts of management that frighten new managers most. He is the principal of Paul Falcone Workplace Leadership Consulting and the author of several books in The First-Time Manager series, including The First-Time Manager: HR. He was previously chief human resources officer at Nickelodeon Animation Studios and has held senior human resources roles at Paramount Pictures and Time Warner.

Best for: human resources conferences and compliance-heavy environments, where performance management and documentation matter.

Camille Fournier

Camille Fournier maps the engineering career path from individual contributor through to executive. She is the author of The Manager's Path, which sets out a detailed route through team lead, manager, director and vice president levels. She was previously chief technology officer at Rent the Runway and head of platform engineering at Two Sigma.

Best for: engineering conferences and technology organisations where the management path needs to be made legible.

Frances Frei

Frances Frei argues that new managers do not have to choose between high standards and genuine care for people. She is Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School and co-author of Unleashed and Move Fast and Fix Things. She is a TED speaker, and she served as Uber's first senior vice president of leadership and strategy.

Best for: organisations building trust-based leadership cultures.

William Gentry

William Gentry researched what actually changes in a person's head when they first start managing. He is an industrial and organisational psychologist and the author of Be the Boss Everyone Wants to Work For, and his flip-your-script material breaks the shift into mindset, skillset, relationships and focus. His first-time manager research was conducted at the Center for Creative Leadership, where he was formerly Director of Leadership Insights and Analytics.

Best for: human resources and learning conferences, and structured new manager onboarding programmes.

Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall Goldsmith wrote the book on why the behaviours that earned the promotion start working against you afterwards. He is an executive coach and the author of What Got You Here Won't Get You There, and he currently teaches executive education at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Best for: audiences mixing new and experienced leaders in a leadership development programme.

Ryan Hawk

Ryan Hawk built a book and a podcast around what people learn in their first years of leading. He is a keynote speaker and leadership advisor, the host of The Learning Leader Show, and the author of Welcome to Management, which Forbes named the best leadership book of 2020. He has delivered hundreds of keynotes internationally.

Best for: sales conferences and high-performance organisations promoting their strongest individual contributors.

Linda A. Hill

Linda A. Hill studied what happens to people across their first year in management. She is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and faculty chair of its Leadership Initiative. Her book Becoming a Manager traces the experiences of nineteen new managers across their first year in the role, and her book Genius at Scale was published in March 2026.

Best for: executive education, academic conferences and organisations that want the research rather than the anecdote.

Lara Hogan

Lara Hogan teaches the unglamorous mechanics of managing: feedback, expectations, difficult conversations and trust. She is the founder of Wherewithall and the author of Resilient Management, and her team runs workshops and training on core management skills such as delivering feedback and setting clear expectations. She was previously vice president of engineering at Kickstarter and an engineering director at Etsy.

Best for: technology and product organisations where managers need mechanics rather than philosophy.

Karin Hurt and David Dye

Karin Hurt and David Dye give new managers the exact words to use in hard conversations. Karin Hurt is chief executive and David Dye is president of Let's Grow Leaders, and they have co-authored six books including Courageous Cultures and Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict. Their material works at the level of the actual phrase rather than the principle.

Best for: frontline and operational teams, and events that suit a two-speaker format.

Dave Kline

Dave Kline runs a cohort programme built specifically for managers. He is a management educator and the creator of the MGMT Accelerator programme and the MGMT Playbook newsletter, and his current programme is explicitly positioned around AI-enhanced leadership. He previously led teams at Bridgewater and Moody's.

Best for: technology-forward organisations where new managers are expected to lead with AI tooling in the workflow.

Kevin Kruse

Kevin Kruse pairs a keynote with a platform that can scale manager training afterwards. He is the founder and chief executive of LEADx and the author of ten books including Great Leaders Have No Rules. LEADx is an online learning platform that publishes dedicated new manager training material.

Best for: organisations that need the keynote to be the front end of a scalable programme.

Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni created the Working Genius model, which helps new managers understand which kinds of work energise and drain them. He is the founder and president of The Table Group and the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. For a first-time manager, learning that their natural genius may not be the work they were promoted for explains a great deal about why delegation feels wrong.

Best for: large-scale leadership conferences wanting the creator of Working Genius and the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Kim Nicol

Kim Nicol has taught essential skills for new managers since 2017 and works almost entirely with that audience. She is an executive coach and mindfulness teacher, and she is the creator and host of The New Manager Podcast. Her Essential Skills for New Managers material has run since 2017 and is aimed squarely at people managing for the first time.

Best for: cohort programmes, lunch-and-learn series and ongoing development rather than a single marquee slot.

Rachel Pacheco

Rachel Pacheco writes about the practical mechanics of management for people doing it for the first time. She is a management professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and the author of Bringing Up the Boss, with a second book, Manage What Matters, published in 2026. She is also a startup advisor.

Best for: startup and scale-up events, and investor portfolio gatherings.

Kim Scott

Kim Scott created the Radical Candor framework for giving feedback without either cruelty or evasion. She is a co-founder of Radical Candor and the author of Radical Candor and Radical Respect, and a revised edition of Radical Candor was published in June 2026. She was previously a chief executive coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics and Twitter, taught at Apple University, and led AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick teams at Google.

Best for: organisations where newly promoted managers consistently avoid difficult performance conversations.

Ramona Shaw

Ramona Shaw positions her entire practice around the first-time manager transition. She is the founder of Archova, a certified professional leadership coach and the author of The Confident and Competent New Manager, and she hosts a podcast for the same audience. Her material deals directly with the confidence problem that sits underneath the skills problem.

Best for: organisations that want a specialist for a new manager cohort or development series.

Michael D. Watkins

Michael D. Watkins wrote The First 90 Days, a structured plan for the opening months in a new role. He is Professor of Leadership and Organisational Change at IMD Business School and chairman of Genesis Advisers, and The First 90 Days has more than a million copies in print across more than twenty languages. He was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2023.

Best for: enterprise organisations with structured onboarding, and audiences mixing first-time managers with senior leaders changing roles.

Liz Wiseman

Liz Wiseman separates leaders who amplify the people around them from those who shrink them. She is the chief executive of The Wiseman Group and the author of Multipliers and Impact Players, and she was previously an executive at Oracle. Her Multipliers distinction is between the leader who acts as the smartest person in the room and the leader who uses their intelligence to amplify everyone else.

Best for: organisations where new managers are struggling to let go of the work.

Julie Zhuo

Julie Zhuo wrote The Making of a Manager after fourteen years at Facebook. She is a co-founder of Sundial and the author of The Making of a Manager, and she was previously vice president of product design at Facebook, where she spent fourteen years. She continues to write about management and design through her publication The Looking Glass.

Best for: technology and product organisations with younger managers in high-growth environments.

How to choose for your audience

Start with who is actually in the room. If the audience is human resources and learning professionals who design manager programmes, William Gentry, Paul Falcone and Kevin Kruse speak their language. If the audience is the new managers themselves, Julie Zhuo, Ryan Hawk and Ramona Shaw connect with the emotional reality of the promotion faster.

Match the speaker to the industry context. Camille Fournier and Lara Hogan both came from senior engineering leadership roles, which tends to matter to that audience. For schools, healthcare, government and mixed corporate audiences, the broader frameworks travel further.

Decide whether you need a name or a specialist. A globally recognised speaker fills a room and gives your event a headline. A specialist changes what managers do the following week. Seven of the 24 listed here work mainly with new managers, and those seven are usually the better choice when the goal is behaviour change rather than attendance.

Ask four questions before you commit. What specifically will managers do differently on Monday, and what have you delivered to an audience of newly promoted managers in the last year?

Then ask the two that reveal how the speaker works. Will you run a discovery conversation with us beforehand, and what does the engagement include beyond the talk itself? For a fuller set of questions, see what to check before booking a high-stakes keynote speaker.

What these speakers charge

None of the 24 speakers listed here publishes a keynote fee on their own website. That was checked against each speaker's own website, institutional page or publisher listing during the August 2026 verification pass, and it is the honest answer to the question every event organiser asks first.

Fee figures for named speakers do circulate on bureau and aggregator pages. Those figures are not published by the speakers themselves, so this page cannot verify any of them and reproduces none. An earlier version of this page carried fee bands of that kind, and they have been removed for exactly that reason.

The practical route is to request a quote directly, or through a bureau, and to ask what the figure includes. Ask specifically whether travel, accommodation, workshops, breakout sessions or extended engagement sit inside the quoted figure or outside it. If you are weighing up going direct against using an agency, see how speaker bureaus actually work.

What a keynote can and cannot change

A keynote is very good at one thing: making a shared problem discussable for a whole room at once. Newly promoted managers frequently believe they are the only person struggling, and an hour that proves otherwise has real value.

A keynote cannot install a skill. Delegation, feedback and difficult conversations are practised behaviours, and DDI's finding that only 19 percent of assessed manager candidates delegate well is not a knowledge gap that a talk closes.

The pattern I would push for is to pair the talk with something that has ownership attached. Name one clear owner, the next action, and the point where the work comes back for a decision. A keynote with a follow-up cohort, a workshop series or manager coaching behind it changes behaviour. A keynote on its own changes the conversation, which is worth having, but it is worth being honest about which one you are buying.

What this directory does not cover

This directory is limited in ways worth stating plainly.

It covers speakers who work in English and who have a public professional presence that could be verified online. Excellent practitioners who work regionally, in other languages, or without a public profile are not represented here, and their absence is not a judgment.

It does not assess delivery quality. Nobody in this directory was assessed on stage, and no client testimonial or satisfaction score is used anywhere on this page, because those figures could not be independently verified.

It does not include fee guidance, for the reason given above. It also does not cover in-house programmes, learning platforms or manager training vendors, which are a different category of purchase.

Finally, roles change. Every entry was verified in August 2026, and one entry on the previous version of this page had already gone out of date before that check caught it. Verify anything load-bearing before you sign a contract.

Your next step

Before you shortlist anyone, write down the one behaviour you want to be different in your managers ninety days after the event. Then use that sentence as the brief. Most disappointing keynotes are not badly delivered; they are booked against a topic rather than against an outcome, and the brief is where that gets decided.

If the honest answer is that your managers need skills rather than inspiration, a speaker may not be the first purchase at all. In that case, start with 100 essential training topics for managers and design the programme first.

In full transparency, I offer this service myself, which is why I have kept my own work separate from the directory above. If you are choosing a speaker for newly promoted managers and you want the session to connect to something that continues afterwards, that is exactly the kind of work I specialise in, so let me know at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Questions event organisers ask

Are there speakers who work only with new managers?

Yes. Seven of the 24 in this directory focus wholly or mainly on the first-time or new manager audience rather than on leadership generally: Kevin Eikenberry, William Gentry, Rachel Pacheco, Ramona Shaw, Kim Nicol, Dave Kline and Makeda Andrews. Several of them deliver through cohort programmes rather than single keynotes, which is worth knowing before you approach them for a conference slot.

Is this directory a ranking?

No. The entries are listed alphabetically by surname, the inclusion criteria are published above, and no entry is scored, graded or placed above another. Delivery quality was not assessed, because nobody here was seen on stage as part of this compilation.

Can these speakers deliver virtually?

Delivery format was not verified individually for this directory, so no claim is made here about any specific speaker's virtual or hybrid availability. Confirm the format directly with the speaker when you make first contact.

Should we pair the keynote with a workshop?

Pair them whenever the budget allows. A keynote raises awareness across a whole room, and a workshop or cohort programme is where practice happens. DDI's finding that only 19 percent of assessed manager candidates delegate well points at a practised behaviour rather than a knowledge gap, and practised behaviours are not installed by a talk.

About the author

I'm Jonno White, a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out, with more than 10,000 copies sold. I host The Leadership Conversations Podcast and work with schools, corporates and nonprofits around the world.

Related directories

For engagement-focused events, see employee engagement keynote speakers. For organisations in the middle of structural change, see adaptive leadership keynote speakers.

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