Bill Benjamin

You need to move fast, adapt to a changing environment, and deliver performance, yet your team is moving too slow when it comes to making tough decisions and are avoiding the more challenging conversations that drive results. What is at the heart of high performance is culture. Unfortunately, most leaders misunderstand culture; they believe culture exists across the organization; it doesn’t. It exists primarily on teams.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 72,000 people that is published in the Harvard Business Review, which puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture. Your people will learn specific tools to own and model the culture on their team in the critical moments, what we call Last 8% moments, that create culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid, but are the secret to driving team performance.

In this impactful program, your team will learn:

• What the two pillars of a high performing culture are: High Connection (psychological safety) and High Courage (ability to do hard things skillfully)
• Emotional Intelligence-based tools to be their best in Last 8% Situations
• How to influence & engage others who are at a distance and create the conditions to keep the best and brightest

Pre-program assessment

Bill Benjamin’s research organization has the capability to survey all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 3–4-minute assessment provides the following benefits:

• Bill will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs, and present data to the group to make it relevant for them By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
• Post program, Bill will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience.

Your people are already carrying more than any generation before them. Pressure to deliver results, AI reshaping work itself, and no clear playbook for any of it. And through all of that, they’re being asked to change faster than ever.

To survive and grow, your people need the capability to be agile in the face of change, resilient under pressure, and willing to take the risks real innovation requires. But here’s the problem: your people’s brains are not wired for performance; they are wired for self-preservation. In today’s environment, risk aversion isn’t caution. It’s the opposite of what’s needed to operate at the speed required to adapt and win.

The ability to change at speed is now the currency of success—in every industry, every function: product development, supply chain, technology, sales, marketing, digital transformation.

Organizations today don’t need economies of scale. They need economies of speed.

In this powerful program, your team members will learn:

• Specific tools learned from working with high performers under pressure -- the NFL, NBA, Olympic teams, Navy SEALs, Goldman Sachs, Intel and others — to become more adaptable, resilient, collaborative, and innovative
• How to manage their brains so they can think, perform, and lead effectively under pressure and amid change
• What separates teams that keep pace with change from those that fall behind, including how to close the gap between the risks people know they should take and the risks they actually take — a gap IHHP’s research identified as averaging 7.56%, which we call The Last 8%
• Strategies to help individuals and teams perform and adapt in the face of the pressure and uncertainty they face

This program draws on two major research efforts: a 12,000-person study behind the New York Times bestselling book Performing Under Pressure, and a 34,000-person study published in Harvard Business Review on the gap between the risks people know they should take and the risks they actually take.

Pre-program Assessment

Bill Benjamin's research organization has the capability to survey all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 3–4-minute assessment provides the following benefits:

• Bill will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs, and present data to the group to make it relevant for them By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
• Post program, Bill will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience.

The organizations that pull ahead over the next three years won’t be the ones with the best AI.

They’ll be the ones with the courage and capability to use it.

Here’s the gap we find in company after company: leadership is fully bought in — CEO-led, funding for the platforms, committed to scale. But below that level, the conviction stalls out. As one senior executive told us recently, the middle and lower ranks aren’t leaning in anywhere near as hard as the top expects. And the reason isn’t complicated: people at that level are afraid this will end in job losses, starting with their own.

What It Takes to Win Right Now

The people being asked to change how they work are rarely the ones setting AI strategy or choosing the tools. They know something is being asked of them. What they don’t have is the trust needed to take the risks AI adoption requires or a specific, actionable answer for what to do differently on Monday morning.

That’s the gap this keynote closes. It equips your people leaders to help their teams change, take risks, and move faster than your competitors, who are stuck facing the exact same challenge.

How do you do that?

Our research on the world’s most courageous, high-performing cultures — just published in Harvard Business Review, now its third-most-popular article — comes down to one thing: people need to be equipped to do hard things under pressure. Such as naming the disruption honestly while still caring for the people living through it, before anxiety hardens into avoidance and quiet resistance.

Skip that and your AI investment quietly stalls, no matter how good the tools are.

At the End of This Keynote, Your Team Will Be Able To:

• Make the hard thing safe and expected. A culture where intelligent risk is rewarded, and where acting under ambiguity, even failing, gets treated as learning, not liability.

• Lead with high care and high accountability. The human operating system for AI. You can deploy AI in weeks; trust takes longer—this is how you build the two dimensions that close the gap.

• Default to curiosity and better judgment: the two things AI can’t supply, and has only made more valuable. Your team leaves with real agency over a challenge that, right now, feels like it’s happening to them.

It comes down to one question: will your people do the hard thing when avoidance is easier, faster, and no one’s watching? They’ll leave with a plan—and enthusiasm—to win with AI, not someday, but in the choices they make the very next morning. Because AI can hand you every answer in the world. What it can’t do is get your people to act on them.

Our research has found that most people are relatively effective at getting to 92% of what they want to say in a feedback conversation. But when they get to the Last 8% of what they really want to say–the hardest part of the feedback they want to give–the part of the conversation that has consequences for the other person, they sense the potential emotional impact this feedback might have, and they back off, avoiding giving the feedback that’s needed.

This creates significant challenges for the other person: not only do they not know how or where they stand, which increases their anxiety, but they are also not given a chance to improve. Worse, they feel less psychologically safe and emotionally connected, which diminishes their performance.

The goal of this program is to give your people the insight and tools to manage their emotions to get to the Last 8% of what they want to say in any feedback conversation. The good news is that there is a burgeoning science of how to give and receive feedback that anyone can learn. It starts by becoming a ‘student of human behavior’, understanding the brain under pressure, and learning the concrete skills needed to give feedback in a way where the other person can hear it.

In this powerful program, your people will learn:

• What The Last 8% is and why it provides the biggest opportunity to learn, grow and boost their performance.
• How the brain reacts under pressure and why that is at the heart of why people avoid giving Last 8% feedback.
• Self-awareness: what their habitual way of reacting to receiving feedback is and why that matters as a signal to the other person that they are open to receiving this important feedback.
• How to start a Last 8% feedback conversation: most people do not know where to start, which causes anxiety. Along with trying to be perfect, this stops them from beginning this important conversation.
• What the key components are to building an environment of high psychological safety, and why it matters to innovation.

“This was an insightful and practical training session. I was able to connect this directly to my own behaviors. I liked the way you had us practice the strategies rather than just telling us about them so we could internalize the behavior. That way, I’ll actually remember it!” – Intel

Pre-program Assessment

Bill Benjamin’s research organization surveys over 40,000 people a month and can leverage their proprietary research capability to assess all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 4-5 minute assessment provides the following benefits:

• Bill will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs.
• By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
• Bill will tailor/customize the keynote with key results from the survey to address what matters most to the participants
• Post program, Bill will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience but believe will help you move forward with building culture and lead your teams more effectively

Pre-program Assessment

Bill’s research organization has the capability to survey all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 3–4-minute assessment provides the following benefits:

• Bill will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs, and present data to the group to make it relevant for them
• By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
• Post program, Bill will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience.