Dr. JP Pawliw-Fry

Build a High-Performance, Last 8% Culture

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. Second, they see culture as something that should be owned by the CEO and CHRO, believing it is their job to build the culture across the organization; it isn’t. Most CEO’s and CHRO’s get so overwhelmed when they think of tackling culture, that they avoid it and allow culture to be built haphazardly, which means that good people leave, and goals are not met.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 7,500 leaders that puts your people leaders at the center of building your culture. Your people will learn specific tools to own the culture on their team in the critical moments, the Last 8%, that creates culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid. When leaders feel agency and have skills to lean into the difficult, they build a high-performance culture that becomes a powerful force in your organization.

In this powerful 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)
• How to build the culture on their team with our proprietary approach of Model & Own
• Specific tools to connect and coach their people 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 bests and brightest

Performing Under Pressure

To survive and thrive, your organization needs to be agile in the midst of change and challenge, and when faced with pressure, see opportunities where others do not. There are skills your team can learn to help better manage these situations to drive results.

In this powerful program, your team members will learn:

• Specific tools learned from working with high performers under pressure in the NFL, NBA, Olympic teams, Navy SEALs, Goldman Sachs, Intel, among others, to be more adaptable, resilient, collaborative and opportunistic
• How to manage their brain so they can think, perform and lead effectively under pressure
• The single most important daily habit that increases focus and decreases burnout
• Strategies to help their teams perform in the face of the pressure they face

This program is based on a 12,000-person study conducted for our New York Times best-selling book, Performing Under Pressure, which is available in 65 countries.

This session can be delivered to leaders or individual contributors as a way to help them harness emotional intelligence to deal with pressure, build stronger relationships with their clients, collaborate internally and deal with the setbacks and uncertainty that sales people must overcome to be successful.

Empower Your Organization With AI

Nothing remarkable, professionally or personally, is going to happen to you or your team unless you take an uncomfortable risk. It is as simple as that.

If you are not willing to be uncomfortable to take on a new challenge or speak up at a meeting when you see something wrong or have an idea you think might help or ask someone for help, or hold someone accountable, the list goes on - unless you are willing to endure discomfort, you will not learn, change, grow and deliver in new, different and better ways. It is the same when it comes to AI.

Too many teams and organizations are risk averse: they have created a culture where people are more worried about covering their backs than enabled to ‘get out of the harbour’ to take smart risks. This keeps them stuck when it comes to exploring new frontiers like AI; they miss out on the benefit and all that AI can bring to their organization and to their clients.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You can build a culture that enables people to take the necessary risk to embrace AI. It starts by giving your people leaders an understanding of how to get their people to go against their biology to be courageous to do hard things.

In this powerful keynote, your team will learn:

• The common mistake organizations make when choosing who will lead AI initiatives.
• The importance of (smart) risk taking to high performance
• How to overcome the key obstacles to effective AI adoption and learn how to navigate them.
• Tools to manage their brain so they can be courageous to do hard things
• How to make AI adoption a leadership priority, beyond just the IT department and CIO.
• How to build a culture of courage and risk-taking, especially for people who are intimidated by AI
• How to build a team that can collaborate at a high level

Having High-Impact Last 8% Conversations

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