Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan's Speech Descriptions

Erica Dhawan’s mission is to prepare your global workforce for the future. Her interactive keynote speeches show organizations and leaders how to accelerate the connectedness of your workforce, become masters of connectional intelligence, and “spar” in order to reach your goals more quickly.

Erica’s speaking style is personal, fresh, humor-laden and energetic. She is a gifted presenter who is able to read a room, customize her approach and style accordingly, and draw audiences in with her storytelling and pragmatic solutions to your organization’s most pressing challenges.

Erica has presented to corporations, universities, technologists, entrepreneurs, government agencies, and many other groups. Private corporate speaking has included places like Pepsico, Deloitte, Fidelity, McGraw Hill Financial, United Nations, Facebook, Social Media Week, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keynote: Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence

We typically associate success with speed and smarts. But in today’s hypercompetitive world, even those gifts aren’t enough. Collaboration expert Erica Dhawan argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called Connectional Intelligence (CxQ). As radical a concept as Emotional Intelligence was in the 90s, Connectional Intelligence is turning people into superconnectors who accelerate innovation, break down silos and foster breakthrough impact.

This dynamic, engaging, high-energy, fast-paced session will help participants understand the practice of using connectional intelligence as the key to purposeful collaboration, resilience, and business success. Attendees will shift the notion of collaboration from more meetings and emails to productive engagement that improves speed and quality of service, increases subject matter expertise and specialist sharing across silos, reduces cross-team dysfunction and delay, and eliminates duplicative work. Attendees will learn new insights and tools to accelerate the connected power of teams, become more agile and innovative, and drive breakthrough ideas and outcomes.

Learning Outcomes:
● Discover new ways to lead, inspire, and communicate with diverse teams through uncertainty.
● Learn how to keep cross team collaborations aligned, build trust, and foster motivation.
● Gain specific actions to inspire teamwork, innovation, resilience, revitalization, and results-driven progress.
● Behaviors to understand and build trust and connection, no matter the distance.

Keynote: Maniacal Clarity: Reimagine Leadership to Drive Impactful Innovation

We used to think of leadership as constant hustle and grit - the leader that never slept, sent profits through the roof, and embodied the classic rags-to-riches story… But this tired playbook doesn’t seem to work as well as it once did. What changed? What makes a 21st century leader and a great team now? Is it their ability to tell stories? Their decision-making skills? Their communication style?

The critical missing factor is Maniacal Clarity. This is when leaders give their teams exactly what they need to do their absolute best work and enable them to be empowered to influence anyone, anytime, anywhere. Without it, even skilled, motivated and effective teams languish, with cross-team dysfunction, duplicative work, and unhealthy internal competition. Maniacal Clarity in our modern world delivers the ability to spark overarching optimism, inspirational imagination, continuous courage and fast focus.

In her new keynote, WSJ bestselling author and world-renowned speaker Erica Dhawan constructs a new framework for truly shifting minds and changing hearts, in the office, across any distance and with customers. Based on years of research and advising the respected companies around the world, this keynote promises a ground-breaking look into the science, frameworks, and stories of how to inspire anyone, anytime, anywhere to deliver their best results.

Learning Outcomes:
● Conduct your own clarity audit of your workplace and assess your own Maniacal Clarity habits
● Learn the 4 foundations of Maniacal Clarity and how to bring it to everyone around you with optimism, imagination, courage and focus
● Assess your strengths and opportunities to become a Maniacal Clarity change agent
● Develop an action plan to inspire your teams, customers, and the world around you to drive performance, teamwork and innovation

Keynote: Digital Body Language: Collaborate Faster and Further, Together

Email replies that show up a week later. Video chats full of “oops... sorry no you go” and “can you hear me?!” Ambiguous text-messages. Is it any wonder communication takes us so much time and effort to figure out? How did we lose our innate capacity to understand each other? Humans rely on body language to connect and build trust, but with most of our communication happening from behind a screen, traditional body language signals are no longer visible - or are they? In her keynote, Erica combines cutting-edge research with engaging storytelling to decode the new signals and cues that have replaced traditional body language across genders, generations, and cultures. In person, we lean in, uncross our arms, smile, nod, and make eye contact to show we listen and care. Online, reading carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy. And a phone or video call is worth a thousand emails. In this keynote, Erica Dhawan, author of the new book DIGITAL BODY LANGUAGE will supercharge your teams with collectively understood rules that foster connection, build trust and drive innovation.

Learning Outcomes:
● Understand your collaboration style and the digital body language signals you may be broadcasting (even if you don't intend to!)
● Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video, and even live meetings
● Develop a collaboration strategy that fosters valuable relationships, both in-person and online
● End cultures of useless meetings, missed deadlines, and digital misunderstandings