Leanne Meyer directs the Carnegie Mellon Women’s Executive Leadership Academy and is the former executive director of the university’s Accelerate Leadership Center at the Tepper School of Business. She is the author of the bestselling Climbing the Spiral Staircase, a critical guide empowering women with the tools they need to accelerate their careers and gain control of their professional paths.

Leanne Meyer’s Speech Topics:

Accelerating Your Path to Leadership: Navigating the Obstacles of Gender Difference

Women leaders face distinct challenges as they develop a career—a lack of role models, the absence of formal and informal networks, and a career path that tends to be more complex than those of men. Women also tend to juggle multiple and often conflicting roles that expand across the gamut of their work and personal lives. As a result, women often have different career motivators, goals, and aspirations than men. Women place a different value on stable relationships, connecting to colleagues, being recognized, and giving back to the community.

In this keynote, Leanne Meyer shares learnings from her new book, Climbing The Spiral Staircase, shedding light on the obstacles that are still keeping women’s talents from being fully utilized and recognized at work and offering researchbased suggestions for personal and professional transformation. Participants will walk away with actionable strategies to improve opportunities for themselves and others.

All suggested strategies are grounded in pragmatic, evidence-based thinking. Specifically, we will be covering three transitions that speak to a shift participants will need to make to advance their careers. We’ll equip participants to move confidently from Perfection to Passion, from being “Clueless” to Connected, and from Worker Bee to Strategic Resource. These transitions offer a framework for participants to understand where they are in their career currently, as well as provide context for how to develop the mindsets and skill sets to build the career they aspire to have.

The overarching message to participants is to be intentional in recognizing their sources of strength, assessing their impact and offering value to the organization, and achieving their ambitions.

The Best Gender Conversation You’ll Ever Have at Work

Let’s have the best gender conversation you’ll ever have at work. High-performing organizations find ways to ensure that women are uninhibited in bringing their best selves to work every day. Many leaders want women in their organizations to be supported but may not know where to start. You want to show up as a good leader, but not say the wrong thing. When it comes to gender topics in the workplace, there are headlines, and then there is research.

This keynote is built on research and full of achievable actions to understand everything from unconscious bias to how to design a career ladder that empowers and motivates women. It’s a must-have in the toolkit for leaders who want to maximize their impact and support their talent.

In this keynote, Leanne Meyer helps turn good intentions into best practice.

-The 6 competencies of inclusive leadership

-The 4 surprising patterns of bias in the workplace

-A “Call to Action: 5 Areas Where You Can Make a Difference.”

Actionable best practices to interrupt gender bias in existing workplace systems and processes:

-The Hiring Process

-Raising the Bar in Meetings

-Giving Feedback

-Career Development

-Work-life Integration

Evidenced-based content covered in this session:

-Learn the data on the impact of unconscious bias and gender on organizational performance

-Hone skills needed to lead and manage across genders

-Gain practical tips to lead and nurture 100% of their workforce and talent pipeline

There are real challenges, yes, but there are also real solutions. When put into practice within organizational systems and individual leadership styles, businesses can achieve significant competitive advantage.

Are you leadership material? Refining your Leadership Brand

A leadership brand conveys your identity and distinctiveness, the value you offer. If you have the wrong brand for the position you hold or the position you want, then your work is not having the impact it could.

Building Networks of Influence: Stretching to Grow Your Leadership

In this presentation, we explore how developing a set of strategic networking skills is what separates successful leaders from the rest of the pack. Building a sphere of influence creates a web of contacts to provide the support, feedback, and resources needed to get things done for you and your team.

From Competent to Strategic: Building Capacity to Drive Results Successful leaders have discovered how to transition from being a dependable task-oriented worker to a strategic thinker and doer who offers solutions and makes value-added contributions, dealing with the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities facing an organization from a proactive, initiating stance.

The Art of Asking for It! Negotiating as Leadership Practice and Advocating for Yourself This session will help participants recognize opportunities to negotiate, eliminate anxiety, feel entitled to get what they want and avoid social consequences that inhibit good outcomes for themselves and the organization.

Video:

Bio:

With more than thirty years of senior-level consulting and executive development experience with global Fortune 100 companies, Leanne Meyer’s mission is to help leaders reenergize their lives and their work with passion and purpose, using evidence-based methods to change business practices around the world. Her work focuses on equipping leaders to develop impactful new skills, successfully navigate critical career inflection points, and create alignment between their professional identities and their goals and aspirations.

Leanne directs the Carnegie Mellon Women’s Executive Leadership Academy and is the former executive director of the university’s Accelerate Leadership Center at the Tepper School of Business. She is the author of the bestselling Climbing the Spiral Staircase, a critical guide empowering women with the tools they need to accelerate their careers and gain control of their professional paths.

Leanne’s career and creativity are anchored in leadership development—in helping people discover their potential, stand strong in their values, claim their worth, and believe in their talents to become the leaders they want to be in ways that embrace possibility and potential.

Her calling is to help leaders clarify their goals and build the skills they need to achieve them. Her work has taken her to three continents where she has served in corporate, academic, and not-for-profit settings as a business leader, program designer and developer, facilitator, speaker, educator, and coach.