Brent Gleeson

Brent Gleeson served in the Navy SEALs as a combat veteran before leaving active duty to build TakingPoint Leadership, a consulting firm focused on leadership development and organizational transformation. His books TakingPoint and Embrace the Suck apply SEAL principles directly to the challenges of leading teams through change, building high-performance cultures, and developing the accountability that makes organizations execute at a higher level.

The SEAL Framework for Organizational Change

Gleeson’s central argument is that most organizational change efforts fail not because the strategy is wrong but because the culture is not built to carry it. His keynotes give leadership teams the specific frameworks SEALs use to build trust, define accountability, and execute under uncertainty, and translate them into the corporate environments where those disciplines are most needed and least common. His presentations are built for executive audiences navigating real transformation.

Combat Experience Meets Business Credentials

Gleeson holds degrees from Southern Methodist University, certificates from Oxford, and a graduate business degree from the University of San Diego. That academic foundation, combined with his operational experience as a SEAL, gives him a platform that is both rigorous and credible. He is not recounting military stories and drawing loose analogies. He is delivering a change management system grounded in one of the world’s most demanding leadership environments.

Brent Gleeson keynotes are booked for events focused on organizational change, leadership, building high-performance cultures, accountability, resilience, and the team-building and execution principles developed in special operations and applied to business transformation.

Maximum Performance Through Trust, Teamwork & Accountability

In this presentation Brent draws connections between how high performance teams in any environment can leverage trust, teamwork and accountability to achieve their goals. He provides tools for improving trust that have a measurable economic impact on any organization. He also dives into how building a culture of accountability can have game changing effects and drive a team to achieve more than they ever expected to.

Leadership Lessons For Elite Teams

This presentation is specific to leadership at all levels. Brent compares stories from the battlefield, the lessons learned, and how those lessons apply to leadership at any level across any type of organization or team. Brent talks about how to build a culture of leadership, servant leadership, adaptive change management, and much more. The audience will leave with at least three key take aways that they can start applying to their personal and professionals lives immediately.

Crushing Your Goals & Achieving The Impossible

This presentation is designed to motivate teams at all levels and across any type of organization. Brent shares stories from combat and talks about teamwork, persistence, adaptation, sacrifice, and how elite teams really achieve success and win. The audience will leave with at least three key takeaways that they can start applying to their personal and professionals lives immediately.

Leading Change: A Navy SEAL’s Principles for Navigating Organizational Change

In today’s more volatile, unpredictable and complex business environments businesses can find themselves in almost constant states of change. But more change initiatives fall short or fail due to a lack of leadership alignment, the proper culture founded on accountability and trust and poor discipline. In this presentation Gleeson provides actionable principles for managers to use in leading an organization through change.

Prioritizing People Culture & Values to Achieve Results

People, culture and values often have a reputation for being a “soft” element of management’s priorities and not directly tied to improving profitability. Yet, many studies show that leading with culture makes an organization stronger, more resilient and much more profitable. Gleeson shares correlations between SEAL culture and high performance teams in business and how prioritizing people, culture and values drives a company to achieve better results.

Building High-Trust Organizations that Achieve Winning Results

Productivity, income and profits of any organization can be directly negatively or positively impacted depending on the levels of trust within the team. Trust is one of the most critical elements of a strong team culture that gets results and successfully navigates change. In this presentation, Gleeson shares the seven principles for building high-trust organizations: Integrity of Leadership, Investing in Respect, Empowering Everyone, Accountability for All, Creating a Winning Vision, Keeping the Team Informed, and Embracing Sacrifice.