Cy Wakeman

Cy Wakeman is a New York Times bestselling author, drama researcher, and one of the most provocative leadership thinkers in the country. Her books Reality-Based Leadership and No Ego have challenged the conventional wisdom on employee engagement and established her as the leading voice on eliminating workplace drama and building cultures of personal accountability.

The Anti-Drama Leadership Expert

Wakeman has spent over 25 years developing her counter-intuitive, reality-based approach to leadership. Her research reveals that most organizational dysfunction stems not from poor engagement programs but from an excess of emotional waste the time and energy people spend on drama, ego, and resistance to reality. She challenges leaders to stop buying into every employee complaint, stop over-investing in engagement surveys, and start holding people accountable for bringing their best selves to work every day.

Ditching Drama and Restoring Sanity to the Workplace

Wakeman’s approach has been adopted by organizations across industries seeking to cut through the noise and build cultures where results matter more than feelings. Her keynotes deliver provocative strategies for eliminating workplace drama and emotional waste, building cultures of personal accountability and ownership, reality-based leadership that produces measurable results, and the counter-intuitive practices that turn disengaged teams into high performers.

No Ego: How leaders Can Cut the Cost of Drama, End Entitlement and Drive Big Results

Recent research conducted by Cy Wakeman in conjunction with the Futures Company, has discovered that rather than driving performance and creating efficiencies for the organization, conventional leadership strategies and philosophies are actually fueling drama in the workplace. In fact, research indicated that under currently prescribed leadership philosophy and strategic best practices, up to three months per year of each employee’s time – potentially billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone – is wasted in drama. In this session, Cy proposes a radically different approach to core leadership philosophies such as engagement, change management, and accountability. Join Cy as she calls leadership professionals to redefine HR and leadership with science and research and to teach leaders strategies and tools that will actually work in their modern workplace.

Reality-Based Leadership™: Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace and Turn Excuses into Results

These are challenging times in our businesses today. In leadership, we must become willing to admit that the ways in which we have taught leaders to lead over the years is simply not working. These times are calling for a new type of leader, one who can bring peace, sanity, and results back to the workplace! In this session, Cy rocks audiences as she teaches the key principles of her new wave of Reality-Based Leadership™.

Business Readiness – Ensuring Our Teams are Ready for What’s Next

In this high energy session, Cy Wakeman will help leaders understand their heightened responsibilities in delivering teams and talent that are ready for what’s next along with strategies to ensure that teams able to quickly adapt and change and deliver on the needs of the organization to provide relevant, high- value, services in even mature markets. After all, change is only hard for the unready.

Hardwiring Accountability into Your Workforce

Everyone is talking about accountability, but few organizations are actually successful in ensuring that personal accountability is hardwired into their talent and everyday business operations. Join Cy as she breaks down the core competency of personal accountability and gives you no nonsense, workable strategies to hire for, coach for, and develop for accountability in your workforce! After all, personal accountability is the foundation of Reality Based Leadership™ – a revolution in leadership.

Employee Engagement is Broken: Unlocking the True Driver of Employee Performance

For years, our organizations have been investing time, money and energy into engaging our employees based on the promise that engagement drives results. While engaging our employees is critical, it turns out that engagement isn’t enough. Engagement without accountability is chaos. In this dynamic, provocative and groundbreaking presentation, you will be introduced to the concept of Reality-Based Engagement, where accountability and engagement intersect to produce awesome results. This will include some practical guidance for how to cultivate the power of personal accountability within your organization.

VIRTUAL PRESENTATIONS

Introducing two new webinars for leaders and teams relevant to our world today. And while the webinars are new, online training is not new to Reality-Based Leadership, having delivered virtual and live on-line training for over ten years.

FOR LEADERS: Leading in Uncertainty and Crisis

Many of us are focused on how to “get through” the current pandemic so we can get back to business as usual. For Reality-Based leaders, the work at hand is about greatness – how to not only survive the daily in these times but to ensure that your team comes through this crisis better for it, evolved by it, and changed from it.

What you will take away from this session:

This session will outline the role of a leader in profound uncertainty, capturing hearts and minds, keeping teams and individuals focused on the work at hand, all the while ensuring that the forces that will evolve your team and team members is not curtailed.

Cy will interrupt your current thinking and provide tips and techniques to make sure that your team is impacted – but not traumatized – by recent events and that you are leveraging current times to build resilience in your teams and to recreate the way you work in the future.

FOR TEAMS: Finding Peace, Happiness, and Greatness in Transformative Times

In the midst of extreme challenges and disruption, peace, happiness, or greatness quickly start to seem like an impossibility. As humans, we quickly fall prey to the belief that we can’t succeed in circumstances like these and many buy in to the belief that our new normal is one of stress, anxiety, conflict, and suffering. We throttle down to settle for just “getting through” and surviving until things get back to the way things were before.

But what if we had the power to invoke another side of our uniquely human nature? And that part of our human nature is evolution. What if it didn’t have to be a time of stress and anxiety but instead a time of peace, reflection, growth, and adaption? Good news – it can be different. Even better news, at Reality-Based Leadership we know how to make it different.

We all have far more power over our experiences than we claim. Even in the toughest situations each of us can determine whether we are impacted or traumatized and whether our approaches and responses help or hinder our desired results. In fact, how one person experiences these times has a lot more to do with their mindsets, skillsets, habits, and strategies they are deploying than the actual circumstances we are facing.

What you will take away from this session:

This session is designed to help each participant take a quick inventory of their current experience and learn new techniques, strategies, and concepts that are easy to implement and can immediately shift mindsets to one of peace in the present, and resilience in the future. If you are wondering how you can best support your teams through this crisis, here is a unique reminder of just how much positive impact they can have to succeed despite the challenging reality at hand.