Drew Dudley

“How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourself a leader?”

What would happen if you asked that at your next team meeting? What percentage of hands do you think would be raised? Leadership speaker Drew Dudley has asked that question to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and he’s yet to find an organization where the majority of employees are willing to call themselves leaders. That’s a problem—and this keynote aims to help solve it.

We often evaluate leadership over periods of time: a fiscal quarter, a year, even an entire career. Dudley argues that the most impactful leaders and the most successful organizations evaluate leadership differently. They focus on “everyday leadership” and ensure that it’s fostered, acknowledged, and rewarded. To Dudley, this means creating a process to create more “lollipop moments.” Don’t be fooled by the name; “lollipop moments” represent moments of powerful impact and growth, and can be transformative at every level of an organization.

A born storyteller with infectious energy, Dudley shares practical insights on how successful leaders create cultures of leadership in their own lives and within their organizations. Featuring examples that originate everywhere from small-town Canada to the deserts of Qatar, and characters who range from janitors to CEOs, this presentation will make you laugh, think, and reconsider the ways you evaluate leadership in your life and workplace.

Your organization has smart, dedicated, and talented people. So why does it sometimes struggle to get everyone working together effectively? Silos develop when people fear that working as part of a collective will stand in the way of reaching personal goals and living their core values. As a result, they stick to people with the same values, and avoid engagement where their values might be compromised. This can lead to cliques, turf wars, interpersonal conflict, and of course, lower productivity and satisfaction.

The problem in many organizations is that those within them only discover (or really, guess at) the key values of their teammates when a conflict arises or when a teammate does something they don’t like. In this keynote, Dudley provides a step-by-step process organizations can use to help team members understand their own values and those of their colleagues, as well as embed four key values necessary for collaboration in every organizational culture.

"Have you ever watched a movie that had a big twist at the end? The next time you watch that movie, you see everything that happens in a different light. That’s how I felt looking back on my life once I learned I had bipolar disorder,” says leadership speaker Drew Dudley.

Dudley has spoken to over 100,000 people around the world about creating personal cultures of leadership. This presentation is the story of how he often felt he had no right to do so. He shares the exhilarating highs and devastating lows made possible by his disease, and talks about the challenges of managing personal and professional relationships despite fear and self-doubt. He shares the pressure he felt to deny his illness as he experienced greater success, and the difficulties he encountered in seeking, finding, and accepting help. “I’ve come to realize that we all fight silent battles in our lives,” he says. “Battles we keep quiet because we are afraid they will make us look weak, or unemployable, or an embarrassment to those we care about.”

Dudley weaves humour with insight to make this a presentation about more than mental illness: he aims to shed light on how each of us can more effectively fight the silent battles in our own lives. Blending his personal story with universal leadership principles, he provides not only a greater understanding of life with mental illness, but equips the audience with tools to become more resilient, respond better to adversity, and improve their own mental well being.

In speaking to over 250,000 people around the world, Drew Dudley has discovered that the vast majority of them are simply not comfortable calling themselves leaders.

This aversion to seeing ourselves as leaders is a result of ingrained cultural practices and perspectives that suppress our talents and ambitions, disengage us from the leadership process, and make us regress as leaders and agents of change. These roadblocks to leadership aren’t consciously created, nor are they the fault of any individual or group. They emerge from the “untaught lessons” of our education system—lessons that too often leave people feeling that what others think of them is somehow more important than what they think of themselves.

In this keynote, Dudley highlights these barriers and how they develop, and with hope, humour, and optimism, focuses on ways in which they can be overcome.