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OUR SPEAKERS
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Julia Whitney is an executive coach, trainer and speaker who helps Product, Design and Tech leaders iterate to leadership excellence, increasing their self-awareness and resourcefulness along the way. Her current client list includes leaders and leadership teams from Accenture, Ocado, Deliveroo, MailChimp, Atlassian, IDEO, the Financial Times, ANZ Bank, and others. Julia regularly speaks at Product Leadership, Tech Leadership and Design Leadership conferences and meet-ups.
Julia brings her own experience as a board level leader to her practice. She’s led design teams for more than 20 years, in both the U.S. and the UK, most recently as GM and Executive Creative Director for the BBC’s 150 person User Experience and Design department.
Julia Whitney
Executive Coach, Leadership Coach
English
Languages:
Location:
London, United Kingdom
Can also give an online talk/webinar
Paid only. Contact speaker for pricing!
MY TALKS
The Human Blueprint
Soft Skills, Professional Development, Leadership
As tech leaders, it’s all too easy for us to believe the popular meme that humans can be divided into two camps: those who embrace change, and those who resist it. It's tempting to see ourselves as members of the first group: enlightened heroes, set to inherit the future. And it's tempting to cast the second group as petty villains: narrow-minded, obstructive, and soon to be left behind.
But this meme sets up a false dichotomy. It masks is a load of complexity, and obscures what’s common to us all as humans. Instead we should ask: What does change trigger in all of us? And what can we hold as our centre as we all flex and stretch: as we observe and iterate ourselves and our teams? As leaders, what choices can we make to effect change for the better, in the working lives of ourselves and our teams?
Bending like Bamboo
Soft Skills, Professional Development, Leadership
“…bamboo, bent even to the ground, will spring upright after the passage of the storm.”
-Japanese proverb
Our lives, as leaders, can be stressful. We juggle demands from multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs, and look after our people, with their individual quirks and crises. We battle with peers over resources or principles. And sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. We lose the argument, the employee, or points with our boss. We lose money, customers, or even our job.
How do we bounce back from these losses, both big and small? How do we sustain our energy? How do we, like the bamboo in the proverb, spring upright again once the storm has passed?
We can’t make life less stressful, but we can learn to manage our energy and perspective, and to bounce back more readily. In this talk we’ll look at 5 facets of bounce-back-ability, and learn small changes we can make to grow more resilient.
How's your Team's Conflict Competence?
Soft Skills, Professional Development, Leadership
In her talk, Julia will be looking at different types of conflict in teams, how to navigate it, and it's impact on team effectiveness.
Group Decision Making's Dirty Little Secrets
Soft Skills, Professional Development, Leadership
As leaders, we can make our best decisions by involving our teams in the process.
Research shows that decisions made with a greater diversity of inputs are better. And when an individual has contributed to a decision, they are more likely to act on it, and follow through. They’re also more likely to feel motivated, engaged and empowered as a result of being involved in the process.
So, all good, right? Well, yes… theoretically. But in practice, probably not as often as we’d like. That’s because there’s a dark side too.
This talk is about the dirty little secrets of group decision making that risk getting in the way of all the upside. We’ll look at group dynamics gone wrong, obstacles posed by cognitive biases, and how people’s sense of responsibility for a decision can easily weaken when it’s made by a group.
Then we’ll turn back to the bright side: we’ll show easy ways that you can improve your group decision making process, almost immediately.
The Human Blueprint
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Bending like Bamboo
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How's your Team's Conflict Competence?
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Group Decision Making's Dirty Little Secrets
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