Liz Wiseman

Liz Wiseman's research answers a question most leadership material never asks: not whether a leader is capable, but what happens to everyone else's capability when that leader is in the room.

Multipliers, a New York Times bestseller, divides leaders into two groups by their effect rather than their intent. Multipliers get roughly twice the capability out of the same people. Diminishers, who are usually intelligent, well-meaning and entirely unaware of the effect, shut down the thinking around them by answering first, rescuing too early and being the smartest person in every discussion. The uncomfortable finding, and the one that makes the session land, is that most accidental diminishers believe they are being helpful.

Impact Players, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, turns the lens around and asks why some contributors of equal talent become the ones leadership relies on. The answer is largely about what they do with ambiguity, ownership and the unglamorous work nobody has been assigned.

She is chief executive of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm in Silicon Valley whose clients include Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Nike and Salesforce. Before founding it she spent seventeen years at Oracle, where she was a vice president and the global leader for human resource development at Oracle University, having created a corporate university there at twenty-four. She holds a bachelor's degree in business management and a master's in organizational behavior from Brigham Young University, and Thinkers50 has ranked her among the world's top ten leadership thinkers.

The session is most useful to a team whose problem is not talent but throughput of ideas: capable people who have stopped contributing in meetings, decisions that always route back to one person, or a leadership bench that is not developing. It is delivered as a keynote and often as a keynote plus a workshop, because the diagnostic only helps once a leader can see which of the behaviors they personally do.