Dr. Jill Birch

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• Compassionate Leadership: The Secret to Creating Competitive Advantage

  Master the seven practices of relational leadership to gain not just a compassionate but a competitive advantage. This new system of leading fuses purpose with performance by helping leaders learn how to develop greater self-awareness and channel the compassion of others.

  In this informative presentation, Jill Birch makes the case for this new way to lead, sharing case studies and stories to illustrate how one can develop these new leadership muscles — to see through the eyes of others, empower innovation, and nurture a more trusting culture. Audiences will also learn how to recognize the seven deadly derailers that negatively impact even the best performers, and how, through harnessing compassion, they can make a significant contribution that not only helps them grow as a leader, but help their organization become more agile and resilient.

  Audiences will walk away with:

  • Seven relational practices that turbo-charge leadership performance.
  • Greater self-awareness in how you lead that unlocks new behaviour.
  • A sense of higher purpose leadership that ignites commitment, trust, and accountability.

• Leading Change to Nurture a Culture of Trust

  Never before have so many of us had moments where we’ve said, “I didn’t see that coming” or “How could I have missed such a crucial piece of information?” As leaders respond to the impact of COVID-19, many lament, “leading is becoming increasingly impossible”.

  But what if you could find “the possible” during these challenging times? The secret is taking a pause to better understand how you lead. When we understand how leadership happens, relationships improve, costly missteps are avoided, goals are more quickly achieved, and decisions made are evidence-based.

  In this virtual presentation, you’ll explore a collaborative framework — the seven stepping stones of relational leadership. Audiences will learn:

  • How to enrich your leadership to unlock new behaviour.
  • How to collaborate to create greater alignment and nurture culture.
  • How to navigate change to awaken strategy.
  • How to foster higher purpose leadership to ignite commitment, trust, and accountability.
  • How to harness multiple perspectives to drive more evidence-based decisions.

  By making the leap, you’ll lead relationally and as a result build community and grow collective team intelligence. Renewing our leadership is the most important contribution we can make during these moments. Help shape the kind of future organization you want to work in and the kind of world we all want to live in.

• Changing the Change: Leading Complex Team Projects with Passion

  Culture is an organization’s single most powerful competitive advantage. While most leaders say they could improve their culture, fewer than 20% actually do it. Today’s workforce is not only demanding a trusting culture but also a role in directly shaping and contributing to it, while leaders are demanding agility and greater problem solving.

  In this keynote, Jill Birch outlines how both sides can come together to nurture a healthier culture. Audiences will learn how to instill team confidence to help teams become more innovative, strategic, and curious. By learning how to foster a sense of belonging, leaders can better support teams to capitalize on the very problems that may be pulling them apart.

  Audiences will walk away with:

  • Leadership practices that will help create psychological safety and smash siloes.
  • Inspiration to increase agility while fostering a greater sense of belonging.
  • Strategies to develop storytelling skills to strengthen teams and nurture a healthy culture.

• The Power of Compassionate Leadership: Driving Innovation and Growth

  Leaders have an unprecedented opportunity today to harness the potential of innovation in a landscape of changing workplace dynamics. But there’s a problem here: few leaders actually have an innovation process that accelerates performance and productivity.

  This keynote provides the tools to foster innovation, strengthen business models, and improve work practices. It will help leaders become more adept by focusing on the five core areas that drive innovation — strategic foresighting, navigating complexity, decision-making, problem solving, and visual thinking.

  Audiences will walk away with:

  • Key insights from big idea stories ripped from the headlines.
  • Scanning skills to see the world differently and how to apply these to ongoing strategy development.
  • An innovation process to support greater team innovation and creativity.

• Leading in the Age of AI: Human Touch in a Digital World

  The pressure is on. Leaders are split down the middle on how to unlock human potential by integrating AI into the workday. As quickly as AI is driving efficiency in organizations, it’s also demanding a re-think of the kind of leadership needed to nurture a culture that is as productive as it is compassionate.

  This keynote will outline AI’s transformative effects in organizations around the world. It will push and pull on the new balancing act required of leaders as they harness operational efficiency while driving more sophisticated decision making, problem solving, and a more strategic mindset. Jill Birch will explore practices leaders are using to develop more collaborative and effective teamwork, while showcasing how AI helped develop this new “human touch”.

  Audiences will walk away with:

  • Best practices showcasing how AI can promote greater collaboration, less siloing, and flatter decision making.
  • Strategies to embrace — and practice — the heightened responsibility to mentor and coach while appreciating multiple perspectives faster.
  • Enhanced skills in the AI era including adaptability, continuous learning, and the ability to inspire, motivate, and prepare teams for future challenges.

• Workshop: Wabi Sabi: How Leadership Happens

  Workshop Highlights

  • Explore a new way to develop your leadership through the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, which celebrates the beauty of imperfection, appreciation of impermanence and acceptance of the messiness of life, and learn how it will change the ways you practice leadership.
  • Gain a foundational knowledge of the “P3 Framework of Relational Leadership.”
  • Learn how the concept of collective team intelligence can deepen team awareness and appreciation of the behaviours that inspire your ever-evolving culture.
  • Explore six practical ways that leaders live the how to solve their biggest leadership challenges.

  Description

  “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.”

  When Leonard Cohen wrote these he likely wasn’t thinking about the current state of leadership. But his lines reveal a sense of appreciation of a different way to think about how we define leadership and how we develop leaders. The workshop begins by exploring the principles of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that embraces the wisdom that comes from seeing beauty in impermance and incompleteness. Participants will examine how the concept translates into creating collective team intelligence or CTI. CTI deepens awareness and appreciation of behaviours that inspire our ever-evolving, messy and imperfect cultures. Through exploring relational practices, leaders will live the how of now learning six ways to address their biggest leadership challenges.

• Workshop: Five Key Principles of Relational Leadership

  Workshop Highlights

  • Step into the evolution of leadership beginning with HOW leadership actually happens and the “P3 Kalideiscope of Change.”
  • Learn the five practices that free leaders to create and collaborate to solve organizational challenges.
  • Recognize the right different types of change impacting your workplace now and how you can overcome them.
  • Develop an understanding of how you now lead and harness the “P3 Framework of Relational Leadership” to gain self-awareness and become a 21^st Century Leader.
  • Gain deep insight into leadership’s most under-used muscle — reflecting critically — and learn to how to exercise new perspectives to achieve your objectives faster.

  Program Description
  Working with the five key principles of relational leadership, you’ll be immersed in processes immediately applicable to your unique work environment. For groups of any size, this laboratory of leadership change is laced with the latest research, practical examples, and, most impactfully, your stories and experiences and those of your peers. Engaging with the framework will help you in the three key areas that keeps busy leaders up at night — problem solving, achieving strategic goals, and leadership development.

  *Learning can be tailored to any industry or sector and can also be developed to complement your company’s strategic objectives.

• Workshop: Unlock Your Greatest Leadership Challenge: From Shatterpoint to On Point

  Workshop Highlights

  • Ask the most pressing question — how leadership happens to unpack your greatest leadership challenge.
  • Learn how the concept of a shatterpoint can help solve your most pressing leadership issue.
  • Gain new insights into five practices to help you develop greater self-awareness, uphold ethics, make sense of our complex world, facilitate collective team intelligence, and guide positive outcomes.
  • Explore the six shatterpoint questions that facilitate deep questioning about our leadership beliefs and challenges.

  Description
  It’s a well-known fact that when we know how leadership happens, we can change ourselves. Yet we spend so much time focusing on who is leading, what they are leading, and why they are leading that we often don’t have time to ask the most important question in leadership today: How does leadership happen? This workshop will help participants to appreciate a new way of leading and addressing leadership challenges, by leading relationally. Participants will be asked to bring their toughest leadership challenge and will work on it throughout the program as they learn how to apply the five key “hows”. Collaborative team work will support participants to develop innovative solutions to their challenge in practical ways that build culture and new understanding.

• Workshop: Relational Team Leadership @ Work: Smashing Silos to Build Collaboration

  Light a fire under your team by learning how to successfully navigate the intersection of team dynamics, strategy, organizational goals, and sectoral forces to achieve performance results.

  We’ll examine five key questions relational leaders ask, work with shatterpoints (no turning back moments of change), and harness them to improve team dynamics and create greater productivity.

  Rounding out this program, leaders will go beyond traditional old school “storytelling” and “story selling” and move towards story making.

  Participants will examine the essential properties of story making, co-creation techniques, and methods to identify and harness pivot points that lead positive change. The four key processes of story making will be explored including: penetrating context; appreciating power and politics; guiding, coaching and monitoring conversations; and developing holistic team meeting strategies. Drawing from their own, and shared experiences, leaders will collaborate to create seven different types of organizational stories.

  This session will provide team leaders with hands-on skills to facilitate collaboration within and across teams while achieving results, developing deeper community and building culture.

• Virtual Workshop: Leading During Crisis: The Stepping Stones Leadership Journey

  This virtual workshop is an intensive three-part immersive online experience designed to help leaders make the transition from their lives before COVID-19 to the new world they now find themselves.

  The program is designed to create leadership breakthroughs, inspire innovation, and support leaders working through this disruptive change. Participants will explore the seven stepping stones to transition their current leadership responsibilities to a place where they co-create a renewed future state.

  Content can be tailored to fit a client’s needs as part of a comprehensive three-part package or individual, one-hour sessions.

  Part 1 – Step Across: Leading in Crisis
  This one-hour virtual workshop begins by exploring how much leadership has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Participants will be introduced to the five stages of crisis and will assess their readiness to navigate these stages through four critical competencies — communications, cultural, leadership, and managerial.

  We’ll move through the 10 most critical moments individuals and organizations are facing at this time and the most important elements to be paying attention to. Next, leaders will be asked to identify and discuss their biggest leadership challenges. This work will form the foundations for part two of this workshop series.

  Participants will learn:

  • How to manage the impact of the pandemic crisis on leadership and management.
  • Current leadership practices and key areas to enhance performance.
  • The 10 most critical moments of leadership to determine where focus is required.
  • The four crisis competencies necessary to ride the waves of change during crisis.

  Part 2 – Step Up: The Power of the Pause
  This one-hour virtual workshop begins where part one left off. Leaders will further build out challenges identified in part one. Through feedback and encouragement from colleagues, they will create a folio of innovative practices.

  Participants will then explore relational leadership and how to make informed decisions through the power of the pause. Mastering the moments between making a decision and taking action can mean all the difference in today’s leadership environment.

  Participants will learn:

  • How to harness the relational framework to build self-awareness and new behaviours.
  • Insights into new ways to appreciate and engage teams.
  • How to facilitate collective and connective intelligence among peers, colleagues, and team members.

  Part 3 – Step Out: Master Class to Harness Change
  This one-hour virtual workshop will bring together the key insights of part one and two by exploring new practices and processes to help leaders find new ways to learn and process complex information. With these insights, leaders are better able to harness strategy, collaborate with others, and achieve performance results.

  Participants will work with a personalized system to map out current opportunities, challenges, and organizational priorities through visualization exercises.

  Participants will learn:

  • Relational approaches to coaching teams in order to build stronger alignment and accountability.
  • Change leadership practices through the identification of fast-moving global trends.
  • The eight different types of change and processes to respond.
  • How to revitalize ways to learn by seeing through the eyes, hearts, and minds of others.