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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Minette Norman

If you want to create a culture where diverse teams flourish, you need boldly inclusive leaders.

Author of The Boldly Inclusive Leader | Co-Author of The Psychological Safety Playbook | Former VP of Engineering Practice, Autodesk

Now Playing

Creating an Environment of Psychological Safety (3:56)

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Getting Started with Inclusive Leadership (6:27)

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How Do We Run Inclusive Meetings? (4:23)

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Speaker Reel: Inspiring Boldly Inclusive Leaders (3:45)

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

Revolutionary leadership that sparks creativity, productivity, and success starts with Psychological Safety: a workplace where everyone feels free to share their best ideas. A leading voice in this burgeoning field, MINETTE NORMAN offers actionable advice on how to create cultures of radical collaboration and compassionate teamwork for increased efficiency. Her latest book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader (an Amazon Diversity and Inclusion bestseller), shows you how to leverage a team’s diversity to achieve breakthrough success. Her first bestseller, The Psychological Safety Playbook, is “a must-read for anyone who cares enough to lead” (Seth Godin). Her books are packed with powerful, airtight lessons for managers and employees. Listen to understand, not to respond. Encourage curiosity, and see where it leads. “The world of work could be so much better for everybody,” Minette says. “But that’s only possible if people feel safe to speak up, and be themselves, and share those crazy ideas.”

As a liberal arts major, Minette joined Autodesk as a technical writer and worked her way up to VP of Engineering Practice. There, she led 3,500 software professionals in the male-dominated tech industry, where she focused on engineering practices while nurturing a collaborative and inclusive culture. Now, she’s sharing the methods she’s developed. In her dynamic presentations and interactive workshops, she helps executives and employees at every level rethink how we communicate, which accomplishments we reward, and who belongs in leadership roles. This is the first step to inspiring a creative work culture that leads to break-out innovation and leveraging diversity to achieve breakthrough success.

At her consulting agency, Minette helps leaders build healthy, inclusive organizations where everyone feels like they belong. In her most recent book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader, she provides leaders with actionable strategies and daily practices for cultivating inclusive organizations in which diverse teams can leverage their differences to create a more innovative and productive workplace. Minette shows how being a compassionate leader who welcomes diversity in all its forms will transform not just the workplace, but the world. In her first book The Psychological Safety Playbook—an instant #1 Amazon Bestseller in Business Health and Stress, co-written with Karolin Helbig—Minette bridges the gap between academic research and actionable guides, emphasizing that psychological safety is about the human experience.

She was named one of the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times, and “Business Role Model of the Year” in the Women in IT Awards.

Testimonials

Minette's presentation was down to earth, engaging, and was just right for a mixed room (varying role, experience, etc.). Our team members rated her highly and were excited to use what they learned in the workplace!

XenoPsi

Testimonials

Thank you so much to Minette Norman for joining us! Her presentation was spot-on and I really appreciated how she gave some actionable takeaways that our group can implement right away.

International Security Management Association

Testimonials

Minette was a tremendous keynote speaker at Smartling's Global Ready Conference. She established a unique bond with our audience despite the virtual format and spoke with authority on the subject matter.

Smartling

Testimonials

What an incredible talk with us today! Thank you for being a trailblazer and for paving the way for so many to advance.

Extreme Networks

Testimonials

You’ve really changed my perspective on inclusion. This is what great leaders and people managers do, not the side hustle example you referenced. What an ah-hah moment!

VMware

Testimonials

So engaging and applicable! Loved how you humanized the interaction and shared your personal experiences. This felt like a very genuine conversation and left me wanting more!

Cloudera

Testimonials

Uber Tax is building a culture of belonging - fortifying it day by day, knowing the work is never done. We are grateful for Minette's work and wisdom to help us on our journey.

Uber

Testimonials

Your inclusive meetings workshops made a huge impact. I find that the meetings I attend these days are far more intentional, inclusive, and successful than they were before.

Karat

Lavin Exclusive Speakers

Angela Duckworth

Author of Grit, the #1 New York Times Bestseller | Pioneering Researcher on Grit, Perseverance, and the Science of Success

Daron Acemoglu

2024 Nobel Prize Winner | 3rd Most Cited Economist in the World | MIT Institute Professor | Bestselling Co-Author of Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Creator of The 1619 Project | Executive Producer of the Emmy Award-Winning 1619 Project Hulu Docuseries | MacArthur Genius

Greg Hoffman

Nike's Former Chief Marketing Officer | Author of Emotion by Design

Nicholas Thompson

CEO of The Atlantic | Former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED

Speech Topics

Leadership

The Boldly Inclusive LeaderEmbracing All Aspects of Diversity

Many organizations do their best to hire a diverse workforce—but they often don’t put the same effort towards creating an inclusive culture. Leadership consultant Minette Norman knows that an inclusive culture is the backbone of any thriving workplace. Without it, diversity initiatives will fail. Drawing from her book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader, Minette shares a treasure trove of actionable advice to help cultivate inclusive spaces where diverse teams can take leverage their differences and achieve breakthrough success.

In this thoughtful and compassionate talk, leaders, managers, and employees will learn how to tune into their own behavior, challenge toxic norms, and create inclusive meetings where everyone can speak equally. Minette will also show you how to hire and retain diverse talent, from making sure there are equitable opportunities for advancement to understanding how to manage someone’s job performance while checking your biases at the door. Minette approaches these topics with curiosity and empathy—helping you begin a transformative journey towards putting diversity into practice.

Team Building

Psychological SafetyThe Foundation of Innovative and Engaged Teams

Psychological safety is the belief that we will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Teams that have a high degree of psychological safety are the highest performing teams, the most inclusive teams, the teams that innovate, and the teams that people want to be part of.

In this keynote, Minette Norman shares her approach to creating a psychologically safe culture in which diverse perspectives and experiences are valued so that everyone can fully contribute their best work. Minette tells real-world stories about psychological safety—and its absence—in practice. She also offers practical advice to leaders for increasing psychological safety in any organization or setting, leaving them inspired and equipped to increase psychological safety in their own teams.

Leadership

Radical EmpathyCreating Cultures of Transformative Leadership

No company today can succeed without empathy at the core of its business strategy. But empathy isn’t just about compassion and consideration for your customers. It also means making sure all your employees feel valued, heard, and appreciated. And that takes work.

In this keynote, Minette Norman outlines her approach to ‘radical empathy’: a leadership plan that shatters outdated mindsets about work. She asks audiences to see vulnerability, emotion, and compassion as strengths—even in (or especially in) male-dominated industries. Minette helps us abandon ‘us vs. them’ mentalities, engage in active listening, and make time for the challenging conversations we’ve been putting off. This is a talk to empower leaders so they can take action—and embrace a model of leadership that’s backed by emotion as much as it’s backed by economics.

Workshops & Interactive

Building a Collaborative TeamHow to Run Inclusive Meetings

Data shows us that increasing diversity—of gender, background, even cognitive styles—increases business performance. Simply put, more diverse organizations consistently outperform their peers. But in order for a company to tap into their diverse population, they must first have an inclusive culture—a task that may seem daunting to implement at first. Thankfully, there is a great place to start practicing inclusivity, and it’s inside a process that we’re already intimately familiar with: the meeting.

Meetings are not only where we spend so much of our time; they’re also an embodiment of a company’s wider culture. Unfortunately, only 35% of employees surveyed in a recent HBR study felt consistently comfortable contributing in meetings. In meetings of five to ten participants, that’s only two or three people who feel empowered to contribute. Helping to facilitate meetings that are inclusive and create a sense of emotional safety is a great way for everyone to practice allyship, says transformative leadership consultant Minette Norman. In this highly interactive workshop, Norman explores what it means to model inclusivity, as well as how to create processes that uphold these standards in our organizations.

From setting a meeting agenda to asking proactive questions to inviting counter-perspectives openly, Norman shows us how we can ensure everyone’s voice is heard equally and respectfully in this hands-on workshop. Participants will be blown away with how productive and fulfilling meetings can be once they learn to master their blind spots.