Modupe Akinola

As employees ascend to more powerful positions in your organization, they face ever-increasing demands on their time. These demands can be stressful. They have the potential to negatively impact performance, health, and well-being. In this talk, Modupe Akinola shares tools to help employees at all levels of the organization learn from and adapt to stress in ways that can help increase their productivity and performance, enhance their creativity, and improve health outcomes. What strategies will help you avoid, reduce, and counteract stress in ways that maximize individual and organizational performance? How can you identify stress triggers in yourself and in those you manage in order to improve achievement, individually, in a team, and across your company? Modupe shows you that it’s not simply about managing stress. It’s about actively harnessing the beneficial effects of stress so everyone can thrive within the organization.

What mental biases, skewed logic, false premises and misleading emotions interfere with your ability to lead effectively? What are the most effective ways to ensure that misperceptions and faulty thinking don’t get in the way of you being an effective, even inspiring, leader? In this interactive talk, Modupe Akinola provides fundamental tools to enhance leadership development. What are the leadership blindspots and common pitfalls that hold back so many senior managers and executives? How do you formalize a process to make better decisions? How do you persuade and influence key stakeholders? Drawing on deep research, and delivered with an easy-going grace, Modupe shows you how to leverage the unique portfolio of skills, talents, and backgrounds of those you manage to drive for your team and your organization.

The most successful leaders don’t wait to stumble on happiness. They actively manage their own happiness and the happiness of those they lead. The ever-expanding science of happiness facilitates this process by identifying misconceptions about what happiness truly is, highlighting features of the mind that influence how we think, and offering research to help us change our bad habits. In this talk, Modupe Akinola draws on the latest research to help you be happier as a leader and help others do the same. Why are we so bad predicting what will make us happy? What factors do—and don’t—make people happy? How can we best manage well-being, life satisfaction while fighting the biases that prevent you from being happy? What skills can you use to lead others in a way that increases their happiness, and yours?

In the contemporary knowledge economy, leaders must create sustainable settings for productive exchange and interaction where all members can thrive and put their best foot forward. Leaders are constantly interacting with peers, subordinates, and customers with very different backgrounds and experiences.  When harnessed effectively, these differences can be the catalyst for creative and innovative breakthroughs and the pathway to team and organizational learning and effectiveness; but when misunderstood, these differences can challenge employees’ values, performance, workplace relationships, and team effectiveness. In this talk, Modupe Akinola helps leaders navigate workplace settings more effectively and improve their ability to create, work within, and lead both teams and global organizations. Through thoughtful dialogue, and by drawing on the latest research, she offers leaders the opportunity to lead with a racial and gender equity lens, developing their critical thinking on topics such as identity, relationships across difference, bias, and equal opportunity in their organizations and around the world.