Laura’s keynote on engagement, retention, and what actually motivates people
The Limitless Leader
How to Drive Engagement for Every Member of Your Team
Your people are quietly checking out because they are being graded against a scorecard that doesn’t matter to them. Status and pay were never the whole story, and now they aren’t even the main one. Built on nearly 10,000 responses from 113 countries, from every possible demographic and industry, this keynote shows leaders what their people actually want from work, and delivers four levers to help them bring everything they are to everything they do.
Disengagement is the most expensive problem nobody puts on the budget.
For twenty years, Laura was a retained executive recruiter whose job it was to call people who were wildly successful and convince them to go to work for her clients. She’d call because they were successful, but despite all this success, they weren’t very happy. So they all called her back.
Every team has those people: fine on paper, seemingly doing their jobs, but taking the recruiter’s call anyway. The old scorecard of success no longer fits today’s workforce, and leaders who still swear by it don’t know their teams are at risk until the exit interview is over.
Miss any one of the four C’s, and you don’t have a satisfied employee. You have a resignation that hasn’t been written yet.
Success doesn’t build engagement. Consonance does.
What people want from work and what we give them are not the same.
Consonance is the alignment between what you do and who you are. When it’s there, people walk through fire. When it’s missing, even outwardly successful people quietly disengage. Laura has been conducting workforce engagement research since 2019 to understand what drives this. In a seven-year study of nearly 10,000 people in 113 countries, the gap is wide.
29-point gap
77.2% Say work should give their life purpose
47.8% Feel their company’s mission aligns with their own
50-point gap
86.7% Need work to involve something bigger than themselves
36.9% Feel their work gives deeper meaning to their community and values
42-point gap
85.4% Want work to represent who they are
43.4% Feel they’re the best version of themselves at work
Consonance in one continuous loop.
Consonance rests on four pillars, and they aren’t a checklist. Each one feeds the next: a calling makes the work matter, work that matters gives back, what it gives back earns you more say, and that agency frees you to follow your calling further. Strengthen one, and the others follow. Neglect one, and the whole loop slows.
Calling
Am I inspired by the work?
Connection
Does my work matter?
Contribution
What does work give to me?
Control
Do I have any agency at all?
It’s not enough to be a good leader.
When the relationship with their leader is real, 53% of people say they do their best work. When the leader is capable but there’s no real relationship, that drops to 21%.
What predicts whether your best people stay isn’t how good you look as a boss. It’s whether they feel known. There are a million miles between being loved and being seen.
Four moves, one for each pillar of consonance.
Leaders leave with a clear read on what drives their people, four levers to keep good people engaged, and a path to help everyone else get better.
Start with calling.Allow for broad definitions of inspiration: building a business, serving a leader, solving a problem, or raising a family.
Make your people the hero.Trade “How can I help?” for “What needs to happen?” so they’re the one who acts and matters. Get close to the work, not above it.
Ask what moves them.Learn what each person wants work to contribute to their life, whether money, status, flexibility, or more, and measure against that.
Give your people a say.Hand over real influence, with sightlines into the metrics and decisions that affect them. Agency is a function of trust; trust is a function of sightlines.
Customized keynotes, where Laura’s message meets your moment.
Every talk is customized to the decisions your audience actually makes. Bring it in as a keynote, or build on it so the change lasts. It works especially well for leadership conferences, associations, and high-turnover industries.
Keynote
The data, the stories, and the four C’s, built around your audience and the people they lead.
Half-Day Working Session
Leaders map the four C’s for their own teams and leave with a plan for each person.
Your Own Data
Your people take the Limitless Assessment before the event, and Laura brings your organization’s results to the stage.
“She challenged our thinking on employee engagement and gave us tools to increase morale, productivity, and build more cohesive teams.”
The book
Limitless
How to ignore everybody, carve your own path, and live your best life
The book behind this keynote. Give every attendee a copy, and the four C’s keep working long after the event ends.
- Washington Post bestseller
- One of Good Morning America’s Favorite Books of the Year
- Read in seven languages
More keynotes from Laura
Your best people are deciding right now whether to stay. Make the answer easy.
Tell us your date, your audience, and what you need them to do differently. You’ll hear back the same business day. Bureaus welcome.