SPEAKING

Economist and author, Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a leading expert in the fields of talent management, workplace transformation, diversity, and inclusion. Dr. Hewlett has been charting new ground for companies and employees with her bestselling books and cutting-edge research.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett has keynoted International Women’s Day at the IMF, given the featured address at Pfizer’s Emerging Markets Leadership Summit in Dubai, and spoken at the White House. She has addressed many corporate, educational, non-profit, and other organizations worldwide. To invite Sylvia Hewlett to speak to your organization, please contact lecture agent

TOPICS

Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success

• Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career

  Sylvia Hewlett’s 2010 study, “The Sponsor Effect: Breaking Through the Last Glass Ceiling” revealed what’s keeping women from the very top: Many qualified women lack the powerful backing necessary to inspire, propel and protect them through the perilous straits of upper management. They lack, in a word, sponsorship. Sponsors advocate and facilitate career moves; they push their protégés to achieve high-level visibility and forge crucial connections. Without sponsors, it is nearly impossible to climb the last and steepest rungs of the career ladder—where competition is at its most intense. Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career maps out the two-way street of this strategic alliance, one that results, for the protégé, in promotion and, for the sponsor, in protection. How does this mutually beneficial relationship form? What keeps it going? What makes it work for both parties? And how can women and minorities get in the game?

• Executive Presence

  Performance, hard work, and sponsors get top talent recognized and promoted. But “leadership potential” isn’t enough to lever men and women into the executive suite. Leadership roles are given to those who also look and act the part. Center for Talent Innovation research reveals that the top jobs often elude women and professionals of color because they lack “executive presence” (EP), or underestimate its importance. And they’re simply not getting the guidance they need to acquire it.

  Executive Presence focuses on gravitas, communication and appearance and provides fresh, startling new insight as to why so few women and people of color make it to the C-suite. Though work/life balance challenges are often cited as a major factor, the fact that many people do not understand EP, let alone how to exude it, also plays an important role. Sylvia Ann Hewlett provides tactics for individuals, managers, and HR professionals to improve their own and other’s executive presence. By understanding the nuances of this key leadership competency, individuals and corporations can work to ensure that top talent advances and companies reap the full leadership potential of their most promising employees

• Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success
• The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering and Technology

Leveraging Diversity: Minority and Multicultural Talent

• Innovation, Diversity and the Marketplace

  For leaders of multinational companies, innovation is the Holy Grail. Nothing impacts the bottom line more powerfully than a product or service that levers open a whole new market. But what—or who—drives innovation? Talent management professionals have long suspected that diversity plays a pivotal role. Yet what they haven’t been able to get from any of the business gurus is hard data showing how diversity kicks in.

  Sylvia Hewlett’s new research shows precisely how diversity unlocks innovation and drives growth. The findings quantify, for the first time, the “diversity dividend” that inclusive leadership reaps from a diverse workforce: greater market share and a competitive edge in accessing new markets. When leaders embody diversity and their leadership culture embraces diversity, they create a “speak-up culture” that harnesses “point-of pain” insights to meet the needs of under-served demographics—a dynamic that exerts a measurable impact on the bottom line.

• Vaulting the Color Bar: How Sponsorship Levers Multicultural Professionals into Leadership
• Asians in America: Unleashing the Potential of the “Model Minority”

Realizing the Full Potential of LGBT Talent

• The Power of 'Out': LGBT in the Workplace

Retaining and Sustaining Top Talent

• Top Talent: How to Re-Engage and Re-Energize Your Workforce

  In difficult economic times it's essential to hold onto your top performers. They've got the dedication and out-size smarts your company needs to survive flat-lined growth and emerge a winner. In Top Talent economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett presents new data detailing how star performers are at risk in a downturn—despite high rates of unemployment. She then presents eight pragmatic interventions for engaging and re-energizing your best people (women as well as men) so they can, in turn, drive productivity and profits.

• Making Smart Choices in Life and Work: What Every Person Needs to Know

  In an era of 70-hour workweeks, outsourcing, and endless to-do lists, finding work-life balance is crucial to keep your career on track without burning out. Sylvia Ann Hewlett draws on her research to offer cutting-edge insights showing how to make the most of your work and personal life without sacrificing one for the other.

Tapping into the Strengths of Gen Y, Gen X and Boomers

• How Gen Y and Boomers will Reshape Your Agenda
• The X Factor: Tapping into the Strengths of the 33- to 46-Year-Old Generation
• Leveraging New Streams of Global Talent

  With new markets emerging all around the world, it is no surprise that the next generation of leaders have different cultural backgrounds, educations, and life experiences that will no doubt impact the way companies are run. Sylvia Ann Hewlett explains how to elevate up-and-coming talent by understanding what these global employees need from their job, and how to ensure they get it.

Becoming a Talent Magnet in Emerging Markets

• Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets

  Emerging markets are the growth hub of the world but their vitality is threatened by a talent constraint. Without enough "brain power" global and local companies will not be able to expand in these markets. Luckily there's a solution to this challenge: highly qualified women who are newly flooding into these labor markets. Sylvia Ann Hewlett unveils the strategies and the tactics needed to attract and retain this critical talent pool.