The ranking of high-performing teams keynote speakers

1. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

Erica Dhawan is the strongest fit on this list for a session about teams. She has built a career on how teams work in this century, and her keynotes cover how groups coordinate, build trust and keep moving when they are spread across offices and time zones. Thinkers50 has named her among the top 50 management thinkers, and RealLeaders put her first among female keynote speakers. Nothing is fixed until she has spoken to the people who called the meeting.

Best fit: company-wide meetings, team offsites, and leadership development days

2. Mark Mortensen

Mark Mortensen is a professor of organizational behavior and an associate dean at INSEAD, and taught previously at MIT Sloan. His research covers distributed and project-based working, and he writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

His work addresses the situation most companies are actually in, where people sit on several teams at once and no single team has anyone's full attention. For a teams audience he covers the costs of that overcommitment and what a manager can realistically do about boundaries, membership and competing claims on the same person. The material suits organizations where matrixed working has quietly become the default without anyone deciding it should, and it gives a leadership group language for a problem it has been describing badly.

Best fit: leadership group sessions, HR and people team days, and operating model reviews

3. Liane Davey

Liane Davey is an organizational psychologist and a co-founder of 3COze, and she advises executive teams on how they work together. She wrote The Good Fight and You First, a New York Times bestseller, and she contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review.

Her argument is that teams accumulate what she calls conflict debt by avoiding the arguments they need to have, and that the avoidance costs far more than the argument would have. For a teams audience she covers how to disagree productively, how to surface a problem everyone can see and nobody has named, and what a leader does with a group that has gone quiet. It suits teams that are polite, capable and stuck, which is a far more common combination in practice than open dysfunction and a much harder one to name from inside.

Best fit: executive team sessions, team offsites, and leadership retreats

4. Anita Woolley

Anita Williams Woolley is a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and holds a doctorate from Harvard. Her research established the measurement of collective intelligence in teams, first published in Science in 2010, and her current work covers human and machine collaboration.

She covers what the evidence actually shows about group performance, including the finding that a team's collective intelligence predicts its results better than the ability of its strongest member does. For a teams audience she brings peer-reviewed research to a category that often runs on anecdote and war stories. The material fits audiences that want the underlying science before the prescriptions, including people analytics functions and leadership groups with a research bent who will ask how the finding was measured.

Best fit: people analytics forums, research-led conferences, and senior HR sessions

5. Adrian Gostick

Adrian Gostick is a co-founder of the workplace training firm The Culture Works and has co-written several books on culture and engagement, among them All In, Leading with Gratitude and Anxiety at Work. Thinkers50 has ranked him among its management thinkers.

He works on the everyday mechanics of a team culture, recognition in particular, and makes the case that most managers believe they acknowledge good work far more often than their people report receiving it. For a teams audience he covers what to do about a group that is competent and disengaged at the same time. The content travels well to large mixed rooms, which suits a company-wide meeting, and it gives managers something small enough to begin on immediately, with no budget or program required.

Best fit: company-wide meetings, HR and people summits, and manager development days

6. Shane Snow

Shane Snow is a journalist and author who co-founded the content technology company Contently. He wrote Dream Teams and Smartcuts, and has written for Wired, Fast Company and The New Yorker on how groups and individuals solve hard problems.

His subject is why groups of very different people outperform comfortable ones, and why most teams quietly select against the friction that produces the result they say they want. For a teams audience he covers cognitive diversity as a performance question, with the values argument left aside, drawn from case studies across sport, business and history. The storytelling carries a general audience, which makes it a better fit for a conference stage than for a small working session. It also works where the audience spans several functions and has no shared technical vocabulary.

Best fit: conferences, leadership development events, and all-hands meetings

7. Kim Scott

Kim Scott led sales teams at Google and later advised at Apple, and she co-founded the company built around her own framework. She wrote Radical Candor and Just Work, and has become a standard reference on how colleagues give one another feedback.

Her framing pairs caring about someone personally with challenging them directly, and names the failure modes that appear when either half goes missing. For a teams audience she covers the conversations people avoid having, and how a manager builds a group where feedback travels upward as readily as down. The material works best with manager cohorts who will practice it afterward, since the ideas are simple to agree with and genuinely difficult to do. A booking with no follow-up tends to produce agreement and little else.

Best fit: manager cohorts, team development days, and people leadership programs

8. Josh Linkner

Josh Linkner started Platypus Labs in 2009, and the firm has since run innovation work inside several hundred companies. Three of his four books became New York Times bestsellers, and he came up as a working jazz musician and still performs.

For a teams audience he treats improvisation as a group skill, grounded in his own playing, since a jazz ensemble is a small group solving a problem together in real time inside a fixed structure. He covers how a group keeps putting ideas forward when the schedule is tight, what a leader does to keep the quieter people talking, and why the strongest contribution often arrives from the person nobody asked. If live music forms part of the booking, the venue needs to know well ahead of the date.

Best fit: team offsites, annual kickoffs, and leadership development days

9. Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham spent almost two decades at Gallup and now heads research on people and performance at the ADP Research Institute. He co-wrote First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, and more recently Nine Lies About Work and Love + Work.

He argues from large datasets that engagement is produced locally by the team leader, and that most of what companies measure sits at the wrong altitude to show it. For a teams audience he covers strengths, attention and the handful of things a team leader genuinely controls. The material was built for a big stage and holds a large room comfortably, which makes it a natural fit for a company-wide meeting or a people conference where the audience spans every level of the organization.

Best fit: main stage conferences, HR and people events, and company-wide meetings

10. Stanley McChrystal

Stanley McChrystal is a retired four-star general who commanded Joint Special Operations Command and later US and international forces in Afghanistan. He co-wrote Team of Teams and founded the McChrystal Group, which advises organizations on structure and execution.

His case is that a large organization can keep the adaptability of a small team by changing how information moves through it, leaving the authority structure largely alone. For a teams audience the material comes from having restructured a command under genuine pressure, with the consequences attached. It suits flagship events and leadership summits, and it lands particularly well with audiences that respond to an operational account over an academic one. The structural argument also translates cleanly to large civilian organizations that look nothing like a military command, which is usually the first question a doubtful audience raises.

Best fit: flagship conferences, leadership summits, and executive offsites