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Chester  Elton

Chester Elton

#1 Bestselling Business Author, Organizational Culture, Employee Engagement & Teamwork Expert

Chester Elton

#1 Bestselling Business Author, Organizational Culture, Employee Engagement & Teamwork Expert

Biography

Chester Elton’s work is supported by research with more than a million working adults, revealing the proven secrets behind high performance cultures and teams. He has spent two decades helping clients around the world engage their employees in organizational strategy, vision and values. In his inspiring and always entertaining lectures, Chester provides real solutions for leaders looking to build culture, manage change and drive innovation.

Chester is co-founder of FindMojo, a global assessment company, and author of multiple award-winning New York Times, USA Today and #1 Wall Street Journal bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work. His books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than 1.5 million copies. 

Chester has been called “fascinating” by Fortune and “creative and refreshing” by the New York Times. He appeared on NBC’s Today Show, CBS 60 Minutes, and is often quoted in Fast Company, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal

Global Gurus research organization ranked Chester #4 among the world’s top leadership experts in 2020 and #2 among the world’s top organizational culture experts. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches pay-it-forward project and serves as a board member for Camp Corral, a non-profit for the children of wounded and fallen military heroes.

Some of Elton’s clients include GE, Novartis, Duracell and Pepsi. As an executive coach, he has helped high potential leaders at American Express, Cubic, and the World Bank.

Speaker Videos

Speaking Reel

Keynote Trailer

Keynote Speech

Speech Topics

Leading With Purpose: Engage Your People, Enable Your Teams, Energize Your Leaders

The very best leaders want an organization with high levels of engagement and loyalty from their teams; they want to keep their best people.

“The best leaders I’ve ever worked with understood this happens when they develop skills that foster a thriving culture. A culture where people believe what they do matters, that they make a difference, and when it’s noticed, it’s rewarded and celebrated,” says Chester Elton.

Chester will provide tools that create high-performing organizational culture. His talks are designed to:

  • Enhance each participant’s role as a powerful leader, fostering greater collaboration and communication within their teams.
  • Drive overall employee engagement so leaders understand they are in control of their culture, and they have the most influence to improve employee engagement and build loyalty during rapidly changing times.

Chester’s presentation can be designed using a combination of content from his most requested keynotes summarized below. He can also include concepts using data he’s gathered from more than twenty years researching high performing organizations—including generational differences, diversity, innovation, change management, and more.

All In: How the Best Leaders Create a Culture of Belief & Drive Big Results

In this interactive and engaging session based on the New York Times bestselling business book All In—which includes research from more than 300,000 people in high-performance organizations—Chester Elton will teach leaders how to Engage, Enable and Energize their workforces.

The formula of E+E+E outlines how high-performance organizations deliver extraordinary results by creating a vibrant, productive culture where people believe that what they do matters and that they can make a difference. In this presentation, Chester will relate stories of leaders in action that vividly depict just how these powerful methods can be implemented.

Your leaders learn:

  • The 3 characteristics of the world’s most profitable, productive organizational and team cultures.
  • The 7 steps today’s most successful managers use to generate buy-in.
  • How managers at any level can build a productive workgroup culture of their own where employees commit to the culture and give that extra push of effort.

The Best Team Wins: 5 Disciplines of Today’s Most Effective Team Leaders

Based on an 850,000-person study of the most profitable, innovative work teams, Chester Elton introduces you to the new science of teamwork. The vast majority of employees’ days are now spent working collaboratively, but 96 percent of executives cite poor teamwork as the main source of workplace failures. It might be the most-pressing question organizations must address.

How can managers better lead teams to improved performance given the volatility and challenges teams face today:

  • Increased speed of change
  • The rise of the Millennials/GenZ
  • Emergence of a global, gig economy          
  • Need to work cross-functionally

Elton’s research has shown a set of leadership disciplines that makes the biggest difference in building today’s best teams. His program will help your leaders:

  • Manage to the One—Identify the drivers of each team member for maximum motivation (Inclusion)
  • Speed Productivity—Help new people and teams work faster & smarter
  • Challenge Everything—Inspire innovation through healthy discord
  • Find Focus—Build bridges across functions, cultures, and distance

What Motivates Me: Put Your Passions to Work

Research shows employees who are the most engaged have work that more aligns with what motivates them. Chester Elton helps leaders understand individual and team motivation. He introduces the concept of Job Sculpting: Determining what may be holding employees back from personal growth.

Career development has become the number one reason why people leave an organization. Chester will show your leaders:

  • How to have regular aspirational conversations with their team members to enhance development, productivity and loyalty
  • Understand the organizational benefits of enhancing a team’s motivational mix to enhance inclusion and diversity of thought
  • Proprietary data on the motivators of various generations, industry and job types.

Carrots 2.0: How Today’s Managers Use Recognition to Engage their People, Retain Talent & Accelerate Performance

The Dilemma: Most managers want to create cultures where their teams achieve above-and-beyond results, but for a culture to really take off teammates must encourage each other on a daily basis. The answer is in rooting for each other: having each other’s backs, appreciating strengths, and recognizing strategic behaviors.

The Research: Based his #1 bestselling book The Carrot Principle, which unveiled a 10-year, 200,000- person survey, Elton has become the preeminent authority on employee recognition. Now, he introduces us to Carrots 2.0—showing incontrovertible evidence that today’s employees respond best when they are recognized for things they are good at and for those actions where they had to stretch.

The Result: Elton introduces audiences to new generational and industry-specific data from his 2016 proprietary survey of 14,000 working adults—helping managers link recognition to what is most meaningful to their employees. He introduces practical concepts that help managers encourage excellence, including ideas such as appreciation vs. recognition, effort vs. achievement, and praise vs. rewards. Adrian shows how great managers lead with carrots, not sticks and in doing so achieve higher:

  • Productivity
  • Engagement
  • Retention
  • Customer Satisfaction

The Audience: Designed for managers, Chester Elton has presented “Carrots 2.0” to corporate audiences and associations worldwide. The session is typically customized to an organization’s specific recognition needs and can also include the organization’s available R&R tools.

“The concepts of "All In," "The Carrot Principle," and "What Motivates Me" can be combined to create a tool-box that all organizations can leverage to enhance organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

- US Army

The Anxiety Solution: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

Even before the pandemic of 2020, anxiety was crippling the performance of workers - especially young employees. Today it is affecting productivity and leading to ghosting and burnout.

When the Wall Street Journal covered the anxiety epidemic at work, the first experts featured were New York Times bestselling authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. In their major new spring 2021 release for Harper Business, "Anxiety at Work," they offer 8 tactics for managers to help their employees build resilience.

They offer strategies to:
• Spot the signs of employees hiding anxiety
• Alleviate stress
• Manage uncertainty
• Have people speak up when feeling overwhelmed
• Beat perfectionism and get things done
• Instill an ethic of inclusion and support

The Future of Work

What are managers to do now that operations seem headed toward a new way of working? How do they build and maintain culture, ensure accountability, and focus their people on the right behaviors in this new future of work?

New York Times best selling authors and top-ten global leadership experts Adrain Gostick & Chester Elton help organizations learn to work more effectively in multidimensional cultures.

They teach leaders to:
• Communicate more effectively in a hybrid environment
• Build stronger cultures with diverse, global, remote team members
• Enhance innovation and give people a voice
• Tackle growing anxiety and mental health issues
• Help team members deal with uncertainty
• Build resilience in times of change

Testimonials