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Haydn Shaw

Expert in Generations (Baby Boomers, GenXers, and Millennials), 6 Change Reactions, and Productivity

Spoken to over 100,000 people and worked with more than 1,500 businesses, non-profit organizations, and governmental agencies
Senior consultant with FranklinCovey for over twenty-one years and one of the few consultants to win their Chairman’s Award
Hailed as a “leadership guru” by the Washington Post for his insight on generational differences, productivity, and management

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Haydn Shaw has become a favorite of Leading Authorities, not just because of his expertise and great speaking skills, but his true ability to go above and beyond the call of duty. In 1998, Leading Authorities booked one of Haydn's colleagues for a speech in the Midwest. That speaker became ill, and just one day before the event, Haydn agreed to fill in for him. Then - to make matters more complicated - a snowstorm hit at the event location and no flights could get in or out. This did not stop Haydn; he rented a car and drove to the event - only to be hit by another vehicle on the way there. Even this did not stop Haydn. He walked over a mile down the road to get help, arrived on site in time for the event, and was a hit! A true team player, Haydn practices what he preaches.

Haydn Shaw is a leading expert on the multiple generations, leadership, change, and turning around negative work environments and employees.

Haydn has worked with more than 1,000 businesses, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations. He speaks and consults in excess of 170 days each year to clients who consistently invite him back.

Hailed as a “leadership guru” by the Washington Post, Haydn Shaw has delivered hundreds of convention keynotes or intimate off-sites. Known for taking groups from hilarity to deep reflection, he combines rich content with use-tomorrow tools. His presentations make an impact because he does his homework, designing each one for your unique needs. Having worked with hundreds of organizations, Haydn connects with virtually any group in any industry, and brings practical and inspiring examples from the boardroom and the front line.

He also has worked with FranklinCovey for twenty one years as a senior consultant and one of their most requested keynote speakers specializing in their leadership, execution, and personal productivity methodologies.

Haydn has worked extensively with four topics:

1. Leading Across Multiple Generations.
He is the author of the bestselling training course Leading across Generations. His generational keynotes get people laughing at the generations so they quit complaining about the generations and start learning why the generations are different and how to turn those differences into productivity and sales. People often refer to his presentation on generations as one of the best speeches they have ever heard. Presentations include:

Leading Across Multiple Generations: Helping Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials Get Through Their Sticking Points Get Stuff Done
Leading the Millennials: Gaining, Training, and Retaining the Text Message Generation
Don't Miss Half Your Market: Selling to Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials

2. The Six Change Reactions.
Nothing is more frustrating or discouraging than trying to turn around negative environments or employees. This humorous keynote uses the metaphor of burping a baby to help leaders understand how to keep their teams from turning negative and what to do when they have already have. You’ll learn how to separate the dangerously negative people from the merely irritating, how to keep negative people from taking over your team, and how to move people through changes without letting the negative people take over. Presentations include:

Leading through the six Change Reactions: Why Change Stalls and What You Can Do about It (for leaders, managers, and supervisors)
Understanding the six Change Reactions: Making Change Faster and Easier for All of Us (for all employees)
Light Eaters, Yipper/ Yappers, and Hound Dogs: Dealing with the Three Types of Resistant and Negative Employees (for everyone)

3. Productivity.
Productivity has two parts: how well the organization communicates priorities and how well individuals use their time. Most approaches just focus on individual time management. Haydn’s productivity presentations do both: he helps leaders and managers get clear on how to get their people focused while also helping individuals manage their time and deal with the overwhelming flood of email, technology, and information. Presentations include:

FranklinCovey’s The five Choices for Personal Productivity in the Information Avalanche
FranklinCovey’s four Disciplines of Execution
FranklinCovey’s Why Sales People Can’t Get Time to Sell and What to Do About It

4. Trust.
When trust is high, teams get things done. But when trust is low, everything slows down and costs more. Presentations include:

FranklinCovey’s The Speed of Trust: the One Thing That Changes Everything

Haydn Shaw travels from Chicago, where he lives in a multigenerational household with his Gen Xer wife, Laurie, his Traditionalist mother-in-law, his disabled Gen X brother-in-law, and his Millennial children.

Speaker Video

Haydn Shaw - Generations

Leading for Generations

Haydn Shaw on The 6 Change Reactions

Haydn Shaw on The Speed of Trust

Haydn Shaw: Barriers in Communication and How to Make Positive Change

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Sticking Points: How to Get the 5 Generations Working Together in the 12 Places They Come Apart. They’re here. For the first time in history, you have four generations in your workplace and five generations as customers. Today you have to understand Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials just to write an email that won’t make someone angry. These generations think differently, vote differently, buy differently, and dress differently. Not understanding these differences creates conflicts and loses sales. You will learn…

what the differences are among the generations
what sticking points the differences create for organizations, teams, and even families
how marketing approaches must change to reach the younger generations
what attracts and keeps younger employees
how these differences will complicate the mass exodus of the Boomers from the full time workforce over the next decade

This popular session is full of laughter and insight. Come and see yourself, your customers, your people and your future – and walk away with practical ideas and plans for increasing your ability to get things done across the generations.

Leading in the Hybrid-Remote Work Environment. Three in four want the option to work both in person and remotely. You need hybrid teams that communicate well, get projects done without days of back-to-back video meetings, keep people who work remotely equally engaged, prevent people from drifting toward resigning, and all this without killing your managers with more hours. That requires your team to adopt virtual processes and skills that work for multiple generations. If you do not want your managers to keep working as many extra hours with hybrid as they did for remote, then gain the tools to make hybrid teams work regardless of the generation of their members?

Each hybrid team must make three decisions.

The decision of boundaries. When will we work and where?
The decision of communication. How will we communicate so that we aren’t missing critical pieces?
The decision of disagreement. How will we handle conflicts and differences in styles?

In this session you will learn:

Why hybrid is not going away.
Why most executives worry about aspects of hybrid and prefer their employees to return in person.
How to keep meetings from taking over your day.
How to make hybrid meetings more efficient.
Why you will increase your turnover unless you understand the biggest predictor of who wants to come back to the office more and who wants to work remotely.
How to keep projects moving when people are not in person.
How to keep fully remote workers from becoming invisible when others are in person.
How to do team building in a hybrid environment.
How to keep ideas flowing when people don’t bump into each other informally as much.
How to adjust hybrid systems for the different generations when hybrid turns the stereotypes up-side-down.
How to handle conflicts, differences, and disagreements when people can hide behind chat or email more easily.

Why You Can’t Find Workers and How to Beat the Great Resignation. You know the Great Resignation is a big deal, you have seen good people leave but you have been hoping it’s a Covid induced blip from 2021 that will go away soon. Instead, the Great Resignation is gathering steam--one in four employees plan to leave their job in 2022. If that is not bad enough, you wonder how you will find people. You have already turned away business because you can’t find staff. When you do find candidates, they are often worse than the people you want to fire. Keeping those disappointing employees demotivates your strong workers, but someone is better than nothing when you can’t find anyone else, isn’t it?

This fast-paced presentation will explain where the workers have gone and how you can beat the Great Resignation, and do it with a sense of humor:

Where did all the workers go?

How do they pay their bills?
How can you attract those that will work?
Leading the Two-Tier Workforce: How do you keep your underperforming employees from bringing down everyone else? And how do you decide which disappoints you can live with, and which ones are deadly and must go?

How do you retain people and beat The Great Resignation?

What has caused the Great Resignation?
Why is it still growing?
How does knowing that help us identify the turnover we can avoid and what can’t be stopped?
How do we stop wringing our hands and focus on what will beat the Great Resignation?

Leading Through the 6 Change Reactions: Why Change Stalls and What You Can Do About It. When they announce changes, leaders tell their people that change is now a fact of life. But there is another fact of life: people respond to change in six ways. When leaders and managers ignore the 6 Change Reactions, they make change harder than it needs to be. But you and your leaders can create a change wave rather than struggle to push the change forward.

This humorous, fast paced session presents a breakthrough approach to change. You’ll understand The 6 Change Reactions and…

why change programs backfire
why trying to help people change is keeping them from changing
how to map your team or organization on the 6 Change Reactions curve
why many change teams die a slow death after going in circles until the forward-thinking people disengage
how to set up a team for a quick start
how to find and train change salespeople who can convince the critical few that will move the change forward
how to help the three negative reactors use their negativity to speed things up rather than bog them down
how to deal with the one percent hard core resisters so they don’t ruin everything

You’ll never look at your people the same way again, and they will love you for it.

You Can Double Your Leadership by Escaping the Vacuums. After a conference your head is full of ideas for competing more effectively and growing your internal leaders. But you know there is a catch--when are you going to find the time to implement them? You do not have a day a week sitting open for you to move the business forward. So, they hang in Leadership Limbo.

Haydn Shaw has seen from working with 30,000 leaders and managers the biggest reason people limit their leadership: To implement your leadership ideas, you will need to stop doing some things that still need to get done, and that will create a vacuum. If you don’t escape the leadership vacuums, your will stay caught in Leadership Limbo. But if you do escape the vacuums, you pass them on to your next level of leaders. You escape Limbo, but they are trapped unless you can coach them on how to escape.

Vacuums are the biggest reason leaders don’t implement good ideas that they know will make the difference in their business. But learn how to lead through them and you have a game changer skillset.