Erica Dhawan

We live in a culture defined by a distinct empathy deficit: The boss who constantly emails you are “wrong”—but never shows you how to correct those mistakes. The colleague who mansplains you to death in every conference call and has no interest in what you have to say. The team member who won’t stop looking at her phone as you share sensitive information during a meeting.

Why is empathy today at such a low point? You can credit various factors, including fewer face-to-face interactions, an ever-accelerating pace of change and an increasing number of global teams working remotely. These and other elements make it harder for any of us to understand and meet the unspoken needs of others. Teams have it especially hard. The more digitized teams become, and the more we interact online, the greater the need for empathy becomes to balance distances and misalignments and foster inclusivity and belonging.

How do we actively generate empathy in organizations? How do we bring people together, and make individuals feel genuinely emotionally connected, full-fledged members of the teams that have become the DNA of today’s organizations—teams that are virtual, global, multigenerational and matrixed?

In this keynote / workshop program, attendees will learn to activate the Empathy Advantage, a playbook for leading empathic teams today. With a combination of engaging stories, science, and practical tools, it shows readers how to cultivate greater empathy across teams, ultimately creating cultures of connection, collaboration and high-performance. Among other things, The Empathy Advantage teaches readers how to operationalize empathy with:

·       Simple ways of seeing the world as others do
·       Rules of thumb to avoid misunderstanding, ambiguity and rushes to judgment (or what we call, reading digital body language)
·       Signals that show others you understand their feelings and hear their ideas
·       Tools to diffuse tensions, bring an end to conflicts and create lasting connections

We are communicating faster and more often than ever before. We feel like we’re connected – but are we really? When your colleague replies “fine!” are they actually fine… or are they angry? Do you wait hours to get clarification on a vague e-mail? Did that weekend text message from your boss irritate you?

In person, we can clarify context immediately. We rely on body language and tone to grasp the real meaning. With our digital walls up, we lose subtext and nuance. We’re using our ‘saved’ time to clarify meaning. How do you view someone that doesn’t text back for hours or even days? When can you use or not use an emoji or LOL at work? What does your boss, team, and colleague think of that kind of behavior? We all leave a digital impression on each other and our newest misunderstandings are reducing employee engagement, morale and team performance more than ever before.

In this keynote, we will discuss the new rules and nuances of creating human connection in digital communication, led by collaboration expert Erica Dhawan. This session is perfect for leaders or employees working in virtual, global, matrixed or multi-generational teams.

Learning objectives include:

How your modern communications are broadcasting your digital body language (even if you don’t intend to) Strategies to reduce the confusion and frustration that comes from all our various mediums, like email, phone, IM, text and even live meetings How to drive the highest performing teams through digital communication How to get closer to others intellectually, emotionally, personally, and professionally regardless of physical distance by smartly reading subtext.

Connectional Intelligence (CxQ) helps organizations accelerate and sustain the capability to drive breakthrough innovation and results by harnessing the power of relationships and networks. In our new world of an embedded digital, global infrastructure that connects all of our lives, the power of connectional intelligence holds exponential and previously untapped potential for breakthroughs in ways we can barely begin to imagine in the workplace. To harness CxQ, we have to work with the future workforce differently – because they are ahead of the rest of us in harnessing connective capacity.

In this keynote, Erica Dhawan shares insights into how leaders can bring out the connectional intelligence of your employees and utilize the talents that different silos, cultures, and generations all bring to the table. This is a powerful, interactive presentation for leaders who seek to breakthrough generational friction, drive innovation, shift company culture and transform the untapped connectional intelligence of your entire workforce.

Learning Objectives:

-Understand the resources each employee brings to the workplace
-Decode the connectional capacity of each generation and culture and use that knowledge to significantly improve innovation
-Transform workforce conflicts into growth points
Create processes designed to maximize the ability to connect people, ideas, and resources for breakthrough results

Millennials are the rising generation in the workforce today. Millennials expert Erica Dhawan reveals the #1 key to determining their workplace performance: Connectional Intelligence. For millennials, engagement with different kinds of connection is not just about social media – it’s embedded in all aspects of their daily life and work. This engagement enables them to realize exponential results from Connectional Intelligence (CxQ) leading them to drive growth, streamline costs and improve the overall performance of your business. The way to acquire, engage and retain top millennial talent to generate fast results is to stop with the play and perks. Instead, put their fundamentally different, powerful, radical, and disruptive Connectional Intelligence to work.

This presentation and/or workshop will decode the millennials’ employment mindset, reveal how to maximize millennials recruitment, retention and performance, and offers specific actions to unleash your millennials’ Connectional Intelligence.

We typically associate success and leadership with smarts, passion and luck. But in today’s hypercompetitive world, even those gifts aren’t enough. Strategist Erica Dhawan argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called Connectional Intelligence (CxQ). Virtually anyone can maximize his or her potential, and achieve breakthrough performance, by developing this crucial ability.

Connectional Intelligence is the ability to combine knowledge, ambition and human capital to forge connections on a global scale that create unprecedented value and meaning. As radical a concept as Emotional Intelligence was in the 90s, Connectional Intelligence is helping people enlist supporters, accelerate innovation, develop strategies and sustain solutions to big problems