Curt Steinhorst

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• Shaping the Future of Work: Transforming Who, Where, How, What, and Why We Work

  The pandemic revealed issues with the pre-pandemic workplace and taught employees valuable lessons about how they best work and what they expect from their employer, and convinced them not to settle for less.

  In “Shaping the Future of Work”, Curt Steinhorst covers the five essential lenses to understand the rapidly changing landscape of work:

  • Who works: Employee demographics are changing with multiple generations working together and a more diverse workforce.
  • Where we work: Remote work, redesigned offices, and hybrid locations have shifted where we work.
  • How we work: A more varied workforce that includes employees, contingent workers, and gig workers has created new opportunities.
  • What is work: New technologies and digital transformation have led to the emergence of new job roles, necessitating reskilling.
  • Why we work: Workers expect companies to provide clear value to them while they, in turn, create value for the company. The importance of belonging and culture in the workplace remains unchanged. However, the way in which they are developed and sustained needs to be updated.

  This session will teach leaders how to prioritize the present and guide their company toward the future.

• Growing Your Company Without Shrinking Its Culture

  How can you maintain the unique aspects of your culture as your company grows and brings in new colleagues and customers?

  In this session, Curt Steinhorst helps audiences identify ways to protect and sustain a company’s culture during growth. He challenges them to rethink assumptions about scalability and addresses how what created cohesion, efficiency, and “magic” in the past can actually create silos and inefficiency in the future.

  Audiences will learn how to expand, adapt, and thrive through clarity, communication, and intentional attention. Steinhorst will address common and often misunderstood culture drivers, including:

  • Culture is driven by clarity.
  • Communication driven by convenience creates chaos.
  • A leader’s ability to avoid certain decisions is as important as those they make.
  • Meetings are more likely to drain us than connect us.
  • Attention is your most limited and valuable resource.

  By learning how to adapt an organization and its actions, audiences will leave with practical and sustainable solutions that can be immediately implemented to preserve what makes a company’s culture unique while giving it room to evolve.

• Signal in the Noise: Communicating to Drive Trust, Alignment, Accountability, and Results

  Leaders need to communicate their strategic vision effectively in today’s noisy and uncertain environment — or face missed milestones, chaos, conflict, and lack of accountability. Unfortunately, employees often don’t understand or connect their work to the strategy with 72% reporting a lack of understanding, only one-third feeling like their leaders communicate effectively, and more than 70% ignoring company emails or content.

  This is compounded by the staggering amount of change and information employees face daily, leading to an insurmountable volume of messages, tasks, and meetings. It is more important than ever for leaders to communicate clearly and compellingly what matters most.

  Key outcomes:

  • Learn how to communicate clearly and authentically with employees from all generations, locations, and backgrounds.
  • Discover what it takes to build true clarity in your organization.
  • Structure and deliver impactful messages.
  • Bridge the gap between executive strategy and employee activity to ensure adoption and execution.

• Intentional Leadership in a Rapidly Changing Workplace

  How to drive trust, collaboration, and results through uncertainty.

  Today’s leaders face many challenges, including the great resignation, hybrid and remote work, shifting employee expectations, and tense social and political landscapes — plus the noise and uncertainty of daily life.

  Leaders need to build trust, communicate effectively, and demonstrate empathy to improve recruitment, retention, productivity, engagement, and well-being.

  The core challenge is not a leader’s lack of awareness or concern. Many leaders do what they can — but the primary resource necessary is under assault and in critically limited supply: A leader’s intentional attention.

  In this presentation, Curt Steinhorst helps leaders identify old assumptions, hidden traps, and new ways to connect effectively.

  Key outcomes:

  • Navigate varying and conflicting work preferences based on employee generation, experience, tenure, background, and personality.
  • Reconfigure team protocols to remove costly distractions that sabotage productivity.
  • Increase capacity and space to innovate.
  • Maintain trust in times of chaos, volatility, and uncertainty.
  • Achieve clarity of purpose that drives teams further.

  Leaders will come away with tools to help them relate to and guide employees — and drive their own intentional attention — with higher achievement and greater engagement for all as the reward.

• Healthy Hustle: Doing Your Best Without Burning Out

  Despite wellness programs, unlimited vacation days, and flexible arrangements, high-performing individuals are burning out at epidemic levels.

  In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would allow us to work only 15 hours per week by the end of the century, leading to an increase in leisure time and standard of living. Technology has enabled us to do more, faster, yet we find ourselves bored, miserable, overwhelmed, exhausted, and burnt out.

  What Keynes didn’t predict was that technology would open the floodgates to infinite connections, opportunities, ideas, tips, and ultimately, an overwhelming amount of information. And we consume 118 zettabytes of it daily. How we make decisions about what information deserves our attention will determine how we respond to this environment.

  In this presentation, Curt Steinhorst emphasizes the power of human attention and focus to overcome stress and burnout. By combining brain science with the realities of working in today’s connected world, Steinhorst ‘s “focus wisdom” helps individuals achieve a meaningful career and life.

  Key outcomes:

  • Use the power of attention and focus to overcome stress and burnout.
  • Learn techniques for prioritizing tasks, setting boundaries, and managing time.
  • Understand the impact of organizational culture and policies in preventing turnover and advocating for change.
  • Strategically make decisions about what information deserves attention for a fulfilling career and life.

• The New Team Rules: Connecting, Collaborating, and Producing Results in the Age of Zoom

  How do you build a productive team when co-workers are no longer in the same room or even available during the same hours? And how do you create better rhythms of work and communication that ultimately drive greater engagement and success for your team?

  Effective teams foster creativity, accountability, and diverse ideas, but achieving this is complex. Different work styles and priorities can lead to conflicts and slow progress. Communication overload and excessive meetings can reduce focus and productivity. Team dynamics can result in power struggles, lack of accountability, and stress.

  In this session, Curt Steinhorst outlines hidden drivers that can harm teams. He provides a playbook for working together in a way that makes room for diverse work styles and communication preferences.

  Key outcomes:

  • Transform diverse, dispersed, and disconnected individual contributors into a high-performing team.
  • Improve communication while avoiding overload and interruption.
  • Ensure organizational goals link to team priorities.
  • Negotiate successful ground rules for remote/hybrid work/in-office arrangements.
  • Improve collective decision-making within teams.

• Selling in Today’s Noisy World

  How to capture and keep attention in the age of distraction (for sales professionals).

  Today’s buyer is harder to reach than ever, and even harder to keep. The rules have changed. To effectively reach them, sales professionals must radically alter their strategies to cut through increasing noise, distractions, and uncertainty. The volume of messages coming at all of us requires intentionality in the communication format, channel, length, and timing. It has never been more important to communicate clearly, concisely, and persuasively.

  In “Selling in Today’s Noisy World,” attention expert Curt Steinhorst will prepare you to excel in today’s complex and challenging communication environment — helping you authentically connect with today’s increasingly diverse, multi-generational, constantly connected, easily distracted audience. He introduces you to the critical lens of focus and attention, which Microsoft CEO Satya Natella calls today’s scarcest resources.

  A must-hear program for these times, Steinhorst shares insights garnered from years of coaching sales teams, founders, CEOs of multi-billion-dollar brands, NFL hall of famers, NBA owners, Olympic gold medalists, TV personalities, TED Talk presenters, and Shark Tank contestants on how to capture and keep the attention of their internal and external audiences.

  Key outcomes:

  • Adapt to the varying and conflicting preferences based on generation, background, and personality.
  • Communicate effectively in ways that capture attention, sustain engagement, and increase clarity.
  • Discover counterintuitive communication methods that surprise, delight, and stick.
  • Avoid well-intentioned communication mistakes that decrease engagement.
  • Leverage your customer’s distracted state to communicate more effectively with them.