Blaire Palmer is the authority on disrupting the future of leadership, and wants to help you lead the workplace reformation. She brings more than two decades of experience in coaching boards and senior leaders to provoke everyone to think more critically about the idea of work and leadership itself.
As an expert keynote speaker, Blaire uses her bold and provocative perspective to bust myths about what it means to lead and to educate today’s leaders on how they can truly inspire their teams to step up and take on the challenges of operating in constantly changing times.
Blaire leaves her audiences feeling stimulated by fresh ideas and empowered to rethink their approach to work. Blaire spent a decade as one of the youngest female producers in the fast-paced environment of BBC’s Today programme, over which time she became increasingly fascinated by the idea of leadership. This led her to take the leap from this safe and respected job to train as one of Europe’s first corporate coaches and start her own company to spread her refreshing ideas about leadership and how businesses need to evolve for the new century. Over the last 25 years she has worked with a wide variety of multinational corporations and organisations such as Mattel, Airbus, Roche Pharmaceuticals, GSK, the FA, Havas Lynx, DX, Travis Perkins, the BBC and Rexel.
Blaire is able to use her expertise working in such a diverse range of businesses to make sense of the way generative AI, hybrid working and the long tail of the pandemic, growing understanding of mental health, the rising cost of living and cost of supply, and global unrest have all come together to create a uniquely contemporary crisis in the workforce. More than that, she proposes uniquely contemporary solutions for businesses whose workforce is not just geographically dispersed across the world, but whose needs and wants have changed substantially in the past few years alone.
She is the author of four books on leadership and work: The Hyper-Creative Personality: How to Focus Your Ideas and Become the Most Successful Person You Know, The Recipe for Success: What Really Successful People Do and How You Can Do it Too, What’s Wrong with Work: The five frustrations of work and how to fix them for good. Her 2024 book, Punks in Suits: How to lead the workplace reformation, is a provocative rallying cry for organisations to ask uncomfortable questions about how they work, and grapple with whether or not their approach is still fit for purpose in today’s world.
The business environment has never been more challenging than it is right now, and senior leaders are the ones bearing the pressure and responsibility. Levels of trust in authority figures are as low as they’ve ever been. But what if we could turn every individual employee and contributor in an organisation into a leader?
Disrupting the Victorian model of work – the hierarchy, the siloes, the risk aversion and being busy over being productive – may be the shot in the arm that a team needs to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Blaire can show your organisation how to empower individuals to go beyond being merely ‘team players’ to create a culture of Personal Leadership. This in turn will fill your organisation with motivated, engaged, and fundamentally collaborative cultures during times of change. The conventional models of top-down leadership are no longer enough for organisations to truly thrive, but if everyone taps into their own inner strength, creativity, sense of purpose and curiosity, the company will be able to weather any storm, together.
Blaire uses her extensive experience to propose inspiring but practical solutions to help audiences tap into their own inner leader and motivate their employees to do their best work every single day.
Of course, inclusion is a huge buzzword right now. But what does it mean to your organisation? If it ends at the hiring stage, you won’t be creating thriving, loyal, motivated teams. You’ll simply be meeting a quota with no discernible benefit to your business or the clients you serve.
Inclusion has to be about every individual bringing the unique parts of themselves to work, and using them to inform and enrich the work they’re doing for you every day. Whether that is leveraging the different perspectives and experiences of people at different stages of their life, from new Gen Z hires to women in midlife, or the unique knowledge brought by employees from different cultures to your own, Blaire brings her own personal experiences of navigating the world of work in different seasons of life, and in different challenging work environments, to challenge ideas about what diversity really means.
Blaire asks teams to consider: what if organisations harnessed this uniqueness, and created a working culture that encouraged employees to solve challenges through their expansiveness?
In addition to this, Blaire knows it’s impossible to talk about inclusivity without dealing with the challenges of hybrid working and collaboration. Although leaders claim to want to embrace flexibility, there are unique challenges to leading a distributed team. Instead of getting caught up in the details of ‘two days in the office or three?’ Blaire offers holistic oversight to these collaborative working challenges that focus on harnessing that broader overview of individuals and company culture.
Blaire will inspire and energise your team to think about a future of work and leadership that enables everyone – with their own strengths and needs – to thrive for you.
If there’s one thing we know by now, it’s that change is a constant. New challenges – from generative AI to a cost of living and supply crisis – are being thrown at us every day. If teams are not ready to meet this new future head-on, it is hard to see how they will survive in a challenging work landscape.
Technology is revolutionising the landscape of work and business but that only makes your people a more valuable asset. And unless you understand people, you won’t know what to do with technology. Meeting disruption with an equally disruptive organisational mindset is key to pushing teams to reach their full potential.
Blaire will use this speech to challenge audiences to rethink their assumptions about both technology and people, as well as the role of the leader in creating organisations that are fit for the future.
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