Shane Michael Hatton

Just 3% of leaders feel completely confident to build great team culture. Not because they don’t care, but because nobody ever made it practical. Backed by Shane’s national research with over 1,000 people leaders, this keynote hands your leaders the conversations that turn culture from a poster on the wall into something they build deliberately, week by week. Audiences discover why 95% of people leaders say culture is the outcome of small decisions over time, why the leaders closest to the work matter more than the boardroom, and exactly which conversations move a team from culture by accident to culture by design. Practical, funny and immediately usable. They’ll walk out knowing what to do on Monday.

Drawing from research with over 1,000 people leaders, this session uncovers the underestimated power of language in shaping a culture by choice. It moves beyond theory and offers a pragmatic approach to cultural design. Audiences explore team memes and mantras: how words, phrases and stories influence and permeate an organisation’s culture at every level. Interactive, research-backed and told through stories, with takeaways people can use the same week.

The more machine the work becomes, the more human the culture has to be. As organisations race to embed AI into everything, the question that will separate thriving teams from hollowed-out ones isn’t technological, it’s cultural: will your people still feel connected, trusted and valued while everything around them changes? Drawing on his research with over 1,000 people leaders, Shane makes the case that the human skills of leadership, the conversations, the trust-building, the belonging, are about to become your organisation’s scarcest resource and its sharpest competitive edge. A practical playbook for holding the human centre of a team through the biggest workplace transformation in a generation. Timely, hopeful, and free of both AI hype and AI panic.

Gen Z isn’t breaking your workplace. It’s revealing what was already broken. For the first time in history, five generations share the workplace, and the youngest is asking out loud the questions every generation wondered about silently: why do we work this way, who decided, and what do we actually stand for? Drawing on generational research and Shane’s national study of over 1,000 people leaders, this session cuts through the headlines and the stereotypes to show what really matters to the newest generation at work, and how smart leaders use that energy to build one culture that five generations genuinely want to belong to. Expect myth-busting, laugh-out-loud generational truths, and a practical framework for turning generational friction into cultural fuel.

Culture change moves at the speed of trust in the people leading it. It’s why so many transformations stall: the strategy is right, the values are printed, and yet nothing moves, because only 3 in 10 people leaders strongly agree their leaders actually demonstrate the values on the wall. That gap between what leaders say and what people see is a positioning problem, and this keynote is about closing it. Drawing on his research, where lack of trust ranked as the number one culture killer, Shane unpacks the four elements that determine whether people follow a leader into change: character, narrative, credibility and reputation. Every leader walks out knowing how they’re currently positioned, and what to do about it.

Most sessions ask an audience to sit and listen. Culture Karaoke hands them the playlist. Before and during the event, delegates choose from a songbook of the culture questions that keep leaders up at night, and vote them up the chart. The music rolls, Shane takes the mic, and the room gets sharp, research-backed answers with the energy of a Friday night and the substance of a national study of over 1,000 people leaders. No two sessions are the same, because no two audiences ask for the same setlist.