Mike Evans

In the high-stakes financial sector, where market volatility, regulatory pressures, and fintech disruptions challenge even the strongest institutions, exceptional leadership is non-negotiable. This keynote experience is crafted specifically for financial industry trailblazers. Backed by decades of research and real-world expertise, participants are equipped with a dynamic blueprint to turn compliance into commitment, silos into synergy, and uncertainty into a competitive edge.

Whatever the desired results you wish to achieve or challenges within your organization – lofty growth, distinction, culture change, innovation, breaking down silos, improving collaboration, employee engagement, merging cultures, doing more with less… – exemplary leadership will separate the winners from the laggards . Embark on a transformative journey towards fostering a culture that drives exceptional results.

The financial world is a battleground—We call it a ‘Brawl with Few Rules’
- AI and flourishing technologies are reshaping banking and wealth management,
- Commoditization and competition threaten banking margins
- Clients demand agility and seamless cutting edge digital experiences.

Mike unveils the best practices of exemplary leadership and the five pillars of change, empowering you to lead through relentless change with confidence and flawlessly execute key strategies. This keynote redefines leadership as a choice—to foster trust, drive accountability, and build a culture that thrives under pressure.

Through compelling case studies Mike equips you with pragmatic tools to align diverse stakeholders, from traders to compliance officers, and execute flawlessly amid any change or disruption. Break free from the blame-game, unlock your team’s potential to boost ROE, and craft a distinct brand in today’s ‘Sea of Sameness.’

Walk away with a tailored action plan to elevate client retention, streamline risk processes, outmaneuver disruptors, effectively lead your team through any challenge, or to simply create alignment, engagement, passion, focus and accountability to achieve your most crucial desired results. This isn’t just a speech—it’s a call to lead with precision and purpose, ensuring your firm doesn’t just weather the storm but dominates the financial frontier. Are you ready to redefine success in the New World of Work?

KEY LEARNINGS AND TAKEAWAYS:

- Understand what it takes to cultivate a culture where employees ‘bring more of themselves’ to the workplace – where they are engaged, energized and flourish.
- Enhance and lead the critical skills of agility, resilience, and forward-thinking self-leadership in navigating the complexities of today's disruptive environment.
- Drive Team Commitment and Ownership: Whether it is to inspire analysts to exceed client NPS goals, boosting deposits and loyalty beyond regulatory minimums, create exceptional client experiences, or any strategy that you may have.
- Build Market Resilience: Cultivate agility to pivot during volatility or to move through obstacles, barriers or challenges that may come your way.
- Execute Flawlessly: Apply four execution principles to ensure that your key strategies are achieved and sustained.
- Stand Out in Banking: harness the power of innovation, distinction and agility to adapt and stay ahead of the curve and seize new opportunities for growth.
- Transform your culture from one of obligation to one of aspiration, where change is embraced, and accountability thrives. Unlock the secrets to thriving amidst disruption and shaping a brighter future in the New World of Work.
- Unlock Team Potential: Unleash the discretionary performance within all employees that often remains untapped. Arouse a sense of purpose, distinction and passion among your employees.
- Discover what it takes to lead a culture/team that is aligned, resolute, engaged, agile and takes accountability and ownership to achieve what matters most.
- Break Down Silos, foster collaboration and deploy the best practices of peak-performing teams.

Seven powerful forces have joined together and are gunning for your job, to displace your department, and to reinvent and disrupt your industry. Leveraging talent, ideas, speed, distinction, and leadership are the keys to thriving in the new world of work.

• ERP/SAP: 100’s of 1,000’s of jobs expunged over the past 10-15 years. Replaced by software and advanced technology.
• White-Collar Robots: Cash Machines, Kiosks, People-less stores, Lights Out Warehousing…
• Globalization: Abundance of talented professionals worldwide are only a click away
• Outsourcing: Often better, cheaper, faster (IT, HR, Payroll, etc.)
• Internet: Bye-bye brick-and-mortar. Banking is needed; banks are not. Travel is needed; travel agencies are not. Retail is needed; malls are not…
• Disruptive/Destructive Competition: Uber, Air BnB, Driverless Trucks, Netflix, Amazon…
• Artificial Intelligence: AI’s performing surgery. Capable of learning, making decisions…

We are in a brawl with few rules, where the fast, flexible, and agile will eat and spit out the slow, overthinking, and complacent. Individuals, teams, and organizations that fail to adapt will find themselves vulnerable, uncomfortable, and at the mercy of other people, events, or the competition. In this New World of Work, leveraging ideas, speed, talent, distinction and leadership at all levels will separate top-performing teams and organizations from the laggards.

In the past, change was episodic, transient, and gradual; now, change is constant as business, technology, and society itself continue to evolve at an ever-more-rapid pace. Accelerating Change—igniting engagement, passion, ownership, and creativity that is often lacking during times of change—can be accomplished using proven, memorable, and pragmatic principles. Learn why some organizations achieve and exceed desired results.

Embrace memorable principles that can be put into practice immediately. Whatever the desired results you wish to achieve or challenges within your organization – employee engagement, culture change, breaking down silos, improving collaboration, raising employee morale, merging cultures, doing more with less – it is through your people that you will either succeed or fail. How your people behave is a reflection of leadership.

Learn to cultivate an environment where employees at all levels are engaged, energized, and flourish. How do you effectively tap into the enormous wealth of creativity, innovation, passion, energy and commitment of employees that is often left idle?

KEY LEARNINGS AND TAKEAWAYS:
• Discover the essential tools in the ‘New Work/Future Work Survival Kit.’ Pragmatic, memorable ideas, skills and principles that will equip you and your team with the ability to thrive and excel in the new world of work.
• Understand what it will take for individuals, departments and organizations to thrive, excel, and ward off the unforgiving forces of the ‘7-sided pincer movement.’
• Embrace the 5-ingredient ‘kryptonite’ to thwart the 7-sided Pincer Movement.
• Cultivate a workforce that is connected, committed and aligned and that delivers your 'brand promise.' Become distinctive in today’s sea of sameness
• Capitalize on the untapped potential of your talent - inspire extraordinary performance.
• Build, enhance and grow your desired 'brand' – Organizational and Individual – to cement your spot in the New World of Work.
• Develop tenacity, resolve and agility to secure your spot in the New World of Work.
• Arouse a sense of purpose, distinction and passion among your employees.
• Discover what it takes to move employees from compliance to commitment – jettison resistance.
• Learn how to create a ‘Want-To’ versus a ‘Have-To’ culture. A culture where change is embraced.
• Discover what it takes to lead a culture/team that is aligned, resolute, engaged, agile and takes accountability and ownership to achieve what matters most.

Whatever the desired results you wish to achieve or challenges within your organization – lofty growth, distinction, culture change, innovation, breaking down silos, improving collaboration, employee engagement, merging cultures, doing more with less… – it is through your people (culture) that you will either succeed or fail. Embark on a transformative journey towards fostering a culture that drives exceptional results.

Culture, simply put, is the convergence of the way your employees think and act. That culture is producing your organization’s every result (financial, operational, customer, employee, etc.). If your future desired results are loftier, more difficult, of just different than those you are achieving today, will your current culture be able to deliver? Creating those ‘shifts’ in how employees think and act is what will propel your team or organization toward those desired results.

Your culture is your ‘brand.’ An organization’s (or team’s) culture is either an engine propelling it toward it’s desired results, or an anchor impeding and hindering it’s progress. You can define, lead and shape your optimal culture.

Learn to cultivate an environment where employees at all levels are engaged, energized and flourish. Internalize what it takes effectively tap into the enormous wealth of creativity, innovation, passion, energy and commitment of employees that is often left idle. Cultivate a culture that is engaged, passionate, focused, committed, aligned and accountable, with employees contributing daily to help achieve what matters most.

You can ignite extraordinary results within your team or organization. These straightforward, practical and memorable tips can transform your culture to support and deliver your ‘must-achieve desired results.’ The results that will ensure you thrive and excel in the new world of work.

KEY LEARNINGS AND TAKEAWAYS:
• Learn how to create shifts in the way employees think and act so that your desired culture will flourish and heighten organizational performance.
• Foster increased levels of trust, collaboration and teamwork
• Ignite a heightened sense of urgency, accountability, and ownership at all levels of your organization
• Intensify ownership, engagement and alignment – Crumble silos and abolish territorialism.
• Understand how to identify the root cause of undesired cultural beliefs and actions that impede progress, and how to infuse desired beliefs and actions to accelerate achievement of desired results.
• Discover how to gain voluntary commitments from colleagues so they self-select desired actions - Stop wasting time enforcing compliance around policies and procedures.
• Develop a culture where employees ‘bring more of themselves’ to the workplace – trigger innovation, creativity and passion.
• Create organizational laser-like focus on what matters most – eliminate confusion, misunderstanding, miscommunication, mistrust, frustration and indifference.

Accountability is the Catalyst to: Accelerated Change, Robust Employee Engagement, Intensified Ownership, Relentless Perseverance, Impeccable Alignment, and propels individuals, teams and organizations to intoxicating heights of achievement and success. Learn what it takes to awaken the whatever it takes attitude, belief, resolve, perseverance, confidence, determination, drive and creativity to achieve what matters most to individuals, teams and organizations.

Accountability crumbles silos, boosts teamwork and collaboration, strengthens camaraderie, creativity, resiliency, agility, trust, and communication. Accountability is a current that feeds into the slipstream of success. Your performance, your decisions, and your results are all within your control; when you operate from that premise, magic happens. You deliver like never before because you are personally invested in the outcome. Achieve with Accountability shows you how to nourish that can-do mindset, so you can begin to achieve what matters most.

Discover how to transform accountability into a positive, engaging and forward looking experience that will secure your position in the new world of work. Learn how to kick-start a revolution that will blast your team or organization to new heights of success. With the world coming at us fast and furious every day, it's easy to feel like you've lost control of your own life, your team or your organization. By choosing to take and lead accountability you reclaim control and are able to direct your own destiny.

In today’s constant changing competitive environment individuals, teams and organizations must be prepared to answer these critically important questions convincingly:
1. Who are you? What makes you distinctive in today’s ‘sea of sameness?’
2. How are you dramatically unique or different?
3. How do you make a significant difference or create an astonishing overt benefit?
4. What is/are your reason/s why anyone should believe in you?Convince me!

KEY LEARNINGS AND TAKEAWAYS:
• Discover the 4 keys to accountability and observable best practices.
• Cultivate the agility, flexibility, and resiliency to adapt and thrive during constant change.
• Foster collaboration, camaraderie, and teamwork – Establish unshakable trust and credibility.
• Intensify ownership, engagement, and alignment – Crumble silos and abolish territorialism.
• Instill a can-do, steely resolve, solutions-focused mindset in the face of difficult challenges, obstacles, and barriers.
• Eradicate the blame game and vanquish excuse-making that stifles peak performance.
• Shed feelings of disarray, discomfort, apathy, entitlement, indifference, and despair.
• Unleash voluntary contributions of discretionary performance often left untapped in individuals, teams, and organizations.
• Discover how to develop and enhance your ‘desired brand’ to secure your position now and in the future.
• Grasp what it takes to unleash your true potential.
• Develop a team or organization that is connected, aligned, and manifests your organizations brand.
• Break through self-imposed barriers and mediocrity.

In the past, change was episodic, transient, and gradual; now, change is constant as business, technology, and society itself continue to evolve at an ever-more-rapid pace. Accelerating Change—igniting engagement, passion, ownership, and creativity that is often lacking during times of change—can be accomplished using proven memorable and pragmatic principles. Learn why some organizations achieve and exceed desired results.

Driving a strategy that requires change in human behavior may be the most difficult challenge a leader can face. What do top leaders do to gain voluntary contributions of discretionary performance from those they lead? How do they create alignment, ownership and accountability for desired results at every level of an organization? How do they ensure that key strategies are not slowly suffocated, but instead produce extraordinary results?

Leading change has become a critical competency in today’s economy. But there is a significant and crucial difference between leading and managing change – not only in the approach, but also more importantly in the results. The success, or lack thereof, with transformational change efforts hinges on a few key principles that have been identified, studied and validated.

Leveraging talent, ideas, speed, distinction and leadership are keys to accelerating change. Accelerated achievement of desired results can be accomplished through consistent focused attention over time on a few practical, pragmatic and memorable principles. Discover the practices demonstrated by exemplary leaders that result in others voluntarily choosing to follow them.

Intentional focus on these principles will ignite extraordinary results within your organization. Decades of research have identified five principles and practices that propel organizations forward to blast through the common barriers, obstacles, challenges and inertia that derail most change efforts.

KEY LEARNINGS AND TAKEAWAYS:
• Embrace the key change principles that are common among successful change efforts. heighten and refine your untapped leadership potential.
• Understand the critical difference between leading and managing change and the appropriate ratio required to accelerate change.
• Discover what it takes to move employees from compliance to commitment – jettison resistance.
• Learn how to create a ‘Want-To’ versus a ‘Have-To’ culture. A culture where change is embraced.
• Avoid the primary pitfalls and traps that sabotage most change efforts.
• Learn the five best practices demonstrated by exemplary leaders and how you can apply them.
• Discover the key elements of communicating a vision that leads to increased levels of commitment, engagement, and accountability.
• Understand what it takes to cultivate a workplace culture where employees ‘bring more of themselves’—where they are engaged, energized, and flourish.
• Learn how to lead, develop, and cultivate a culture/team that is equipped to overcome the new 'forces that are coalescing' to dramatically alter the corporate and economic landscape.
• Discover what it takes to lead a culture/team that is aligned, resolute, engaged, agile, and takes accountability and ownership to achieve what matters most.
• Arouse a sense of purpose, distinction, and passion among your employees.