Tim Sanders

About

About Tim Sanders - Renowned Communication and Leadership Speaker:

Tim Sanders is the Vice President of Customer Insights at Upwork, driving their customer-centric approach to help businesses solve their talent gap problems. As a strategic consultant for leading global brands, government agencies, and trade associations - he has helped individuals and organizations tackle marketing innovations, sales performance, talent management, leadership development, and organizational culture. He’s served on advisory boards for several startups, including the social reading website Goodreads - which was purchased by Amazon.

Tim is the author of five books, including the New York Times best-seller, Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. His publications have over one million copies in print - with best-seller status in India, South Korea, Italy, Brazil, and Denmark.

Throughout his career, he’s been on the cutting edge of innovation and change management. Fresh out of graduate school, he was deeply involved in the quality revolution - which disrupted manufacturing in the 1980’s. He joined the cellular phone industry the year it debuted in North America. He was an early stage member of Mark Cuban’s broadcast.com - which had the largest opening day gain in IPO history. He went to Yahoo! when they acquired Cuban’s company for almost six billion dollars - and rose to the Chief Solutions Officer position and later was named the company’s leadership coach.

Tim credits his passions of research, critical thinking, and public speaking to his high school days - where he was the captain of the debate team, and then later in college, a national champion. He points to his years of fronting a rock band as the epicenter of his innovative approach to marketing.

Today, his mission is to bring all of his life experiences and his unconventional, disruptive - yet inspired strategies and perspectives to thousands of people every year, helping them to boost their leadership effectiveness, human connection, and business performance.

Topics

What Tim Sanders Talks About:

Redesign Your Workplace – Innovate Your Collaboration
If you want to increase your company’s velocity and competitiveness, embark on The Grand Redesign. This new leadership approach leverages design thinking to improve how the work is delivered and plans are met.

Tim Sanders, New York Times bestselling author and Upwork executive, offers a stunning collection of insights, statistics and customer stories that illustrate how leaders can tackle today’s biggest challenges.

Deliver a key value proposition to talent: Flexibility. This is emerging as a key to driving productivity, innovation and employee retention. This is done by employing the right design questions that will help leaders craft the perfect hybrid solution for their teams.
Solve the top dependency for their most critical projects and programs: Someone with the skills to complete the work on time. This is done by designing the project canvas to ‘taskify’ and skill-source requirements early in the process, leveraging on-demand talent with an eye of building an elastic workforce.
Lead talent based on outcomes, not attendance or effort. This is the most critical leadership skill because it enables true scale in any working environment. This is done by developing the ability to assign, resource and coach talents to deliver measurable results, regardless of role.

The last three years have been filled with change from Covid to digital disruption to the economy. Historically, times of great change are the best times to redesign key components of your culture – starting with “how we work now.”

Getting Ahead of Burnout

Many of your best people are on the verge of suffering professional burnout. They’ve stepped up the number of working hours, partially due to the new work-from-home environment, but mostly because they need to get more done with less.

Researchers declare that burnout is a threat to companies in 2021—the pandemic’s new world of work is showing collateral damage including turnover, loss of productivity and a lack of creative energy.

The good news is that burnout can be prevented and alleviated in the early stages through designed workstreams and personally managed through the development of boundaries and wellness habits.

In this presentation, Tim provides insights on what it takes to restore work-life integration in 2021. He’ll share the latest research as well as best practices from companies and wellness advisors.

You’ll learn how to:

Spot the early warning signs of burnout in individuals and groups.
Design workstreams to ensure load-management of key talents.
Leverage resources such as the work marketplace to offload tactical burdens.
Coach others to reduce stress and recharge energies while they work from home.

Tim was research-backed, tactical and relevant to today’s landscape. Attendees commented it was one of the best sessions they’ve ever attended.”

The Art of Leading Remote Talent

You’ve likely worked with remote talent before, be they freelancers or full-time employees who have a flexible work arrangement with your company. But today, many of your talents are working remotely from home due to the Covid-19 crisis. More than ever, you need a solid skillset when it comes to managing those who you won’t see face to face in your offices.

That’s why Upwork Vice President of Customer Insights, Tim Sanders, has produced a 45-minute virtual session to give you the best practices in leading remote talents of all types. He’s scoured academic and industrial research as well as interviewed enterprise leaders experienced in remote talent management to create this insightful and actionable program.

The session will reveal helpful and surprising best practices in remote communications focused on platforms, cadences, nuance, and service level agreements on responsiveness.

You’ll also learn how to remotely manage:

Positive Mental Outlook (the key to engagement)
Engagement (the key to productivity)
Collaboration (the key to innovation and problem solving)

Long after your employees return to on-premise work, you’ll be able to put this session to use as you manage remote workers and/or independent contractors. It is the key to developing an agile workforce that can drive key initiatives from business growth to digital transformation.

Innovating Faster – Why Collaboration Changes Everything

Leaders in every industry prioritize innovation but are frustrated with how long it takes to bring breakthroughs to market. According to bestselling author and consultant Tim Sanders, the best way to speed up the innovation process is to promote a culture of collaboration across your organization and externally with partners, customers and competimates.

Over his career, Tim has studied leaders that practice what he terms ‘disruptive collaboration,’ a problem-solving style that leverages surprising alliances along the fault-lines of a company or its market. He’ll reveal how the biggest leaps and turnarounds in history came from collisions of thought, not safe work in our silos of excellence. Tim’s eye-opening keynote will deliver actionable insights and tools that will accelerate the rate of innovation, drive agility and quickly produce breakthrough business outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

Why Companies That Practice Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Outperform Rivals
How to Leverage the Power of Multiple Perspectives to Solve Problems 3X Faster
How to Bring Multiple Stakeholder Needs From “Me-to-We” in a Collaborative Project
Why Innovation Requires a Focus on Building a Collaborative Web of Relationships
How to Connect the Silos, One Collaboration Project at a Time

Recent Publications

Generational, technological and business model forces are set to disrupt the world of financial advisors. Tim’s Essential keynote helps advisors stay ahead of these forces by building deeper relationships with clients.