Chris Leonard
The Authority on Quickly Developing High-Performing Teams and Leaders
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
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Chris Leonard is a Nashville-based consultant and coach. A career that began in tour buses and stages has brought him to large enterprises and startups in healthcare, life sciences, retail, and defense. Through it all, Chris has distinguished himself as a builder of high-performing teams.
He draws from a wide and growing body of knowledge to lead diverse initiatives and transformations. Recent work has spanned public health, omni-channel marketing, and AI-integrated compliance solutions.
His practical insights in traditional, hybrid and agile methods will benefit leaders at any level and in any industry.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Weighing the Cost of Intervention
Speaking up always imposes a price. Is the benefit worth it? This talk shows audiences when to intervene, what it really costs, and how to excel at it. The attendee can carefully assess when to keep silent and when and how best to step in.
Audiences
Executives, directors, managers, dev leads, project/program managers, coaches, scrum masters, and product owners
Key Objectives
1. Appreciate the cost of intervening in common workplace problems
2. Walk through common anti-patterns and the costs of intervening in them
3. Optimize the tradeoffs once the decision is made
Context
It can be hard to observe a group or person struggling without jumping right in. Is it time to intervene, and if so, how? This talk takes on this common conundrum head-on with practical clarity.
Benefits
The audience attains renewed awareness of client behaviors and tools for responding intentionally. This talk puts familiar but ambiguous intuitions into tangible form.
Approach and Format
The format combines exposition, illustrations, and interaction to apply these concepts with light and varied tone.
Persuasion Agility: Mastering the Art of Influence
Achieving agility requires successful persuasion from the initiation of change to shifts in behavior and structure. The wrong message can really backfire, so Agile practitioners must excel at persuasion.
We explore a 4-step approach to persuasion from an unlikely source that bypasses resistance.
Audience
Coaches, scrum masters, transformation leaders, independent consultants, dev leads, managers, directors, project/program managers, and product owners.
Objectives
1. Persuade people to alter behaviors or messages that inhibit agility
2. Teach agile ways of working to developers without invoking common misconceptions
3. Record and relate the value of your contributions
4. Effectively convey the value of agility to executives, hiring managers and potential clients
Context
Persuading stakeholders and developers can be challenging, especially when preconceptions and skepticism abound. Resistance to Agile, however misinformed, can be deeply entrenched. Approach and Format
Exposition and individual reflection alternate using an online or paper worksheet to help the audience apply this method to a real conversation.
Mindsets for Better, Shorter Meetings
Meetings are hard. So much advice about them focuses on leaders, but what about participants? This talk is all about how every contributor can make meetings short, fun and productive.
Audiences
Individual contributors in knowledge work of almost any kind and role; dev leads, managers, directors, project/program managers, coaches, scrum masters, and product owners
Key Objectives
Audience members will feel hopeful and empowered to make painful meetings better through their own behavior and examples. They will learn practical tactics they can apply immediately. Approach and Format
The format combines exposition, illustrations, and interaction to apply these concepts with light and varied tone.
Three Crucial Team KPIs for Sustained Product Delivery
How can product development leaders stay informed about the pace and quality of work? This talk gives leaders and executives three crucial KPIs to monitor their organization’s health, decide when additional support is needed, and plan interventions that make measurable improvements.
Audiences
Executives, directors, mid-level managers, enterprise coaches and PMO executives
Key Objectives
Learn what KPIs to monitor, what they tell you, and why.
Consider how to weigh KPI data against the team’s own insights
Learn a five-step diagnostic process for finding the root of the problem and planning a successful change
Context
With limited time and information, executives and leaders at many levels often lack clear signals to inform their priorities. Which teams and direct reports need support, and for how long? This talk helps clarify this challenging space with rational approaches to cutting through the ambiguity. Approach and Format
This talk is content-heavy with lots of ground to cover, combining exposition with brief illustrations and a canvas for applying the learning during and after the session.
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