Travels from Tampa, Florida, USA
Erica Dhawan's speaking fee falls within range: $30,000 to $50,000
When leaders want to break team silos, drive exponential growth, and innovate through teamwork, they call Erica Dhawan.
Erica is an internationally recognized authority, bestselling author, and advisor on 21st century teamwork, collaboration, and innovation. Named by Thinkers50 as the “Oprah of Management Thinkers,” she is the author of three books: Use Your Brain, Digital Body Language, and Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence.
The world of business is increasingly digital, and work practices have changed at a blistering rate. Erica shares innovative strategies to unlock the collective power of teams, build a culture of trust across any distance, and create authentic engagement that keeps organizations competitive and original in the age of AI. Rated #1 on the Top Women Keynote Speakers list and featured among the top 50 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of business, Erica appears frequently in Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She pairs storytelling and humor with research to give audiences interactive, refreshing, practical strategies for modern, innovation-driving teamwork.
She holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton.
Erica Dhawan’s mission is to prepare your global workforce for the future. Her interactive keynote speeches show organizations and leaders how to accelerate the connectedness of your workforce, become masters of connectional intelligence, and “spar” in order to reach your goals more quickly.
Erica’s speaking style is personal, fresh, humor-laden and energetic. She is a gifted presenter who is able to read a room, customize her approach and style accordingly, and draw audiences in with her storytelling and pragmatic solutions to your organization’s most pressing challenges.
Erica has presented to corporations, universities, technologists, entrepreneurs, government agencies, and many other groups. Private corporate speaking has included places like Pepsico, Deloitte, Fidelity, McGraw Hill Financial, United Nations, Facebook, Social Media Week, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence
Two teams have been working on the same problem for six months. Neither knows the other exists. That is what endless meetings, cross-team dysfunction, duplication, and delay actually cost you. And it isn't a tools problem. Your people can find any document, any dataset, any answer in seconds. So why is collaboration still hard?
Because what actually moves work forward is their human relationships across silos. The colleague who tried this years ago and watched it fail. The client relationship that makes a hard conversation possible. Tools can retrieve everything your company recorded. It cannot reach what only your people know.
When every organization has the same tools, the edge belongs to those who connect across the lines that divide them. Function to function. Region to region. Level to level.
Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Get Big Things Done, named this Connectional Intelligence, which turns people into superconnectors who break silos and drive breakthrough impact. She shows leaders and teams how to surface what no system captured, build trust fast across boundaries, and unlock the collective expertise of the whole enterprise.
Learning Outcomes: ● Surface the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve ● Diagnose where collaboration stalls in your organization, and unstick it ● Break silos and keep teams aligned, accountable, and motivated ● Build trust across functions, geographies, and reporting lines without adding meetings
Use Your Brain: Critical Thinking Intelligence for the Era on Autopilot
Your people aren't using AI. They're agreeing with it. We stopped drafting and started approving. We stopped wrestling with the idea and started accepting the summary. It feels like productivity. It's cognitive surrender, and it's quietly flattening originality, weakening recall, and producing decisions no one in the room can actually defend.
Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Use Your Brain, argues that Critical Thinking Intelligence is to this decade what Emotional Intelligence was to the '90s: the differentiator between the leaders who compound and the ones who get automated.
This is a keynote about running at full speed without outsourcing the original thinking that makes your people worth paying for. Based on case studies and practical storytelling, Dhawan sends audiences home with team rituals they can run the next morning: the Think Sandwich, where human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task, the Friction Meeting, where someone is assigned to argue how the work is wrong; and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays non-negotiably human.
Interactive, immediately usable, and built for teams that think originally and creatively in our modern age.
Learning Outcomes: ● Catch themselves and their teams on autopilot, and put real thinking back around the machine in their organization and with customers/clients ● Pressure-test technology output, stop AI slop, separate signal from noise, and decide what to automate, augment, and protect ● Own high-stakes decisions they can explain, defend, and recall
Collaborate Faster and Further Together
Every message is now well-written. Warm opener. Clean structure. Thoughtful closing line. And you have no idea whether the person actually read your note, cared about your problem, or was even the one who wrote it. That's the new trust problem.
In the past, the signals were sloppy but real. A rushed reply meant something. A typo at 11pm meant something. A long thoughtful message meant someone spent time on you. Effort used to be visible in the writing. Now polish is free.
Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of the WSJ bestseller Digital Body Language decodes what actually signals care, credibility, and commitment. Specificity is the new sincerity. Response time is the new eye contact. Showing your reasoning is the new showing your work. And the fastest way to rebuild trust with a client, a peer, or a direct report is to be unmistakably human in a channel where everyone else sounds like a machine.
This keynote will name the norms that are quietly eroding trust, and leave audiences with shared communication rules and guidelines for what gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person.
Learning Outcomes: ● Read the signals that still carry meaning, and stop trusting the ones AI made worthless ● Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video and even live meetings ● Rebuild credibility with clients and colleagues in channels flooded with perfect, forgettable communication
“Erica’s presentation was an absolute hit.” ―Erik Spoelstra, Head Coach of Miami Heat
“Non-verbal cues are vital to understanding each other. Now that so much communication happens online–and with the massive shift to distance learning and remote workplaces–we need Erica Dhawan’s book more than ever. In Digital Body Language, Erica shares tips and strategies for communicating effectively on chats, emails, and video calls, so everyone can successfully share and connect in the digital age.” ―Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
“Erica offers a profound look at how to foster inclusion and better leadership in our digital world.” ―Billie Jean King, Founder, Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative
“Terrific. Our leaders were very engaged and had immediate practical takeaways. Erica made a big impact.” ―Mike Fucci, Chairman Emeritus, Deloitte
“Erica’s session was engaging, relevant, and actionable. She is thoughtful, inspirational, and smart with a contagious positive energy. All organizations and executive leaders would benefit from having her as an advisor to drive behavioral change, harness the power of networks, and think beyond traditional cohorts. She is a thought leader in the development of collaborative ways of working, improving productivity and customer engagement and experience.” ―Lisa McCann, COO & Global Head of Customer Success and Delivery Services, Korn Ferry
“Erica’s presentation was absolutely perfect for our leaders. Our group was diverse and Erica was a hit with everyone! Her storytelling style of presenting along with a healthy dose of informative case studies kept everyone engaged and interested and excited about using connectional intelligence to transform our business. ―George Chavel, Chairman Emeritus, Sodexo
“As a presenter at our organization’s first large scale virtual conference, Erica delivered a keynote session that was not only engaging and thought-provoking, it was extremely relevant to what our organizational membership is currently experiencing. Erica’s presentation took viewers outside of their home offices and truly felt like a live, in-person event.” ―Hannah DeBevoise, AACSB International
“Erica delivered an outstanding keynote. Her message about digital body language could not be more relevant and timely than it is today.” ―Bridget Dunn, Meeting Planner, Association for Talent Development
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Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot
There is a version of you that has stopped thinking; you just haven’t noticed yet. It happens quietly. You stop drafting emails and start approving them. You cannot answer a question without checking your phone. You stop wrestling with the idea and start accepting the summary. Every shortcut feels like a win until you’ve outsourced your mind to machines that don’t doubt, don’t feel, and don’t care.
The atrophy is subtle; the cost is staggering. It’s the promotion lost to the person who can still reason out loud. It’s your child freezing at an open-ended question because no one ever let her sit in the discomfort of not knowing. We are becoming a generation that prompts brilliantly and thinks almost nothing, and the most dangerous part is how good it feels on the way down.
But you don’t have to go down. Use Your Brain is a field guide for revitalizing your creativity and original thinking when the generic answer is always a tap away, whether it’s in the boardroom or around the kitchen table. From CEOs to artists to students to parents, the most effective navigators of the modern era have one thing in common: they aren’t afraid to pick up a new tool, but they know exactly when to put it down and think for themselves.
Drawing on years of research, globally-recognized leadership expert Erica Dhawan delivers common-sense habits for protecting your judgment in the age of AI that you can start building tonight. You will learn how to catch yourself on autopilot before you act, how to interrogate an answer that looks finished, how to separate signal from noise under pressure, and how to own a decision instead of laundering it through a machine.
The thinking class and the prompting class are separating in real time, and the gap is going to be brutal. The window to keep your edge is still open. It won’t stay open long.
Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance
An instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller
The definitive guide to communicating and connecting in a hybrid world.
Email replies that show up a week later. Video chats full of “oops sorry no you go” and “can you hear me?!” Ambiguous text-messages. Weird punctuation you can’t make heads or tails of. Is it any wonder communication takes us so much time and effort to figure out? How did we lose our innate capacity to understand each other?
Humans rely on body language to connect and build trust, but with most of our communication happening from behind a screen, traditional body language signals are no longer visible — or are they? In Digital Body Language, Erica Dhawan, a go-to thought leader on collaboration and a passionate communication junkie, combines cutting edge research with engaging storytelling to decode the new signals and cues that have replaced traditional body language across genders, generations, and culture. In real life, we lean in, uncross our arms, smile, nod and make eye contact to show we listen and care. Online, reading carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy. And a phone or video call is worth a thousand emails.
Digital Body Language will turn your daily misunderstandings into a set of collectively understood laws that foster connection, no matter the distance. Dhawan investigates a wide array of exchanges―from large conferences and video meetings to daily emails, texts, IMs, and conference calls―and offers insights and solutions to build trust and clarity to anyone in our ever changing world.
We typically associate success and leadership with smarts, passion and luck. But in today’s hyper-competitive world, even those gifts aren’t enough. Get Big Things Done argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called Connectional Intelligence. Virtually anyone can maximize his or her potential, and achieve breakthrough performance, by developing this crucial ability.
So, what is it? Put simply, Connectional Intelligence is the ability to combine knowledge, ambition and human capital, forging connections on a global scale that create unprecedented value and meaning. As radical a concept as Emotional Intelligence was in the 90s, Connectional Intelligence is changing everything from business and sports to academics, health and politics by quickly, efficiently and creatively helping people enlist supporters, drive innovation, develop strategies and implement solutions to big problems. Get Big Things Done unlocks the secrets of how the world’s movers and shakers use Connectional Intelligence to achieve their personal and professional goals–no matter how ambitious.
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