Leadership Talk: Win Any Room

You've prepared. You know your material and then someone in the room decides they're not going to make it easy for you. In this Ted-style talk, Emily Thompson draws on two decades of leading change across retail, consulting, aerospace and high-growth organizations to explore the moments that don't show up in leadership books: the presentation that went sideways, the engineer who pushed back in front of the whole team and what happened next. This talk will illustrate how to read resistance, stay curious under pressure and connect with people who came in ready to disagree. You'll leave with a new way of thinking about the hardest rooms in your career - and what it actually takes to earn trust when support isn't freely given.