Professor Herminia Ibarra has dedicated her professional life to studying workplace behaviour. Her pioneering insight into how habitual thinking hinders innovation has the power to transform a workplace, while Herminia’s speaking topics teach corporate audiences how to harness their potential. From leadership to workplace culture, her previous speaking engagements, with such names as Wired, TEDX and the 2018 HR Congress, have inspired all those in attendance, a testament to Herminia’s extensive knowledge. Additional roles include Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network and London Business School Governing Body, to name a few of Herminia’s prestigious appointments.
With INSEAD, Herminia’s transformative insight resulted in the Leadership Transition executive program, which she created and directed. Carving a pathway for managers to pursue higher leadership roles, the program reflects Herminia’s unrivalled understanding of communication, decision-making and high-performance teamwork. She is a professor of leadership and learning and a former professor of organisational behaviour, reflecting her position as an authority figure in business. With an MA and PhD in Organisational Behaviour from Yale University, an expert like Herminia is a cut above the rest.
Previously a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School for 13 years, Herminia was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2019. As a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council, she played a pinnacle role in international finance, a reputation only strengthened by her role as a jury member for the Financial Times. With such positions of influence in mind, it is no surprise that Herminia was listed among the 50 Gurus of the World's Most Influential Businesses. She leaves audiences with a comprehensive understanding of leadership and workplace culture when booked for events, with techniques inspired by her career.
In 2018, Herminia presented a TED talk that explored The Authenticity Paradox. Watch Herminia speaking at the London Business School. Herminia’s award-winning books, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, are considered essential guides on professional development. Named in the Top 40 Case Authors by The Case Centre, her articles have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal and Academy of Management Journey – the mark of a truly influential professional. Also listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy, winner of the 2019 Warren Bennis Prize and the 2018 recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award, Herminia’s critically acclaimed work has set the standard for management best practices. Transform your quality of leadership with this leading authority.
Recently, Herminia was listed among the top 15 Net Zero Talent Speakers Tackling the Great Resignation.
Social Media
Books
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader
Reviews
Herminia Ibarra received a 4.5 star rating across 16 events in 2023.
Agent Recommendation
"Herminia Ibarra is a world-renowned organisational psychologist and best-selling author. Her expertise in leadership development and career management makes her an ideal speaker for audiences seeking to navigate change, embrace new roles, and cultivate authentic leadership. With her engaging and insightful presentations, Ibarra empowers individuals and organisations to thrive in a rapidly evolving world."
How to hire Herminia Ibarra
Contact the Champions Speakers Agency to provisionally enquire about hiring Herminia Ibarra for your next event, today. To get in touch, simply call an official booking agent on 0207 1010 553 or email us at [email protected] for more information.
** We do not accept requests for autographs, signed merchandise, fan mail, birthday messages or any other non-commercial contact with the speakers or acts. Each speaker on the website may not have necessarily worked with Champions in the past but are known to perform such engagements within the industry.
Herminia Ibarra's official speaking topics are listed below:
How to Step Up to Bigger Leadership Roles
Today’s breakneck pace of technological change has an immense impact on leaders, and as a result, on their organizations’ capacity to transform. All too often, executives remain stuck in outdated mindsets and modes of operating, even when they recognize the need to reinvent themselves in order to step up in their careers. This interactive session upends traditional, introspective advice and says act first — in order to change your way of thinking. Whether you are moving into a new role or stepping up in your current post, in this session you will learn to change through action, not reflection, and to apply a growth mindset to our own leadership capacities.
Learning objectives:
- Identify how to redefine your job so that your contributions are more strategic and client-centered.
- Learn how to expand your network so that you connect to and learn from a bigger range of stakeholders inside and outside your firm.
- Understand different ways of defining authenticity in order to give yourself permission to stretch beyond your ‘natural’ leadership styles and habitual ways of contributing.
Leadership Skills for the Future
Today more than ever we need leaders who can help transform our firms — so they become more agile, more innovative, more digitally savvy, more customer-centric, more inclusive and/or more human. Herminia has found that five leadership skills are vital for moving our organizations in this desired direction, increasing their people’s capacity to deal with today’s adaptive challenges: situations in which problems are complex, there isn’t an obvious answer, and, the brainpower and enthusiasm of many, not just the top leaders, is needed to solve them.
The five skills:
- Cross-cutting: developing networks of relationships that extend and connect to a diversity of people and groups.
- Collaborating: fostering candor and psychological safety to increase team performance.
- Coaching: asking questions to develop others’ potential.
- Culture-shaping: proactively shaping organizational culture and mindsets, including recognizing and modifying practices that are no longer fit for purpose.
- Connecting: growing in empathy and authentic leadership.
Making Successful Career Transitions
Today, people at all stages of their careers are asking themselves profound questions about the kind of work they do, how much of it they want to do, and the place it occupies in their lives. In part, we’re asking ourselves these questions because fewer and fewer of us conceive of life as having the three ‘traditional’ stages: a short early stage devoted to learning, a long middle stage devoted to work, and a final retirement stage.
Instead, with growing frequency, we’re alternating between changing jobs and careers, pursuing opportunities for education, and making time for periods of rest and restoration. There’s a lot that’s beneficial and necessary about this shift, but no matter how often you change careers, you’re likely to experience the transition as an emotionally fraught process — one that involves loss, insecurity, and struggle.
In this session, I explain what makes career change hard, outline a three-part process of exploring a diversity of ‘possible selves’ and describe the three levers for change that we all have at our disposal: experimenting with new professional activities, connecting to new networks and working and re-working the story of who we are.
How to Get a More Diverse Pool of Talent to the Top
Career success is a tripod built on three legs: key experiences that help people learn critical business, functional and organizational skills; a network of helping relationships that provide information, advice and support; and growing in confidence, credibility and reputation.
These are precisely the same three arenas in which gender and racial bias play out in organizations: access to mission-critical roles, access to a network of senior gatekeepers and biased perceptions about the capacity and potential of people who are underrepresented at senior levels. In this session, Herminia explains how the tripod's three legs work together to create virtuous or vicious career cycles, and how organizations can improve progression rates by tackling all three in unison.
Developing Authentic Sponsorship Relationships
Getting the mission-critical roles and stepping stone assignments that pave the way to a successful career requires more than skills and drive. It requires a special kind of relationship — called ‘sponsorship’ — in which mentors goes beyond giving feedback and advice to use their influence with other senior executives to advocate for proteges and ensure that they have exposure and visibility with other top decision makers.
In this session, you will learn what sponsorship is, why it matters, and most importantly, how to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships such that, over time, your relationships are more likely to blossom into true sponsorship. Herminia and the participants will discuss the spectrum of helping relationships, ingredients of effective career conversations, how to manage universal ‘like me’ biases and how to overcome common challenges in sponsoring relationships across differences.
Official Feedback from In-Person & Virtual Events
"Herminia's presentation was very well received last week in Madrid and the feedback so far has been very positive." - PwC
- 2024 - Awarded The Case Centre Awards 2024
- 2023 - Author of Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
- 2023 - Listed among the Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors
- 2023 - Listed in the Thinkers 50
- 2022 - Awarded the Best Teacher Award
- 2021 - Awarded the Scholarly Contributions to Educational Practice Advancing Women in Leadership Award
- 2019 - Won the Excellence in Teaching Prize
- 2017 - The Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School
- 2015 - Author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader
- 2008 - Instructor for the World Economic Forum
- 2002 - The Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership & Learning at INSEAD
- 2002 - Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD
- 1989 - Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Harvard Business School
