NSB Logo Lee-Anne McAlear Lee-Anne McAlear

Lee-Anne McAlear

Speaker Featured

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Fortune 500 Innovation Specialist

Lee-Anne McAlear is an award-winning facilitator, educator, and consultant. She is Program Director at the Centre of Excellence in Innovation Leadership at The Schulich School of Business (home of the top-rated MBA in Canada according to the Financial Times). She shows audiences that while technology and R&D may be essential inputs for innovative results, the beating heart of innovation success lies within an organization’s people – their thinking, their ability to collaborate and their drive.

Keynote Speeches

Virtual Keynotes & Webinars
Contact us for more information about this speaker & their virtual presentations. Click here for some of the most popular formats for virtual events.
From Buzzwords to BIG Value!

How do we turn the buzzwords of 2022 into meaningful realities that deliver value? In this highly interactive session, Lee-Anne will pull on her fabulous collection of stories gleaned from leaders and teams around the world that highlight real-life solutions to the current challenges of hybrid productivity, hyper-collaboration, and radical innovation. Building on insights, case studies and new research, she will help answer the questions that our changed reality and this new navigation demands. Energized audiences will leave with practical tips, techniques, and approaches for where to start and how to move forward.

Innovation is NOT for a Few Geniuses in Hoodies

Most of us do not work in start-ups and we probably won’t ever work in innovation incubators, hubs or labs. Why is this important? Because what works for a small group of entrepreneurs in a highly charged, flat organization is unlikely to work for those who work in medium to large enterprises which, by the way, is where most of us are found and where innovation is badly needed.

While some of the principles of a start-up can be applied, little else can. In this interactive and engaging talk, Lee-Anne will highlight the effective and exciting ways large organize innovate. Yes, they do. The innovation landscape is filled with fantastic examples and stories of how organizations of many levels and many people have met the challenges of delivering new value in new ways. Lee-Anne can’t wait to share them with you!

Do Your People Love to Work with You? (Creating cultures that collaborate and innovate)

Culture doesn’t just eat strategy for breakfast – it eats it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Organizations don’t innovate, people do. There is a correlation between employee engagement and creativity.

59% of engaged employees say that their job ‘brings out their most creative ideas’. Of the surveyed employees who were disengaged, only 3% said the same thing. In this captivating keynote, Lee-Anne will address the questions of how we create engaged cultures where creativity is freely applied to all our thorny challenges and our people can’t wait to face the day. How do we create environments where people feel better leaving work than they did when they came in?

What is Your Creative Superpower?

To thrive in this dynamic environment, businesses and people have learned that resilience, adaptability, and creativity are the keys to unlocking possibility and creating success. One of the questions often asked is, “How do we transform those characteristics into effective new business approaches?”

In this enlightening talk, Lee-Anne will introduce a creative-problem solving approach tailor-made for our current reality. With a flexible framework and real-world cases, she will expand your problem-solving approaches and enrich your innovative capability. She believes that we were made for these times.

There are No Experts of the “Next Normal” (We Need a New Kind of Leader)

Complexity now reigns. If there were only simple problems and simple solutions, we could thrive with a template and an algorithm. That we are biological beings in an increasingly digital world, means that critical thinking and experts are no longer enough. Experts are always experts of old stuff.

In this informative and stimulating talk, Lee-Anne will build on her years of working globally in different countries, sectors, and industries to animate the key leadership principles that will shape our ever-changing reality and our best, next strategies. She will speak to how organizational levers like adaptability and creativity can help us navigate and lead into the future. She’ll explore how resilient organizations and leaders frame their challenges, engage their people and help them skill up and thrive!

Leading from Within: Change is ALWAYS Personal

Today, every leader is experiencing never-ending waves of change. Change, as we know, takes place on a continuum – from a little to a lot, from incremental to disruptive. Leadership behaviors are different whether we are asking people to adapt or asking them to transform. Effective leaders understand that not only does change have different levels, but people also experience those levels in different ways. Change is not a universal experience; it is intensely personal, and a broad-brush approach is seldom effective. Leaders are particularly challenged as they have to lead changes of their own, steward organizational changes plus experience change themselves. And let’s not forget, inspire others while they are at it!

Building on her decades of experience in working with leaders who innovate and change, Lee-Anne will explore leaders’ best change practices, ‘next’ changes practices and new changes practices. The audience will leave with fresh eyes, novel ideas, and practical strategies.

Additional Presentations

Platform Plus Presentations

Unique formats and ways to connect with audiences.
Workshop | Improvisation is the Heartbeat of Innovation
In this witty and wise Keynote Deborah Kimmett and Lee-Anne McAlear are a dynamic duo who will teach your organization the tools and mindset you need to go from idea, to implementation to innovation. A 70-90 minute keynote, or 1/2 day workshop this will energize and inspire your team to think and act in a new way.

Audience reviews:

  • Lee-Anne was fantastic! Her presentation was engaging, entertaining and informative. We have already started to receive great feedback. - Employee Experience Coordinator, Management Consulting, KPMG International Services Limited
  • Lee-Anne was fantastic. She was very accessible during our planning stages and was instrumental in helping us round out not only our event but our strategy! Lee-Anne has an incredible amount of knowledge in this area and freely shared it with us. The insights and tips she provided certainly helped us focus our Innovation Program, develop KPIs and winning tactics for maintaining momentum.Our Innovation Kick-off proved to be the event highlight of the year for our firm. And this can solely be attributed to Lee-Anne’s presentation. Her combination of high-energy, smart insights and quippy delivery engaged our audience from start to finish. She had the ability to win over a skeptical audience within the first five minutes and keep them under her spell for the duration. I was as delighted as I was impressed – as was our Innovation Committee and our Managing Partner.

    - Marketing Director, Harper Grey LLP
  • You made a tremendous impact on all of us. The texts and emails and general feedback was awesome. You are amazing and not to take away from any of the other amazing presentations today, but you were the only one I made time to sit in from start to finish - and worth every minute. Just from your slides, I could tell that yours was a talk I did not want to miss... We were lucky to have you! BRAVO!

    - Associate Director, Communication & Planning, Bell Canada
  • Lee-Anne McAlear was fantastic! She was there for most of our conference and she met many of our members. Her sessions were very well received. I heard many excellent comments about her presentations. Someone said her session was the best at the conference!

    - Director of Member Events and Communications, CPA Saskatchewan
  • Lee-Anne was absolutely excellent, she's a wonderful person. She bonded with people immediately and set a perfect tone for the event. Her presentation was excellent, it was a diverse crowd, from students to people in their 70's - and she had everybody in the room captivated the whole way - everyone could identify with it.

    - Niagara College Administration
  • I'm also pleased to tell you that in the post-conference evaluations, your presentation had one of the highest scores for content and presentation quality. It won the most votes by quite a large margin, for being the most valuable presentation of the conference. Thank you again for your outstanding contribution to the event.

    - Rogers Healthcare Group
 

Speaker Biography

Lee-Anne McAlear is an award-winning facilitator, speaker, writer, and consultant. She is a program director and sought-after lecturer at the Schulich ExecEd, Schulich School of Business at York University, speaking at conferences on leading innovation, enhancing employee engagement, establishing creative cultures and thriving in change.

Lee-Anne has worked extensively in the leadership and innovation space in more than 33 countries in both the public (federal, provincial, and municipal levels) and private sectors.

She has piloted several global innovation initiatives that have delivered new approaches to brand revitalization, new methods for delivering patient care and new ways to address customer growth and retention. For more than 25 years, Lee-Anne has worked across industries and sectors including, but not limited to, pharmaceutical, health care, telecommunication, transportation, professional services and consumer packaged goods. She is highly sought- after and has delivered around the world with speakers as varied as best-selling author and creativity guru, Edward de Bono, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, Don Tapscott, and activist and actor Alan Alda.

Lee-Anne has many certifications including Emotional Intelligence, Team Management Systems and Situational Leadership, and is a Certified Innovation Professional. She sat on the first board of the Canadian Chapter of IAOIP (International Association of Innovation Professionals) – the only association offering globally recognized innovation certifications.