Tina Varughese
Human Connection Expert
Erica Dhawan
Leading Authority on 21st-Century Teamwork, Collaboration, and Innovation | Bestselling Author
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Book Erica Dhawan, Teamwork & Collaboration Speaker
About This Speaker
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.
Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton.
Speaker Fee: $50,000+
Contact an agent to get Erica's availability and ratesSpeaking Topics: Erica Dhawan
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
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
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
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
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
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
Concrete Empathy: A Playbook for Leading Modern Virtual Teams
We live in a culture defined by a distinct empathy deficit: The boss who constantly emails you is “wrong”—but never shows you how to correct those mistakes. The colleague who mansplains you to death in every conference call and has no interest in what you have to say. The team member who won’t stop looking at her phone as you share sensitive information during a meeting.
Why is empathy today at such a low point? Fewer face-to-face interactions, an ever-accelerating pace of change and an increasing number of global teams working remotely.
In this keynote or workshop program, attendees will learn to activate Concrete Empathy. With a combination of engaging stories, science, and practical tools, it shows attendees how to cultivate greater empathy across teams, ultimately creating cultures of connection, collaboration and high-performance.
Why is empathy today at such a low point? Fewer face-to-face interactions, an ever-accelerating pace of change and an increasing number of global teams working remotely.
In this keynote or workshop program, attendees will learn to activate Concrete Empathy. With a combination of engaging stories, science, and practical tools, it shows attendees how to cultivate greater empathy across teams, ultimately creating cultures of connection, collaboration and high-performance.
Selling Value in a 21st Century Marketplace: The Power of Connectional Intelligence
Selling value in a 21st century marketplace demands a significant transformation in go-to-market strategies and a profound evolution in salespeoples' omnichannel communication skills and competencies—where up to 70% of sales interactions are virtual-first. We no longer rely solely on the lean-in, handshake, and eye contact. Today, reading virtual cues carefully is the new listening and writing emails clearly is the new empathy.
Erica Dhawan, author of the WSJ bestselling books Get Big Things Done and Digital Body Language, is the go-to expert helping salespeople become superconnectors to decode the new signals and cues of prospects and customers by mastering the power of Connectional Intelligence. In this keynote, learn the differences between the buyer’s brain during virtual interactions and in-person meetings, how to tackle the unconscious cognitive bias in both in-person and digital sales interactions, and how to elevate your presence and increase your level of influence using omnichannel communications. Salespeople will leave blown away by how to better connect with customers, build stronger relationships, and drive sales success in the modern age.
Learning Outcomes:
• Decipher Digital and In-Person Body Language: Master the ability to read and respond to the subtle cues of your prospects and customers, both online and offline.
• Optimize Omnichannel Communications: Embrace and effectively utilize a variety of communication channels, tailored to your prospects' and customers' digital and generational preferences.
• Craft Personal and Emotional Experiences: Create compelling virtual experiences that keep prospects engaged and eager for more in-person and virtual interactions.
• Balance Real-Time and Asynchronous Communication: Strategically use real-time interactions (live meetings, phone, video, chat) and asynchronous methods (email, text, social media) to maximize engagement and productivity.
Erica Dhawan, author of the WSJ bestselling books Get Big Things Done and Digital Body Language, is the go-to expert helping salespeople become superconnectors to decode the new signals and cues of prospects and customers by mastering the power of Connectional Intelligence. In this keynote, learn the differences between the buyer’s brain during virtual interactions and in-person meetings, how to tackle the unconscious cognitive bias in both in-person and digital sales interactions, and how to elevate your presence and increase your level of influence using omnichannel communications. Salespeople will leave blown away by how to better connect with customers, build stronger relationships, and drive sales success in the modern age.
Learning Outcomes:
• Decipher Digital and In-Person Body Language: Master the ability to read and respond to the subtle cues of your prospects and customers, both online and offline.
• Optimize Omnichannel Communications: Embrace and effectively utilize a variety of communication channels, tailored to your prospects' and customers' digital and generational preferences.
• Craft Personal and Emotional Experiences: Create compelling virtual experiences that keep prospects engaged and eager for more in-person and virtual interactions.
• Balance Real-Time and Asynchronous Communication: Strategically use real-time interactions (live meetings, phone, video, chat) and asynchronous methods (email, text, social media) to maximize engagement and productivity.
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