Sharon Steed
Sharon Steed is an international keynote speaker, author and founder of Communilogue, a corporate empathy and communications consultancy. She is a subject matter expert on empathy at work, and she teams organizations the key empathy behaviors necessary to retain top talent and improve individual and team performance.
Sharon has spoken at companies and conferences in 17 countries spanning five continents, with a focus on improving team communication and collaboration through engaging empathy and vulnerability as a professional asset. She has given a TEDx talk on empowering insecurities.
A lifelong stutterer, Sharon uses her speech impediment to both teach what empathy is and to inspire audiences to engage in empathy actions daily. An author and course instructor for O'Reilly Media, Inc., her eBook Empathy at Work is available in the O’Reilly library. Sharon’s LinkedIn Learning course "Communicating With Empathy" has been translated to French, Spanish, Farsi, Polish, Turkish, Dutch and Chinese; it over 500,000 views. A Midwest, USA native, she currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA.
Session
Communicating confidently and effectively; working collaboratively; solving complex problems; time management - all of these are considered soft skills, and none of them come naturally. Excelling at any of these "soft" skills could taking courses to learn more about the tools, asking a mentor to guide you when you feel overwhelmed, and engaging in a ton of trial and error when it matters the most.
Soft skills are anything but soft; they are competencies. We must consistently and actively work at developing these abilities so we can be successful teammates, managers, leaders and coworkers. And there's one skill above all that can get you there faster: empathy.
This talk will teach you to turn empathy into a behavior. We will determine empathy's importance in a corporate as well as team setting. We'll define how empathy impacts team performance and productivity. And we'll break down the framework that turns empathy from an idea to an action.