Dalton Kehoe

As an organizational change practitioner, trainer and motivational speaker, Dr. Dalton Kehoe has been helping individuals and organization throughout North America strive for excellence for over 40 years.

Kehoe inspires others with his passionate energy and the focus on his life mission of helping organizations respond to changes in value systems, modes of leadership and forms of collaboration that encourage excellence. Presenting on such topics as appreciative leadership, self-managed communication, creative thinking and problem solving, he motivates individuals to attain personal excellence by teaching them to gain strength and leadership skills from within themselves.

As an instructor at the Schulich School of Business and a professor in the Faculty of Arts at York University, Kehoe has been routinely voted as one of the top teachers in Ontario, and was chosen by TVOntario as one of the best lecturers in the province. He is a partner in Heart of the Matter Consulting, an organization that assists companies in shifting leadership culture and improving customer service. He has the rare ability to translate his research into practical and successful applications for both his students and clients. Due to his academic background, Kehoe is constantly evolving with the research community, and has the most current and effective information and strategies.

Kehoe's dynamic presentation style and use of images and anecdotes have made him a favourite among his students and audiences. His academic, consulting and research experience has exposed him to a wide variety of companies and employees, and has granted him invaluable insights into the dynamics of successful business relationships and organizational excellence.

1. Employee Engagement, Workplace Wellness and Local Leadership

    In every organization, managers and employees work in a stressful environment - too much to do, in too little time, with too few resources and in the midst of change. All this can lead to decreases in both productivity and physical and emotional wellness for employees at all levels. Wellness issues show up in rising rates of absenteeism and lengths of disability leaves – and in declining productivity - as employees respond to continual feelings of stress by emotionally disengaging from their work.

    These negative effects often appear to be inevitable but they aren't. Based on his own research, consulting experience and results from key organizational studies, Dr. Kehoe's talk highlights the particular elements of managerial behavior and decision-making that organizational leaders must focus on if they are to support the kind of local workplace practices and employee relationships that can enhance their engagement in their work and buffer them against workplace stress.

1. Leadership For Engagement: Competent, Caring and Collaborative

    This presentation combines insights from the research done on the dimensions of competence and caring in local leadership behavior and employee engagement with the growing body of data on the emotional effects on employees of the fairness or justice of their manager's behavior. Kehoe vividly demonstrates how three-C leadership (competent, caring and collaborative) not only increases employee productivity and unit profitability and efficiency as well as customer satisfaction and loyalty.

1. The Power of Appreciation at Work: Unleashing the Energy for Change

    It's appreciation -- and not fear -- that will get the results you want from your employees, every time. In his keynotes, acclaimed professor Dalton Kehoe delivers an emotional punch with practical value. To create rapid and lasting change at the workplace, he says, the qualities of hope, optimism and acceptance will always beat out fear and force.

    In his energetic talks, Kehoe shows us why Appreciative Inquiry is sweeping HR departments, management circles and employee groups. Appreciative Inquiry means understanding people's situations, asking them good questions, and valuing them for what they've already done in order to unlock their potential to repeat it in a changing future. With fascinating case studies, he debunks many myths of workplace motivation.

    Most companies, when striving for change, use the Three F's:

    ·Fear - Crisis Gets Attention

    ·Facts - Tell Them What To Do

    ·Force - Threaten Jobs

    This approach is quick, but it stimulates the wrong emotions, and the changes come slowly, awkwardly, or not all. Kehoe, instead, shows you the best methods to communicate with others at work: ways to achieve real change that will lead to personal and professional success.

1. Appreciative Inquiry: Unleashing the Energy for Change

    In terms of approaches to organizational change Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a relatively recent development – practiced from about 1995 to the present. AI's rapidly growing usage is due to its almost magical way of engaging people in the process of seeing and creating change at a various levels: the whole organizational level; at the level of particular teams or in their persona leadership styles. The AI process is always positive for participants, unleashing their creative energies and their willingness to create and implement change.

    Presentations on AI can work for a wide variety of clients. This can be done in workshop form – ½ day, one day. Worked really well for Steves and Rozema

1. D.I.A.L.O.G.U.E: Effective Communication in Difficult Circumstances

    A good deal of what we do every day as human beings in the process of preparing to talk to other people is pretty much automatic. Most of our internal, "natural" acts of processing information—perception, cognition and emotion—are schematic, automatic processes focused on creating a comforting certainty about what's going on and what's going to happen next. We don't think very much before we talk in most situations. And that's fine as long as nothing upsets our view of our selves (our "rightness") or our perception of other people's view of us. Automatic fast and closed ("Blink Talk") is the way we live our lives.

    This kind of "CONNECT talk" is fine in situations that are well structured and predictable. However, when we are faced with differences, disagreement and disorder in our relationships with others, we must move into a new mode—"D.I.A.L.O.G.U.E. talk".

    In this speech, which can also be delivered in workshop format, Professor Dalton Kehoe teaches his audience the principles of effective communication in difficult situations. Each element in this process— Descriptive talk, I messages, Appreciative questions, Listening actively, Open acknowledgement, Genuine support, Understanding first, and Emotional self-management—help to overcome our natural tendency to become defensive and controlling when confronted with conflict, and move the discussion along to a productive, or less harmful conclusion.

    Learning this approach to communication in difficult circumstances helps audience members to become more mindful of their behaviour, and gives them the tools to preserve relationships when disagreements happen.

1. Self-Managed Leadership

    This presentation describes emotionally intelligent leaders who manage their emotional reactions in difficult communication situations. Not only do managers learn the value of reducing their automatic C.O.N.T.R.O.L. talk and moving to D.I.A.L.O.G.U.E. talk when motivating employees or when facing unexpected differences, disorder and disagreement but also some of the key tools for doing so. This material has been successfully presented to all levels of organizational leadership.