Angela Kingdon, PhD Speaking Topics

• Workplace Wellbeing: Why Your Highest Performers Are Burning Out and What to Do About It

  Based on Angela’s forthcoming book, "Low-Demand Business: How to Build Work That Doesn’t Break You"

  High performers are often treated as the people who can handle anything. They are praised for their intensity, speed, loyalty, problem-solving, and ability to keep going when everyone else is overwhelmed. Then, one day, they stop. They burn out, disengage, leave, or quietly become a fraction of who they were at work.

  In this timely and practical keynote, Dr. Angela Kingdon helps leaders understand burnout as a design problem, not a personal weakness. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience as a CEO, communications expert, psychology researcher, and workplace wellbeing speaker, Angela shows how modern workplace systems overload the very people they most depend on.

  Angela gives leaders a new way to spot hidden burnout, reduce unnecessary friction, and create conditions where talented people can sustain high-quality work without sacrificing their health, creativity, or humanity.

  ATTENDEES GAIN:

  • Awareness of why high performers are often most vulnerable to burnout.
  • A practical understanding of burnout as a workplace design issue.
  • Insight into how communication, meetings, urgency, and unclear expectations drain talent.
  • Strategies to reduce unnecessary demand without lowering standards.
  • A framework for building healthier systems where people can do their best work for longer.

• Communication: The Hidden Cost of Workplace Misunderstanding

  Every organization loses time, trust, and talent to misunderstanding. People leave meetings with different assumptions. Managers think they were clear. Employees think they are failing. Teams build resentment around problems no one has named out loud.

  In this engaging keynote, Dr. Angela Kingdon shows how workplace communication can become one of the biggest hidden drivers of burnout, disengagement, conflict, and underperformance. With a PhD in Communications and decades of experience helping leaders, authors, founders, and teams translate complex ideas into action, Angela helps audiences see where communication breaks down and how to repair it.

  This talk is especially valuable for organizations navigating hybrid work, neurodiverse teams, fast growth, leadership change, or high-pressure collaboration.

  ATTENDEES GAIN:

  • Awareness of the most common sources of workplace misunderstanding.
  • Tools for making expectations clearer across teams and roles.
  • Strategies for reducing friction in meetings, feedback, and collaboration.
  • Insight into how different communication styles affect trust and performance.
  • Practical ways to build communication systems that support clarity, belonging, and better work.

• Leadership: What Leaders Get Wrong About Motivation, Loyalty, and High Performance

  Most leaders want motivated, loyal, high-performing teams. Many workplace systems accidentally reward overwork, punish honesty, and confuse compliance with commitment. The result is a culture where people perform engagement while quietly losing energy, creativity, and trust.

  Dr. Angela Kingdon brings the perspective of a founder who built a $50M+ company, supported nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs and thought leaders, and spent decades studying communication, psychology, and human potential. In this keynote, Angela helps leaders rethink what actually drives performance in modern workplaces.

  Audiences leave with a clearer understanding of what people need from leadership now: clarity, autonomy, trust, meaningful work, and conditions that support sustainable contribution.

  ATTENDEES GAIN:

  • A fresh understanding of what motivates people at work.
  • Insight into why loyalty declines when people feel misunderstood or overextended.
  • Strategies for leading high performers without burning them out.
  • Practical ways to improve trust, feedback, and psychological safety.
  • A leadership lens that supports performance, wellbeing, and retention.

• Future of Work: The Workplace Was Designed for Assembly Lines. Your Employees Weren’t.

  Many workplace norms were built for a different era: fixed hours, constant supervision, standardized roles, and visible productivity. Today’s work depends on creativity, pattern recognition, emotional labor, communication, problem-solving, and deep focus. The systems have not caught up with the work.

  In this forward-looking keynote, Dr. Angela Kingdon challenges leaders to rethink the assumptions built into their organizations. She explores how hybrid work, generative AI, neurodiversity, and changing employee expectations are reshaping what people need in order to thrive.

  Angela helps audiences move beyond surface-level perks and toward deeper workplace design. The goal is not to make work easier. The goal is to remove the unnecessary barriers that keep talented people from doing their best work.

  ATTENDEES GAIN:

  • Awareness of outdated workplace assumptions that still shape modern organizations.
  • Insight into how knowledge work differs from industrial-era work.
  • Strategies for designing work around attention, energy, communication, and creativity.
  • Practical ways to support different working styles without losing accountability.
  • A future-of-work framework for building more adaptive, humane, and high-performing organizations.

• Inclusion and Belonging: What Neurodivergent Employees Can Teach Us About Building Better Workplaces

  Neurodivergent employees are often framed as people who need accommodation. Angela Kingdon invites organizations to ask a better question: What can neurodivergent people teach us about the future of work?

  As the founder of the Autistic Culture Institute and host of the award-winning Autistic Culture Podcast Network, Angela brings a deeply informed and practical perspective to inclusion. She helps leaders understand how sensory load, communication norms, social expectations, unclear rules, and constant context-switching affect people across the organization.

  This keynote shows how designing for neurodivergent employees can improve clarity, flexibility, trust, and wellbeing for everyone.

  ATTENDEES GAIN:

  • Awareness of common barriers faced by neurodivergent employees.
  • Insight into how workplace norms affect attention, communication, and belonging.
  • Strategies for making inclusion practical, respectful, and useful.
  • Examples of workplace changes that support both neurodivergent and neurotypical employees.
  • A stronger understanding of how difference can improve workplace design, leadership, and culture.

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