Katie Best Keynote Speaker

• The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems: And How to Solve Them

Every leader, no matter how experienced, faces moments where they feel stuck. This talk breaks down the toughest challenges in leadership today, ranging from managing underperformance to handling difficult conversations to making high-stakes decisions. In it, Katie provides practical, inspiring and research-backed strategies to navigate them.


At the heart of this session is SOLVE, Dr. Katie Best’s structured approach to leadership problem-solving. Developed from years of leadership coaching, consulting, and teaching, SOLVE provides a clear, adaptable framework that helps leaders tackle their biggest challenges with confidence and clarity.

This session can be tailored to include real leadership dilemmas faced by the audience, making it an interactive and high-impact experience. Whether exploring common leadership struggles or working through live challenges in the room, attendees will leave with tools they can immediately apply to their own leadership context. It can also be adapted to be a fireside chat, focused on the book and its key learnings, and bringing in audience and host questions to tailor it to the audience’s interests on the night.

Key takeaways:

• A structured approach to solving leadership challenges using the SOLVE framework
• Tools to make difficult decisions and manage competing priorities
• Practical strategies to handle conflict, disengagement, and misalignment

• Why Most Leadership Advice Doesn’t Work (And What to Do Instead)

The leadership industry is full of advice but often it is oversimplified, outdated, or just plain ineffective. Generic mantras like just be authentic or empower your team sound compelling, but they often fail leaders in real-world situations. So how can leaders know what really works?

In this talk, Katie unpacks why so much leadership advice falls short: primarily because it ignores context and fails to encourage leaders to deeply understand a situation before trying to solve it. Too often, leadership advice presents one-size-fits-all solutions, when in reality, great leadership is about reading the situation, diagnosing the problem, and adapting accordingly.

Drawing on research, coaching insights, and real-world leadership case studies, Katie helps leaders adopt a more thoughtful, effective approach to leadership. This session challenges attendees to critically evaluate leadership trends, challenge common leadership assumptions, and apply an approach that is both strategic and adaptable. It can also be tailored to explore common leadership advice the audience has struggled with (for example, through live messaging), making it highly entertaining, interactive, and relevant.

Key takeaways:

• Why most leadership frameworks oversimplify reality and how to avoid this pitfall
• How to avoid generic advice traps and make leadership decisions that fit the situation
• A simple framework to figure out and apply what truly works

• How to use the SOLVE framework to tackle your workplace problems

Leaders dealing with persistent, messy, or ambiguous issues often don’t have a decent problem solving methodology. In this session, prticipants will use Katie’s SOLVE method as a problem solving technique; learn how to state the problem clearly and identify what’s causing it; create a solution which fits the context; and explore how to structure thinking when situations feel overwhelming.

• Leading Exceptional Teams (and Dealing with Team Challenges)

It’s hard to get people to work together, to lead a disparate group, and to tackle power struggles and unspoken tensions which could undermine performance. In this session, participants will learn to identify what makes a strong team and how to foster these qualities in their own team; balance psychological safety with accountability; identify points of friction; and lead the team towards high performance.

• Strategic Thinking for Busy Leaders

Leaders are often told they need to think more strategically and step back from ‘the weeds’, but aren’t told how. In this session, we identify how to shift from reactive to deliberate thinking, create space for strategci work through better work-sharing and delegation, and how to connect daily decisions to longer-term goals.

• Personal Effectiveness for Leaders

Even high-performing professionals become overwhelmed, reactive, or stretched too thin and their performance and resilience suffer, creating a negative cycle. In this session, we’ll identify where the time pressure is coming from and what to do about it; look at how to manage energy to enable them to maximise their effectiveness – including how to recuperate after periods of stress; prioritise what really needs their attention and how to say no; and learn how to set boundaries without guilt and maintain perspective in demanding environments.