Your happiness and success depend on your working relationships. The people you manage. Your boss. Key collaborators. Important clients.

Most of us leave the health and fate of these relationships to chance. We hope for the best, and immediately get into the work.

But every relationship gets dinged at some point, and when that happens, most of us don’t know what to do about it. We are resigned to the fact that this is what happens: relationships always get a little broken, or a little stale, or a little worse. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. Carry on.

In this practical and interactive session, you'll learn how to reverse that trend and build the best possible working relationship with anyone. (Well, almost anyone.)

You will leave with a renewed optimism about the quality of your working relationships, a determination to actively manage them, and a plan to get things started.

“My name is Michael. I can hop. Do you want to see me hop?” That’s how I introduced myself to bemused strangers at the supermarket when I was three. Honestly, not much has changed. Here’s the formal bio, with the best bits at the end.

Michael Bungay Stanier is at the forefront of shaping how organizations around the world make being coach-like an essential leadership competency. His book The Coaching Habit “unweirds coaching”. It is the best-selling coaching book of this century, with over a million copies sold and more than ten thousand five-star reviews on Amazon. In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching. Michael was the first Canadian Coach of the Year, has been named a Global Coaching Guru since 2014, and was a Rhodes Scholar. His most recent book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, shows how to build the Best Possible Relationship with the key people at work.

Michael founded Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that had helped hundreds of organizations transform from advice-driven to curiosity-led. (Learn more at BoxOfCrayons.com.)

Michael is a compelling speaker and facilitator, combining practicality, humour, and an unprecedented degree of engagement with the audience. He’s spoken on stages and screens around the world in front of crowds ranging from ten to ten thousand. His TEDx talk has been watched by a million and a half people. (Learn more at MBS.works.)

En route to today—and these are essential parts of his origin story—Michael knocked himself unconscious as a labourer by hitting himself in the head with a shovel, mastered stagecraft at law school by appearing in a skit called Synchronized Nude Male Modelling, and his first paid piece of writing was a Harlequin Romance-esque story involving a misdelivered letter ... and called The Male Delivery.