Yoram Solomon PhD
Keynote Speaker | Trust Expert & Researcher
BY THE NUMBERS
TOP
1%
SPEAKER
(by eSpeakers)
AUTHOR OF
16
BOOKS
TOP
10
GLOBAL THOUGHT
LEADER
PUBLISHED
300+
ARTICLES
DELIVERED
50+
SESSIONS in 2022
TESTIMONIALS
"I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THIS PRESENTER BACK AGAIN! REGARDLESS OF THE TOPIC, I WOULD ATTEND HIS SESSIONS."
"YORAM WAS AMAZING! HE KNEW HOW TO KEEP US ENGAGED! HE HAD COMMAND OF THE AUDIENCE. SO MUCH ENERGY! SO MUCH KNOWLEDGE. THIS HAS BEEN MY FAVORITE ONE YET! THANK YOU!"
"I WISH THERE WAS SOMETHING BEYOND STRONGLY AGREE. YORAM WAS EASILY THE BEST SPEAKER I HAVE EVER HEARD - ENGAGING, GREAT CONTENT, REAL ACTIONABLE ITEMS. PLEASE BRING HIM BACK FOR MORE!"
"DR. SOLOMON WAS ONE OF THE BEST SPEAKERS I HAVE SEEN THROUGH MPI AND IN A WHILE. HE WAS ENGAGING, ENTERTAINING, FUNNY, HONEST, REAL AND IMPACTFUL. I HOPE TO ATTEND MORE SEMINARS WITH HIM AS THE SPEAKER! WOW!!"
"THIS WEBINAR WAS AMAZING! WHAT A WONDERFUL, MOTIVATING, INFORMATIVE SPEAKER. HE HELD MY ATTENTION THE
WHOLE TIME - I DIDN'T WANT IT TO END!"
"THIS WAS, BY FAR, THE BEST WEBINAR I HAVE SEEN! YORAM IS NOT ONLY CLEARLY AN EXPERT IN HIS FIELD, BUT TRULY RELATABLE AND ENTERTAINING. THE MATERIAL WAS HELPFUL AND SOMETHING I CAN EASILY INCORPORATE INTO MY JOB ON A DAILY BASIS. THANK YOU!"
FEEDBACK FROM MEETING PROFESSIONALS INTERNATIONAL (MPI) KEYNOTE
"YOUR PRESENTATION WAS A BIG HIT. THE POWER OF THE PRESENTER CAN BE JUDGED BY HOW LONG AFTER THE PRESENTATION THE AUDIENCE STAYS. THEY WERE HERE A FULL HOUR AFTER THE EVENT."
JACK BICK, ORGANIZER, ST. JUDE CAREER ALLIANCE
"HE HIT A HOMERUN WITH OUR AUDIENCE! NOT ONLY DID THEY FIND THE MATERIAL COMPELLING, THEY FOUND HIM TO BE AN INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR WHOSE EXTENSIVE RESEARCH AND NATURAL CURIOSITY MAKES HIS INTERACTIVE SESSIONS SO MEANINGFUL AND ON TARGET."
EILEEN KORNMEYER, AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, DALLAS BUSINESS JOURNAL
HOT KEYNOTE AND BREAKOUT TOPICS
May TRUST be with You! What is Trust, and how do you become trusted?
Trust is the foundation for every relationship, personal and professional. Trust makes companies succeed, and distrust makes them fail. In one of his surveys, 16-time author Dr. Solomon found that trustworthiness was the most important quality for people in others more than 61% of the time, more than the next four qualities combined. But trust is not what you think it is. In this keynote, he will show how trust affects everything, provide a new definition for trust and demonstrate that trust is relative through the 8 laws of trust. You will see that the same behavior that would cause one person to trust you could cause another person to distrust you. Through the 6 components of his relative trust model (who you are and what you do), he will explain how people decide if they can trust you and how you can make better decisions on whether you can trust them. The keynote is very engaging and fast-paced, and using the 8-laws of trust, personal stories, and participant engagement, he delivers the takeaways listed below. This keynote was delivered (at varying depths) over 45 to 90 minutes and to audiences from 13 to over 9,000+.
The Cost of our Obsession with Leadership
Almost two decades ago, Yoram sat with an organizational psychologist and asked, “am I a leader or an individual contributor?” The answer changed his professional life and career path forever (and for the better). Corporate America is obsessed with leadership. Everybody wants to rise in the organizational hierarchy, and we encourage it. But there is a cost for it. In this keynote, in an engaging, inspiring, sometimes humorous, and sometimes emotional and dead serious, Dr. Yoram Solomon will start by explaining why we are so obsessed with leadership, what are the true costs to the organization, one of which is how it devastates trust in the organization. He will continue and explain why not everybody should be a leader, and finish with a path forward to get there.
The Formula for Building A Trusted and Successful Business
What makes a business successful? Two things: being trusted and being profitable. A trusted company can sell the same product at a 29.6% higher price and still win the business, or sell at the same price as a competitor and win the business 100% of the time. There are five components (all completely within your control) and a very specific mathematical relationship between them that, if maintained, will make any business profitable and trusted. Dr. Yoram Solomon has been a serial entrepreneur for more than three decades and is a highly regarded adjunct entrepreneurship professor at the graduate school of business at SMU. Using his trust research and pragmatic, no-BS approach, he will explain what makes customers trust your company and what will make your company profitable in this interactive and highly-engaging keynote.
Sell on TRUST and Not on Price
In one of his surveys, the author of The Book of Trust, Dr. Yoram Solomon, found that people care about the trustworthiness of others 50% more than the next four qualities combined. In more than 77% of the cases, they cared about the trustworthiness of a salesperson or a service provider more than any other quality. In another study, he found that trustworthy salespeople can get 29.6% higher prices for the same item than untrustworthy ones. Even worse, he found that you will have to discount your product or service by 22.8% just to compete with a trustworthy salesperson, if you are not one. In this keynote, you will learn how to build your trustworthiness as a salesperson through examples and the new relative and dynamic trust model. Finally, you will get specific tips on being a more trustworthy salesperson from the book "Can I Trust You? 50+1 Habits that will make you a trustworthy SALESPERSON.
TRUST and Organizational Silos
As companies grow, they start developing silos between different functional departments, business units, or both. Silos are separated by walls of distrust. While the level of trust within an organizational unit increases, the level of trust across those walls decreases. The consequences of having silos can be devastating to organizations. Not only do different units in the organization not support each other, but they often find themselves competing with one another. What could be a productive 1+1=3 turns into a destructive 1+1=1. You can have the best HR, finance, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, or sales department, but what does it matter when the company fails? There is a reciprocal relationship between trust and the formation and existence of silos. Distrust across organizational units causes them to build silos, and the existence of those silos further causes distrust. This session will use the relative trust model to explain why silos are formed and, more importantly, how to combat them.
8 Things to do to Not Lose Trust when Working Remotely
In March 2020, the world changed again. This time, it was addressed by working remotely, from home. Working remotely is not new, although it was never used as broadly as it did since March 2020. These days, the phrase “the new normal” is used often, referring to working remotely. Tools were developed to support this way of working and collaborating, but also tools to keep track of employees when working (or not) remotely. An AT&T study found that the hybrid work model is expected to grow from 42% in 2021 to 81% in 2024. Is remote work good for everyone, in every situation, and for every job? This session will answer that question and, more importantly, how remote work is related to trust, how it affects trust, and how it is affected by it. The session will conclude by providing 8 things you can do not to lose trust when working remotely.
The Hard Truths About Employee Engagement Surveys and TRUST
Employee engagement is essential to companies. It affects the company’s culture and performance. But it has also declined in the past several years. Because of that, many companies conduct employee engagement surveys. However, before you set off to conduct an employee engagement survey, there are a few things you should know and consider, because you may end up not really hearing what you need to hear, but rather only what you want to hear, and because you might do more harm than good with those surveys. This article will explain those, with examples and research data, and at the end, you’ll see what you should do to keep employee engagement high. Because, after all, that’s your goal. Right? And yes, it has everything to do with trust.
How to Form New Habits that Change Old Behaviors and Build TRUST
What holds you back from being more trusted by others is typically one old behavior that you simply can’t shake. But old behaviors are very hard to change without forming new habits. This session will focus less on the relative trustworthiness model itself, and more on the process developed by the instructor for forming new habits. This process can be applied to building trust, as well as to changing any other behavior, or even losing weight (for which the process was originally developed by the instructor in 2012). This session will lay out 5 steps to forming any new behavior, and will then add 2 more steps that will turn it into the 7-step Trust Habits® process that will form new habits that will change old behaviors, build trust, and transform the organization.
Communication and TRUST
The common wisdom is that communication is one of the most important foundations of trust. But the relationship between trust and communication is reciprocal. On the one hand, we tend to trust people who communicate with us transparently. Who tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We trust people who tell us what we need to hear, not necessarily what they think we want to hear. But on the other hand: would you be willing to share confidential information with someone you don’t trust? Would you be willing to be vulnerable with someone you don’t trust? Would you feel comfortable giving direct feedback to someone when you don’t know (or trust) how they will take it? And will you accept that kind of feedback from someone you don’t trust to have your best interests in mind? This session will address that relationship in greater detail and cover topics such as transparency, miscommunication, intimacy, information vs. communication, and more.
10 Ways to be More Accountable and Trusted at Work
The dictionary defines accountability as “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.” The session instructor found a strong link between trust and accountability in his research. Like any trust relationship, this one, too, is reciprocal. If a person behaves in an accountable way, they will be trusted and get autonomy because they are trusted not to abuse it. Accountability cuts across many relationships, personal and professional. In this session, through stories, research, and the relative trust model, the instructor will discuss several aspects of accountability, the link between accountability and trust, and give you 10 ways to be more accountable and trusted and to guide employees in the company to do so.
Give Feedback Like You Care, Take Feedback Like it Matters
Did someone ever give you "constructive feedback" in front of everyone, making you feel ashamed? Did you ever give feedback to help someone, only to have it blow up in your face, making you swear never to give feedback to that person again? Employees in high-trust organizations experience 74% less stress, 106% more energy, and 76% more engagement. Why? Because they are 106% more capable of delivering feedback and 76% more receptive to it. It's when instead of holding the meeting before the meeting or the meeting after the meeting, you only hold the meeting during the meeting. Based on his research and experience as an executive, an elected official, a professor, a pilot, and a member of an elite military unit, Dr. Yoram Solomon, the author of The Book of Trust, will provide 4 powerful tips on giving feedback and 4 powerful tips on receiving it. At the end of this highly engaging, entertaining session full of emotional stories, he will also provide a handout with the feedback pledge and more.
How Leaders Kill Trust (and how not to)
No leader intentionally wants to kill the trustworthiness of their people. But they do it anyway, and often for what they believe are perfectly justified reasons. Nevertheless, the outcome is the same: they cause their people to give up and stop being trustworthy, and as a result, the leaders cannot trust them. A self-fulfilling prophecy. This keynote will explain WHY it happens in light of the 8 laws of trust and the 6 components of the relative trust model. It will discuss the correlation between autonomy, micromanagement, creativity, and productivity (with insights from the speaker’s doctoral research) and the reciprocal relationship between them (through learnings from later research done by the speaker). These insights might shock you, but also open your eyes. In the end, he will show you how to reverse this trend.
Can You Trust Remote Employees?
We didn’t ask for the COVID-19 pandemic. We didn’t ask to work from home. But, in March 2020, it was forced upon us. At the time, it didn’t look like there was going to be an end, and this was going to be “the new normal.” We are now out of the pandemic. Many companies have returned to work at the office, but we also learned the benefits of working from home for the company and its employees. Should we go back to the office full-time? Should we work remotely full-time? Should we deploy a hybrid mode? And, in the context of this session, should you trust employees who work from home? Or, even better, what can you do so you can trust them?