This month’s featured speaker lineup has plenty to say about how people work together. A behavioral economist, an inclusion-focused CEO, a workplace sociologist, a Lean practitioner and a former broadcaster each take a different angle on leading and communicating. Meet November’s featured speakers:
Dr. Christiane Schroeter | Keynote Speaker & Behavioral Economist, Doctor Christiane
Dr. Christiane Schroeter teaches the opposite of most leadership advice: Small steps, done consistently, are what move people and organizations forward. A behavioral economist, TEDx speaker and award-winning professor, she helps high-performing teams create real change without burning out the people who deliver it. Her keynotes take one clear idea and turn it into a system leaders can use the next morning.
The idea comes from science: her Ph.D. research at Purdue University focused on elasticities, or how a 1% change ripples through an entire system. She draws on Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Liebig’s Law of the Minimum to build frameworks any audience can apply right away. Through her Petite Practice® framework, she shows leaders how to build focus, confidence and momentum through small, disciplined actions that compound into measurable results. Her passion is helping leaders move forward when the stakes are high and time is short. Many professionals have the talent and drive, she says, but complexity, pressure and constant demands erode their clarity.
Dr. Christiane is a Fulbright Scholar and a professor at Cal Poly with 33 peer-reviewed publications, including a Journal of Health Economics paper cited more than 300 times. She hosts the Happy Healthy Hustle podcast, which ranks in the global top 1%, and was named 2025 Woman Podcaster of the Year in education. She is the bestselling author of five books, most recently “Petite Practice®: Small, Steady Steps to a Life of Momentum and Real Change,” and contributed to the anthology “Milestone Moments: Fifteen Women Leaders on Reinvention.” She has taught more than 10,000 students and professionals in five countries, and her commentary on educator workload, burnout and career decisions has appeared in Newsweek, Business Insider, The Washington Times, Yahoo, SheKnows and HigherEdJobs. Her signature keynote, built from her TEDx talk “How Small Steps Create Big Change,” gives audiences a method they can start using the next morning.
View Christiane’s speaker profile.
Maxine Legall | Speaker & CEO, Thrive Inclusively
Maxine Legall is the founder and CEO of Thrive Inclusively and a speaker with more than 20 years of experience. She speaks at conferences, virtual events and seminars on resilience, self-care and inclusion, and she guides organizations toward success with culturally transformative practices and innovative leadership strategies. Teamwork, empathy, engagement and strong leadership drive her work.
She realized early on in life that she enjoyed helping others. Her best story comes from a time she got in her own way. Six months into a new role, Maxine noticed her employer paid for an MBA. She wanted one but kept talking herself out of it, convinced she couldn’t work full time, care for her family and earn the degree. A colleague asked how long it would take. Three years, Legall said. “Well, that will be 2014,” her colleague replied. “You can have an MBA in 2014 or not have one!” Maxine applied, got accepted and enrolled. She graduated in 2014 with a 4-year-old at home and another baby on the way.
Maxine recently emceed C-Vision International’s Women with Vision CXO, a full day of dialogue and conversation. Her talks include “Silencing Your Inner Critic: Reclaim Your Voice & Power,” which examines imposter syndrome and how to combat the self-doubt behind it and “Leading Inclusively,” where she shares strategies for leading diverse teams to high performance while nurturing inclusion and psychological safety.
View Maxine’s speaker profile.
Sarah Mosseri | Keynote Speaker and Organizational Strategist, Author of “Trust Fall”
Sarah Mosseri is a keynote speaker, organizational strategist and sociologist of work. She is the author of “Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us” (University of California Press, 2026), based on more than 1,200 hours of NSF-funded fieldwork inside four workplaces: a marketing agency, a restaurant, a tech start-up and the ride-hail circuit. The book received an honorable mention for the American Sociological Association’s Labor & Labor Movements Book Award.
Her interest began in advertising, where she sat behind the glass at consumer focus groups and realized she loved listening to people talk, noticing patterns and working out what they meant in practice. Her research now looks past engagement scores and org charts to the informal organization: the favors, workarounds, unwritten rules and personal relationships that hold a workplace together. Left unexamined, she says, these become liabilities, such as retention that rests on one person’s goodwill, crisis heroics that stand in for functional systems and AI tools trained on habits no one has audited. Across her fieldwork, she found that people bring enormous care to their jobs and the systems around them often waste it.
Her talks give audiences language for dynamics they have felt at work but struggled to name: the buffering labor that exhausts good managers, the crisis cultures that fuel constant firefighting and what happens when good intentions meet bad systems. Her favorite moment on a stage is when someone recognizes a dynamic they have felt for years and finally has a name for it. She has spoken for the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors, the University of Maryland System, Expel Technology, UVA Darden Business School and the California Department of Health. Mosseri holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Virginia and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney Business School.
Anne Frewin | Chief Engagement Architect, Employee Centric Leadership, LLC
Anne Frewin is a speaker, coach and facilitator, and the Chief Engagement Architect at Employee Centric Leadership, LLC. She has spent more than 15 years implementing Lean principles across health care, biomedical, manufacturing and professional services, and she has seen firsthand how leadership behaviors shape the environment, for better or worse. She holds master’s degrees in organizational leadership and health care administration.
Her path into employee engagement and leadership development grew out of that Lean work. Anne saw that the greatest impact came not from leading improvement projects but from the learning the participants did along the way. Through one-on-one coaching and leadership training, she watched leaders build their employees up instead of shutting them down. Over the years, she has held roles that required her to implement Lean practices and to develop leaders at every level to coach others and create cultures where employees are engaged and thrive.
Anne turns that conviction into practice with her proprietary LEAD Mindset Model: Lead with Courage, Embody Trust, Anchor with Clarity and Drive Improvement. It gives leaders a clear path from intention to action. She believes in the potential of people when they are engaged and empowered, and she is passionate about creating workplaces where employees feel valued, motivated and energized to be their best, which leads to greater productivity and innovation.
Cynthia Kay | CEO and Founder, Cynthia Kay Biz
Cynthia Kay is the founder of CK and CO Media Production and Cynthia Kay Biz, which provide communication programs for organizations from the Fortune Global 100 to small businesses. A former award-winning broadcaster, she has spent more than 35 years speaking, teaching and coaching business owners and executives. She holds a master’s in communications and is a graduate of Michigan State University.
Her business roots go back to her dad’s dry cleaning shop, where she swept floors, worked the counter and eventually opened and closed the store. It was there she learned business could be messy. Her broadcasting career ended when she was fired from a station that changed ownership four times in six and a half years, despite more than 30 awards from United Press International, the Associated Press and regional groups. Her new boss thought she made too much money and didn’t value her investigative reporting. “You are nobody till somebody fires you,” she often says. The firing led her to start her own company and take it from a small local firm to one serving corporations and nonprofits.
Cynthia is a past board chair of the National Small Business Association, an inductee of the American Academy of Entrepreneurs and an Entrepreneur Emeritus for the Edward Lowe Foundation. She is the author of five prize-winning books, known for a down-in-the-trenches, no-nonsense and humorous approach to business and life. Her passion is storytelling. She has helped engineers tell the stories behind everything from massive buildings to microchips, toured plants that make jet engines, gummy bears and pharmaceuticals, and interviewed countless people about how products changed, and sometimes saved, their lives. What makes her smile is inspiring curiosity and showing how people can make a difference by communicating effectively.
View Cynthia’s speaker profile.
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