Jennifer Willey
- Certified Speaking Professional and founder of Wet Cement
- Former executive at Yahoo, AOL and The Trade Desk
- Author of Fearless in 5 and creator of Fearless Fundamentals
Jennifer Willey Speaker Biography
Wet Cement works with teams on their third or fourth restructure of the year, where composure becomes the binding constraint on performance. Jenn Willey founded the firm in 2017, after more than 20 years leading sales and marketing teams at Yahoo, AOL, pwc, WebMD and The Trade Desk, and an earlier career as a TV news anchor and reporter for ABC and CBS affiliates.
The methodology is the Fearless Fundamentals framework, five capabilities: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage. It draws on Wet Cement’s Fearless@Work Survey, and has been deployed at Johnson & Johnson, Nissan, Paramount, Samsung and Genentech.
Fearless in 5 was published by Pearson Business in August 2026. Its twenty chapters sit under the five capabilities, from evicting the inner impostor to building a personal board of directors and self-advocating under bias. Pearson positions the book for professional women and for the leaders who manage them, and Wet Cement sells it into organisations as a common leadership language for a whole cohort.
Wet Cement is dual-certified as a Woman-Owned (WBENC) and Disability-Owned (Disability:IN) business, and Jenn is a Certified Speaking Professional, the National Speakers Association designation held by fewer than 12% of its members. She sits on the ad:tech Tokyo advisory board and has spoken at the conference four times, opening day two as moderator in 2023 and 2024. Her work in this region includes the Empower and Elevate Training Academy for ethnic-minority-owned businesses in Europe and the UK, delivered with ESDP and MSDUK.
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Speech Topics
Fearless in 5: A Journey of Resilience & Reinvention
A keynote arguing that confidence and adaptability are built skills, made from a career that changed direction repeatedly, from child actor on a 1980s television show and the youngest certified fitness instructor in the US to TV news anchor, IT management consultant, and tech and media executive.
Key takeaways:
- What fear costs an organization when people stay silent and avoid intelligent risks, and the behaviors that shift it
- Methods for deciding and acting before conditions feel settled, including as AI reshapes roles and expectations
- A clearer read of your own value in place of self-doubt, with the humour in the hard parts as part of how it lands
Lead Through Change: Build Trust, Find Opportunity and Reduce Fear During Times of Transformation
A session for people leaders, from new managers to executives, on holding a team together through repeated change, built on Gartner’s finding that 74% of employees report lower engagement and productivity when they go through change without support.
Key takeaways:
- How fear surfaces in a team as fight, flight, fawn or freeze, and what each one looks like in performance terms
- A repeatable five-part framework for building psychological safety through empathy, structure and impact
- Generative AI applied to change messaging and to the decisions managers make during a restructure
From Impostor to Impact: Building Confidence to Contribute, Lead & Grow
A session on impostor patterns at work, built on Wet Cement research in which 98% of professionals reported some aspect of impostor syndrome, for all employees with a manager version available.
Key takeaways:
- What triggers impostor patterns, and the cost they carry in withheld ideas and passed-up leadership opportunities
- Tools for reframing limiting beliefs and for asking for help without losing standing
- Using AI to build confidence without outsourcing your judgement or your voice, and methods for managers whose people are held back by low confidence rather than low capability
Build Your Personal Board of Directors: Advancement Through Advocates
A workshop in which participants build a named network of sponsors, mentors, peers, allies, and protégés, with a plan for approaching each one.
Key takeaways:
- Which relationship types do which work, and where the participant’s own network is thin
- Conversation openers for approaching a potential sponsor or advocate, supported by Center for Talent Innovation research that
- people with strong networks of mentors, sponsors, and advocates are 23% more likely to advance
- Named prospective board members, identified during the session itself
Harness Generative AI to Boost Impact and Productivity
A hands-on workshop for teams who are using AI as little more than an expensive search engine, covering its use across the Fearless Fundamentals and the safe handling of proprietary information.
Key takeaways:
- Prompts for communicating more assertively, advocating for an idea and working through a complex problem
- Ways to use AI to prioritize, cut low-value work and reduce burnout
- Practice applying it inside their own workflow rather than to generic examples
