Melody Wilding

Managing Up: Influence Without Authority in the Age of AI
Your organization is in constant flux. Priorities may change mid-month, demands multiply daily, and teams must drive alignment across functions and levels. To stay competitive as complexity grows, you need employees and leaders who can influence across the chain of command to speed up decisions and keep critical work on track.
AI can help teams draft documents or automate tasks, but there’s no substitute for human skills like trust, persuasion, and relationship-building. Managing up is the must-have skill set that turns those capabilities into business results while giving top talent more agency and autonomy in their careers.
Whether your employees are looking to move up, have taken on a bigger remit with more senior stakeholders, or are executives who need to earn support from boards, regulatory partners, and customers, this talk (drawn from Melody’s award-winning book, Managing Up) provides practical tools for getting what they need from powerful people without compromising their integrity.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Uncover what your boss (and their boss) cares about, even amid fast-shifting priorities, so you can deliver maximum value
• Quickly decode how stakeholders prefer to receive information and make decisions to eliminate conflicts and get buy-in
• Push back or renegotiate scope without damaging the relationship (including exact language to use)
• Deliver honest, necessary feedback upward in a way that deepens credibility and is taken seriously
• Take initiative to advance new ideas or step outside your remit without crossing political lines
• Showcase your contributions without self-promoting or cutting others out

How to Work With Anyone: Confidently Collaborate Across Work Styles & Personalities
Success at work increasingly depends on your ability to collaborate with those who think and communicate differently. And if not handled correctly, these differences can slow business down—big time. Employees lose more than a month each year to ineffective communication, costing $12,506 per employee annually*. Plus, with five generations now working side by side, a person’s ability to adapt impacts their happiness and engagement daily.
No one wants another workplace communication talk telling them to “just be authentic” or “listen more.” Those ideas, while well-meaning, fall flat when faced with the reality of a colleague who seems distrustful and asks 50 questions or an executive who gets impatient with too much context.
Drawn from Melody’s book Managing Up and grounded in decades of psychological research, this session provides memorable, proven strategies for adapting how you come across without losing your own style. Participants learn how to apply the framework in everything from emails and meetings to feedback conversations and high-stakes decisions, helping eliminate expensive misunderstandings and build stronger, more enjoyable relationships.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Use a simple but powerful “decoder” to command attention and respect from any stakeholder (even the most difficult) with the very first sentence you speak
• Leverage the “diamond principle” to tailor a message for a big-picture CEO, a process-focused peer, or a skeptical customer—and get each of them on your side
• Bridge the translation gap between technical and non-technical teammates without “dumbing” anything down
• Keep your composure with executives who interrupt
• Save time by getting decisions in a single email or meeting instead of weeks of back-and-forth
*Data sourced from Axios and Grammerly

Standout Self-Advocacy: Increase Your Value and Visibility
Right now, some of your best people may feel invisible. Your reliable workhorses – those solving problems and shouldering important responsibilities – freeze when talking about their contributions, worried they’ll sound selfish and boastful. Their dissatisfaction builds, risking attrition. On the other hand, Gallup finds that employees who are well recognized are 45% less likely to leave their organization.
Leaders also need people who can clearly explain the value their work is creating, especially when priorities and investments are under greater scrutiny.
Self-advocacy helps close both gaps, which is why participants leave this talk armed with skills to articulate their results. Melody helps employees feel more valued and ensure leadership has a clearer view of the talent and impact already inside the organization.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Translate your tasks into business outcomes your boss, skip-level, and C-Suite care about
• Share your contributions in a way that honors the team AND makes your individual impact clear
• Weave self-advocacy into your existing workflow — one-on-ones, project updates, status reports — instead of adding it as another thing on your plate
• Walk into your next performance review with a clear, confident narrative of what you’ve delivered not a last-minute scramble