For more than 20 years, Connie Dieken dedicated herself to journalism as atelevision news anchorwoman, reporter, broadcast personality, and talk show host, including co-hosting The Morning Exchange, America’s longestrunning television talk show. She is a multiple Emmy® award-winning and Telly® award-winning journalist and her excellence has led to her induction to the Radio/Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame.  

Connie has represented more than 50 companies as their spokesperson, including Intel, Sealy, GE, American Greetings, Ernst and Young and Goodyear.  

Connie spent her career with the most successful and influential people in business and entertainment and recognized a pattern to their success. After years of research, she learned the common traits each of these people shared, and discovered people could learn how to be influential with the right training. Armed with unique insight into the power that influence has over each of us, she developed a proven methodology to transform any leader or executive into an influencer.  

 In 2000, she founded onPoint Communication to train leaders and emerging leaders in critical influential leadership, communication, media and presentation skills. For nearly 12 years, Connie has been the trusted executive coach and advisor to many leaders who run the world’s most recognizable brands. She has become the most respected and in-demand executive coach, keynote speaker, author and authority on learning the skills needed to become an influential personality in all forms of leadership and communications.  

Connie has authored and coauthored five books, dedicated to teaching people the guide to influential leadership, communication and presentation techniques. Her most recent bestselling book, Talk Less, Say More: 3 Habits to Influence Others and Make Things Happen, takes Connie’s knowledge, research and experience coaching high-powered leaders into a fast-paced, no-nonsense guide to teach anyone to be an influential communicator with anyone, anywhere.  

Connie’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNBC, The Los AngelesTimes, Crain’s Business, The Chicago Tribune, Women’s Day, and many more nationwide.

TOPICS INCLUDE:

Leadership

People crave a certain amount of structure and guidance. Without the influence of good leadership, organizational successes may stay in flux. Many organizations, especially those blessed with highly motivated, exceptional people, overlook the impact effective leaders have on organizational outcomes.

Connie focuses on and highlights various types of leadership, their traits and evaluates strengths and weaknesses. She speaks on tailoring any leader’s behavioral type to outcomes that empower people, give rise to successful performance, and influence positive actions. 

Team Building

GDP isn’t the only casualty during economic hard times and when we start to look at our companies on the micro level, we see that the morale of our team has also been hit hard. People worry for their families, they worry for their jobs, but it’s the leader’s job to foster an environment for self-motivation to improve company morale.

Connie takes audiences through the importance of team building to improve communication and leadership skills within an entire organization. She gets audiences to understand company goals and the role they play in the success, which leads to a stronger working environment with improved collaboration, better performance, and increased retention of top talent.  

Communication

In business and life, our ability to effectively communicate is the most important skill needed to accomplish anything, and yet it is the single greatest challenge in business today. When it comes to our people, so much more is expected from them, we need to reach them on the road just as much as in the office; and yet, this need also decreases their attention spans, makes people more distracted and eager to get to the point.

Connie talks frankly about the need to connect instantly in order to capture attention and gives useable tips helping anyone be heard and understood to influence others to action. Audiences walk away with the skills to achieve more in less words, cause less confusion communication and build more rewarding relationships. Connie inspires audiences to act knowing that the skills they learn will increase their ability to influence through communications. 

Change

Change is hard, and it’s not something people or companies revel in. And regardless of the impetus for change, whether it’s strategic, operational or technological, effective communication and management tends to be the primary bottleneck to any successful change management plan.

Connie shines light on the typical and specific roadblocks to managing change successfully, from effective communication techniques to a successful implementation to dealing successfully with resistant attitudes and behaviors to successful leadership techniques to manage or integrate teams, or strategies to align expectations. 

Customer Relationships

Building and maintaining trust with customers should be the top on any organization’s list, yet more often than not, we find that companies will focus their efforts on new acquisitions rather than better cultivation of the relationships they have. And in today’s social media economy, this is more likely to face detrimental sales and service issues. People have grown accustomed to information on their terms, and if we’re to evolve communication and sales in today’s customer relationships, we must evolve how we sell and service today’s customer.

Connie focuses on a wide variety of customer service, engagement and relationship related issues affecting organizations today. Through her experience with communication and media, Connie gives actionable information to audiences from gaining trust through knowledge, to creating low pressure sales environments, to aligning service and expectations. 

Employee Engagement

Employees don’t stay with companies like they used to. Recruiting and retaining top talent is now the most challenging issue in human resources. And while some forms of brain drain are unavoidable, there are ways to mitigate losses and maximize employee retention through sound methods to improve employee engagement.

Connie focuses her talk on work environments and behaviors that lead to dissatisfaction and teaches basic methods to identify the signs of impending disengagement. She gives ideas on communication and leadership initiatives that increase engagement, improve loyalty among teams. 

Business Etiquette

So much of communication is non-verbal, whether it’s body language, facial expressions, electronic communications, or even just an awareness to the reactions of others. Much of business etiquette really boils down to your acknowledgement and consideration to the people you are interacting with. And while there are many areas that can be construed as rules, and that remaining aware of the old adage “do unto others” is important to be mindful of, we benefit more by staying in the moment of those we are interacting with.

Connie highlights that the popular notion of etiquette can be solved through our consideration and respect of the people and situations we are engaging. Communications and business etiquette should always work to this end. When we engage with people as if they are the center of the universe, just by our behavior, we influence positive action and inspire confidence.