Frequently Asked Questions
About Drew Dudley
Drew Dudley spent eight years as the lead of one of Canada’s largest leadership development programs at the University of Toronto. His TED talk “Everyday Leadership (The Lollipop Moment)” was voted “one of the 15 most inspirational TED talks of all time” and has been viewed more than six million times globally. He’s the bestselling author of This is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters, which debuted on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and became an international bestseller. As the Founder and Chief Catalyst of Day One Leadership, he has helped top organizations around the world increase their leadership capacity. His clients have included JP Morgan Chase, McDonald’s, Proctor & Gamble, American Express, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and more than 100 colleges and universities.
The Leadership Test is a system of accountability that helps users to behave more purposefully and consciously about achieving a positive impact in their lives, careers, families, and communities. Rooted in behavioural psychology, the Test leverages a series of action-driving questions that drive users to consistently create powerful moments of interpersonal impact for oneself and others. It functions both as a blueprint for helping users to implement impactful behaviors, and a mechanism for generating evidence as to why they matter when doing so.
The research of Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner concluded there are five “exemplary practices” used by the most effective leaders. These leaders model the way; inspire a shared vision; challenge the process; enable others to act; and encourage with the heart. I have built on their work by creating a process to help users commit to engaging in these behaviors everyday. The Leadership Test helps users to identify, define, and evaluate the way they perform these “exemplary practices” in whatever context they deem impactful.
About The Content
“Everyday leadership” is a commitment to creating powerful moments of interpersonal impact daily. The Leadership Test is the system used to help users consistently fulfill that commitment.
The Leadership Test leverages behavioral psychology—particularly the power of the unanswered question and knowledge that incomplete tasks create psychic discomfort—to empower users to adopt a system of practice that guides their daily actions. In doing so, it provides them with a clear picture of how to make what are normally unconsciously impactful behaviors function more purposefully and deliberately.
I have traditionally taught The Leadership Test through a series of stories and insights derived from living my six core leadership values everyday: impact, growth, courage, empowerment, class and self-respect. Audience members are motivated to identify their own values and implement their own personalized Leadership Test after hearing of my successes and those of others.
In addition to leveraging my core values to inspire audiences to create and implement their own Leadership Test, I’m expanding the number of values that I can profile in my speeches to better ensure the content is relevant for your group and the environments that they function. These include agility/adaptability, vulnerability/authenticity, collaboration, empathy/compassion, integrity, resilience, self awareness, creativity/innovation, fun, service, and emotional intelligence.
Content Relevance
Organizational culture is the sum of behaviors that a business employs to conduct itself everyday. An organizational culture, however, features individuals who embrace different (and sometimes conflicting) beliefs about how to perform their roles and responsibilities. Research shows that employers who help their people to behave authentically will reciprocate those efforts by committing more strongly to their employer’s priorities. Therefore, The Leadership Test helps to create alignment between the manner in which an organization conducts itself more generally and an employee conducts themselves specifically.
Research shows that employees who clarify and consistently reference their personal leadership values when making decisions at work demonstrate significantly higher levels of pride, productivity, and happiness. The Leadership Test makes it more likely that employees will understand and live their values thereby ensuring their engagement at and connection to their responsibilities and colleagues is higher.
The Leadership Test provides users with a “roadmap to achieving impact ” with each daily decision they make. Participants will possess a clearer understanding of their personal values, a better recognition of their impact when utilizing them, and a framework for evaluating how effective they’ve been in facilitating leadership after they do. Adopting a personalized leadership test fosters a sense of personal responsibility and ownership over their daily behaviour, which increases engagement, productivity, and satisfaction both at home and work.
Content Outcomes
According to Kouzes and Posner, individuals who can articulate their personal leadership philosophy (or decision-making philosophy) score 110% higher on measures of overall leadership effectiveness; are ranked 140% higher than those without a philosophy by the people they impact; and have teams that demonstrate higher levels of pride, productivity, and commitment to the organization. They also score 135% higher on measures of trust.
The Leadership Test helps individuals to better understand their core values and makes it more likely they’ll utilize those values to drive their everyday behavior. However, no system can fully eliminate the various unforeseen challenges that may disrupt the way that a person intends to behave. Illness, conflicts, inadequate resources, major social or economic shifts, pandemics, and, yes, poor leadership can act as powerful forces that limit someone’s intended impact. To address these factors, we offer 4 supplemental presentations and 3 workshops to help audiences better unpack these barriers and create strategies to help them navigate how they’ll continuing leading in a nuanced and complex workplace.
No two people are alike in how they learn, so I can both instruct or facilitate content for audiences in ways that appeal to different learning styles and perspectives. For example, my content can be offered as story-driven presentations that stimulate but don’t necessarily go deep on its applicability to the audience’s lives and career. I can also facilitate half-day to multi-day workshops that result in audiences have actionable plans to implement their leadership values. My presentations and workshops can be adjusted in both content and form to address most human performance challenges you’re facing.
Content Impact
I aim to offer the most engaging, practical, and relevant educational experience to clients. Highlights of abilities include:
· My experiences as a leadership development educator at Canada’s most prestigious university ensures all content is rooted in peer-reviewed behavioral psychology, management and/or sociological research.
· My advanced understanding of leadership theory allows me to adopt an innovative hybrid approach to leadership: drawing the most effective strategies from multiple models, including the Social Change and Servant Leadership models.
· My content can be presented in a variety of ways through a variety of in-person and digital mediums.
· My Ted talk, Everyday Leadership: The Lollipop Moment, has been viewed over 6 million times across the web and has been cited as one of the most inspiring and useful presentations for anyone who wants to become a leader.
· My book This is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters is a Wall Street Journal and international bestseller.
· My work has been cited in numerous leadership publications, adopted as a textbook or organizing principle in several college/university and corporate leadership development programs, and referenced in academic studies.
· 95% of clients have ranked me as one of the five best speakers they’ve ever booked.
My Net Promoter Score* is 85.5 based on 6,000+ audience responses. Only 0.025% of audience members who responded have ranked my work below 6/10.
*A Net Promoter Score evaluates a respondent’s loyalty and commitment to a product or service based on how likely they would recommend it to a trusted acquaintance for an initiative they are planning. In this case, it is calculated as the percentage of people who rate my presentation as 9/10 or 10/10, minus the percentage who rank it below 6/10. A ‘good’ net promoter score for keynote speakers is typically between 40 and 60.
My work ensures that participants are able to articulate their personal values and develop a personal-decision-making philosophy based on those values. Research demonstrates that individuals who are able to do those two things:
· Score 110% higher on measures of overall leadership effectiveness
· Are rated 140% more effective as leaders by the people they lead
· Have teams that demonstrate higher levels of pride, productivity and commitment to the organization.
· Score 135% higher on measures of trust.
Regardless of what aspect of leadership you aim to develop, cultural change is driven by a shift in behaviour. The challenge is identifying with specific behaviours that need to be employed and remaining committed to those behaviours. At its core, the Leadership Test provides a simple and practical blueprint for behavioural change, regardless of the desired outcome. Whether the Leadership Test is taught before or after a series of sessions on any other topic, it can serve as a roadmap to more effectively embed the behaviours necessary to create a culture that better embraces diversity, collaboration, innovation, or whatever might be your organization’s most pressing need.