--- title: "Erica Dhawan" description: "Book Erica Dhawan, WSJ bestselling author and AI-era keynote speaker on Connectional Intelligence, Digital Body Language, and modern teamwork. Get fees." canonical: https://www.kmprod.com/speakers/erica-dhawan updated: 2026-08-10 15:57:39 --- # Erica Dhawan *Keynote Speaker & Author on Connectional Intelligence, Digital Body Language, and AI-Era Teamwork* ## Biography **Erica Dhawan is an internationally recognized leadership keynote speaker, authority and advisor on AI / Tech, 21st century teamwork, collaboration and innovation. ** When leaders want to break team silos, drive exponential growth, and innovate through teamwork, they call Erica Dhawan. Named by Thinkers50 as the "Oprah of Management Thinkers," she is the author of three books: *Use Your Brain*, *Digital Body Language*, and *Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence*. The world of business is increasingly digital, and work practices have changed at a blistering rate. Erica shares innovative strategies to unlock the collective power of teams, build a culture of trust across any distance, and create authentic engagement that keeps organizations competitive and original in the age of AI. Rated RealLeaders' #1 Female Keynote Speaker, named a Top 20 Management Thinker by Global Gurus, and featured among the top 50 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of business, Erica appears frequently in *Harvard Business Review, New York Times,* and the *Wall Street Journal*. She pairs storytelling and humor with research to give audiences interactive, refreshing, practical strategies for modern, innovation-driving teamwork. She holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton. ## Presentation Topics Erica Dhawan is based in Tampa, FL, USA. She offers a variety of different presentation formats including keynote presentations, workshops, fireside chats, moderated Q&A, on a wide variety of topics. Each presentation is unique, customized and tailored for audiences, industries, conferences and event formats. All of Erica's programs can be delivered as a keynote (45 - 75 minutes) or as workshop (1.5 - 3 hours)  ### Use Your Brain: Critical Thinking Intelligence for the Era on Autopilot  Your people aren't using AI. They're agreeing with it. We stopped drafting and started approving. We stopped wrestling with the idea and started accepting the summary. It feels like productivity. It's cognitive surrender, and it's quietly flattening originality, weakening recall, and producing decisions no one in the room can actually defend. Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Use Your Brain, argues that Critical Thinking Intelligence is to this decade what Emotional Intelligence was to the '90s: the differentiator between the leaders who compound and the ones who get automated. This is a keynote about running at full speed without outsourcing the original thinking that makes your people worth paying for. Based on case studies and practical storytelling, Dhawan sends audiences home with team rituals they can run the next morning: the Think Sandwich, where human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task, the Friction Meeting, where someone is assigned to argue how the work is wrong; and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays non-negotiably human. Interactive, immediately usable, and built for teams that think originally and creatively in our modern age. **Learning Outcomes:** - Catch themselves and their teams on autopilot, and put real thinking back around the machine in their organization and with customers/clients - Pressure-test technology output, stop AI slop, separate signal from noise, and decide what to automate, augment, and protect - Own high-stakes decisions they can explain, defend, and recall  ### Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence  Two teams have been working on the same problem for six months. Neither knows the other exists. That is what endless meetings, cross-team dysfunction, duplication, and delay actually cost you. And it isn't a tools problem. Your people can find any document, any dataset, any answer in seconds. So why is collaboration still hard? Because what actually moves work forward is their human relationships across silos. The colleague who tried this years ago and watched it fail. The client relationship that makes a hard conversation possible. Tools can retrieve everything your company recorded. It cannot reach what only your people know. When every organization has the same tools, the edge belongs to those who connect across the lines that divide them. Function to function. Region to region. Level to level. Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Get Big Things Done, named this Connectional Intelligence, which turns people into superconnectors who break silos and drive breakthrough impact. She shows leaders and teams how to surface what no system captured, build trust fast across boundaries, and unlock the collective expertise of the whole enterprise. **Learning Outcomes:** - Surface the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve - Diagnose where collaboration stalls in your organization, and unstick it - Break silos and keep teams aligned, accountable, and motivated - Build trust across functions, geographies, and reporting lines without adding meetings  ### Collaborate Faster and Further Together  Every message is now well-written. Warm opener. Clean structure. Thoughtful closing line. And you have no idea whether the person actually read your note, cared about your problem, or was even the one who wrote it. That's the new trust problem. In the past, the signals were sloppy but real. A rushed reply meant something. A typo at 11pm meant something. A long thoughtful message meant someone spent time on you. Effort used to be visible in the writing. Now polish is free. Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of the WSJ bestseller Digital Body Language decodes what actually signals care, credibility, and commitment. Specificity is the new sincerity. Response time is the new eye contact. Showing your reasoning is the new showing your work. And the fastest way to rebuild trust with a client, a peer, or a direct report is to be unmistakably human in a channel where everyone else sounds like a machine. This keynote will name the norms that are quietly eroding trust, and leave audiences with shared communication rules and guidelines for what gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person. **Learning Outcomes:** - Read the signals that still carry meaning, and stop trusting the ones AI made worthless - Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video and even live meetings - Rebuild credibility with clients and colleagues in channels flooded with perfect, forgettable communication  ## About Every organization has a communication problem it doesn't know it has. Erica Dhawan built her career finding it. As the researcher behind "Digital Body Language" — the tone, timing, and signals people unintentionally broadcast through email, Slack, and video calls — she gave a name to the friction costing teams their trust, speed, and morale long before anyone had language for it. That same instinct now points at AI. Dhawan's newest keynote argues the leaders who win the next decade won't be the ones who avoid AI or blindly adopt it, but the ones who use it to strengthen — not replace — human connection. It's a sharper, more urgent version of the idea she's spent over a decade refining: that Connectional Intelligence, not sheer talent or effort, is what lets teams actually get big things done together. Named Thinkers50's "Oprah of Management Thinkers" and RealLeaders' #1 Female Keynote Speaker, Dhawan brings audiences research most of them have never encountered, delivered with the kind of specific, industry-tailored storytelling that turns a keynote into a strategy session. ## Expertise - **Connectional Intelligence** is Erica Dhawan's signature framework for turning individual talent into collective results — teaching teams to break down silos and accelerate innovation across distance, department, and hierarchy. - **Digital Body Language**, the subject of Dhawan's bestselling book of the same name, decodes the unspoken signals — response time, tone, punctuation — that determine whether digital communication builds trust or quietly erodes it. - **AI-era team leadership** is Dhawan's newest keynote focus, equipping leaders to use AI as a trust-building tool rather than a threat, while keeping human judgment and connection at the center of the workplace. - **Cross-generational and cross-cultural collaboration** research underpins Dhawan's keynotes, addressing the real friction points of hybrid, remote, and multigenerational teams rather than generic "teamwork" advice. - **WSJ bestselling author of two books** — Get Big Things Done and Digital Body Language — Dhawan grounds every keynote in original research, not recycled leadership platitudes. ## What Clients Say > Erica’s presentation was absolutely perfect for our leaders. Our group was diverse and Erica was a hit with everyone! Her storytelling style of presenting along with a healthy dose of informative case studies kept everyone engaged and interested and excited about using connectional intelligence to transform our business. > > — Sodexo > Terrific. Our leaders were very engaged and had immediate practical takeaways. Erica made a big impact. > > — Deloitte > Erica’s presentation was an absolute hit. > > — Erik Spoelstra, Head Coach of Miami Heat > Erica was even more impressive, relatable, and engaging in person, I really enjoyed the session. She has a unique way of making you feel that she is speaking directly to you, even in a group. > > — SONY > Non-verbal cues are vital to understanding each other. Now that so much communication happens online–and with the massive shift to distance learning and remote workplaces–we need Erica Dhawan’s book more than ever. In Digital Body Language, Erica shares tips and strategies for communicating effectively on chats, emails, and video calls, so everyone can successfully share and connect in the digital age. > > — Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook ---