POWER AND TRUST: THE MAGIC FORMULA
What employees really expect from their leaders
Christine Armstrong is an author, keynote speaker and researcher of the future of work, known for turning complex topics like organisational culture, leadership and employee experience, into clear, direct and actionable insights.
Her work focuses on what is actually happening between leaders and employees in everyday working life: where distrust takes root, why change so often exhausts people instead of energising them, and how organisations can rebuild connection, focus and momentum without yet another grand leadership slogan.
At the HR Experience conference, Christine will talk about the human cost of poor leadership, the widening gap between leaders and employees, and what teams today truly need from the people who lead them. No sugarcoating. No inspirational lines that sound good but never change behaviour. Just data, real stories, and very concrete messages for leaders and HR teams.
The Reality This Session Explores
In many organisations, leaders and employees no longer live in the same reality.
Leaders often believe they communicate clearly, lead change responsibly and give their people enough support. Employees, on the other hand, increasingly feel tired, uncertain, overstretched and distanced. Between those two perspectives, a space opens up - a space where trust weakens, engagement drops and people start to pull back, sometimes openly, but far more often in silence.
This talk is about exactly that space.
Through a combination of global data, local context and real-world examples, Christine will open up the question of trust between leaders and employees - and show, very practically, what leaders and HR teams can do right now. Not in a year. Not through a major transformation programme. But through small, concrete shifts in how they run meetings, talk to people and make decisions.
What You Will Leave With
🟣 You'll understand where the trust gap between leaders and employees begins
You'll see why leaders so often hold one picture of the organisation, while employees live something entirely different every day.
🟣 You'll recognise the human cost of poor leadership
Disengagement, burnout and change fatigue are not abstract HR concepts, they're real consequences of how people are led, heard and included.
🟣 You'll get a clearer view of what teams actually expect from their leaders
Not another complicated leadership theory, but the simple, very concrete things that give employees back their sense of safety, focus and trust.
🟣 You'll learn how to change the way you run meetings, conversations and decisions
Christine will show why small, practical shifts in everyday communication can have a huge impact on energy, clarity and trust within a team.
Who Needs to Hear This
🟣 Executives, leaders and managers wondering why employee engagement isn't growing despite the investment
🟣 HR professionals who want to better understand what is really happening beneath the surface of their teams and organisations, and who are looking for arguments backed by data, not anecdotes
🟣 Internal communications, employer branding, PR and marketing specialists whose work shapes the employee experience and organisational culture
🟣 Organisations going through constant change and asking themselves why trust and energy are slowly fading
🟣 Anyone who wants to rebuild trust, commitment and energy through small everyday leadership habits, not through large programmes and initiatives
Biography
Named one of the world's most influential people in HR, Christine Armstrong is an author, keynote speaker and researcher on the future of work. She has studied work trends since leading global research projects in advertising in the early noughties, and is now recognised as one of the most authoritative voices on how organisations remain connected and productive amid constant disruption. Her work examines how teams align and deliver when competing workplace trends threaten to pull them apart.
Christine equips leaders and teams to rebuild connection, culture and momentum with clarity and confidence. Her sessions are rigorous, immersive and commercially grounded, designed not simply to inspire, but to shift behaviour. An event organiser who has booked her three times recently wrote: "You had a near perfect score (unsurprisingly)." Her expertise spans organisational culture, team dynamics, cross-generational and cross-cultural communication, and the practical realities of leading groups through change.
She is the founder of Armstrong & Partners,a research and advisory firm whose work is trusted by organisations including Microsoft, Deloitte, IBM, BBC, Accenture, Universal, Pepsi and many others. -Earlier, she co-founded Jericho Chambers, built on what we'd now call a hybrid model back in 2013, nearly a decade before the rest of the world caught up. Her weekly vlog on where work and life collide has more than 5 million views, and the research behind her keynotes is grounded in years of conversations with leaders, employees and parents trying to make modern work actually work.
Christine is also the author of The Mother of All Jobs (Bloomsbury), shortlisted for Business Book of the Year. The book was born out of her own story: after her career stalled following the birth of her children, she started interviewing women who had figured it out, and turned what she learned into a book that landed on the front page of The Sunday Times Magazine. She writes regularly for The Times, The Sunday Times and The Telegraphand appears frequently on BBC and in other broadcast media.
English 
Serbian 