Steve Gutzler
Steve Gutzler is the President of Leadership Quest, a Seattle-based Leadership Development company.
Having coached and trained CEOs and presidents, professional athletes, and world-class organizations, Steve’s insights have gained a reputation around the world as an authority on high-performance leadership, emotional intelligence for exceptional leadership, growing leaders at every level, and accelerated sales success.
Steve has an exceptional ability to communicate clear leadership and business solutions with humor, clarity, and insight. He believes every presentation should transform a life and inspire leadership. He knows how to deliver proven results and has been engaging and inspiring audiences with his messages of extraordinary leadership, achievement, success, and significance for almost 30 years
His list of clients includes Pandora Radio, Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing, Cisco, Starwood Corporation, U.S. Security Administration, and Oxford Financial.
Speaking topics
- Emotional Agility: 5 Shifts to Mastering Change Management
Change can be emotionally draining, or change can be emotionally fuelling. The choice is yours.”
So here is the real question: How equipped is your team to navigate uncertainty when the ground keeps moving beneath their feet?
After 25+ years coaching leaders through their toughest moments, I’ve learned this: You cannot lead people through change until you lead them through their emotions.
This is not another checklist. This program gives your team the mindsets, strategies, and emotional awareness to stop surviving change and start thriving in it.
Through 5 powerful shifts, you will learn to reduce resistance, turn disruptive emotions into fuel, and stay fiercely engaged even when the path forward is unclear.
Audiences learn:
This is not theory. This is practical, research-backed wisdom you can apply the moment you return to your team. Here is what you will gain:
1. Shift from Chaos to Calm
Emotions are contagious. Your leaders are either spreading anxiety or calm—whether they realize it or not. This shift equips them with the tools to find their center when everything around them is spinning.
Your organization gets leaders who become the steady presence their teams need. Clear decisions. Composed leadership. Teams that take a deep breath because their leader took theirs first.
2. Shift from Solo to Collaboration
Here is what happens under pressure: the brain gets hijacked. The amygdala fires. Leaders go blind to the people around them. This shift arms your team with the neuroscience of emotional agility—so they can recognize the hijack before it takes them down.
Your organization gets leaders who don’t just survive their own triggers. They tap into the collective intelligence of the team, solving together what they could never solve alone.
3. Shift from Crisis to Innovation
Crisis wants your people to play small. It wants them to play defense. This shift teaches them to flip the script.
Your organization gets teams that stop asking “What’s wrong?” and start asking “What’s possible?” They innovate under pressure. They see opportunity where others see only obstacles.
4. Shift from Resistor to Advocate
Every team has three mindsets living in it: The Resistor. The Victim. And the Advocate. Your leaders will learn to spot them instantly—in themselves and in others.
Your organization stops wasting energy on resistance and starts building trust, psychological safety, and a culture that doesn’t just accept change—they champion it.
5. Shift from Rigidity to Resilience
The ground is going to keep moving. That is the only guarantee. This shift hands your workforce the tools to tap into resilience when everything feels uncertain.
Your organization gets people who bend without breaking. They adapt without melting down. They master uncertainty instead of being mastered by it.
Program is designed for:- Executive Leaders and Individual Contributors facing the relentless pace of disruption.
- Personal Leaders and Teams seeking new strategies to navigate shifting landscapes with confidence.
- Organizational Leaders charged with building emotionally intelligent teams that don’t crack under pressure.
Target Audience: Steve has delivered this message to a wide array of industries—technology companies, sales teams, government agencies, financial advisors, realtors, small business associations, university programs, and leadership conferences. If your organization is facing restructuring, mergers, digital transformation, or market disruption, this is your playbook.
- Emotional Intelligence for Extraordinary Leadership
In today’s fast-paced, competitive work environment, how effective are you as a leader of personal influence, impact, and inspiration? Emotional intelligence (EI), our ability to manage our emotions and navigate successfully our personal and professional relationships is the game changer. This dynamic and fast-paced presentation will offer you practical tools for professional excellence and high-performance in leadership and life.
With the explosion of our information age and the increased potential of the millennial generation, it has become clear that in order to lead with impact, one has to fully engage the minds, emotions, and spirit of those they lead. While many managers today are skilled at presenting team goals and strategies, the skillsets of emotional intelligence and leveraging the brain science of high performance are the new competitive edge. Empowering your team to feel emotionally connected with their own purpose and to one another is imperative.
Steve Gutzler’s half and full-day workshops are highly interactive, combining case studies, peer-to-peer coaching, multi-media, and hilarious and compelling real-life stories, along with on-site assessments and setting SMART goals to ensure actionable takeaways.
Key Takeaways:
- Assess one’s level of emotional intelligence in dealing with relationships with others in business and achieving organizational goals
- Examine our strengths and weaknesses for developing our emotional intelligence
- Learn the brain science of emotional hijacking moments and strategies for self-regulation of one’s emotions
- Develop composure skills and redirect emotions in order to ensure a “win-win”
- Learn actionable skills for resiliency and stress management
- Demonstrate and increase empathy by acknowledging the feeling and perspectives of others
- Build bonds of connection by nurturing instrumental relationships in business
- Uphold integrity and increase your persuasive influence and leadership impact
- Build collaborative skills and empower communication
- Recognize the contagious influence of your moods, attitudes, and emotions with leadership encounters
*Half and full-day workshops include Steve’s Emotional Intelligence for Personal Leadership Assessment.
Target Audience: Steve has presented this topic to a wide array of industries including technology companies, sales teams, government agencies, financial advisors, realtors, small business associations, University programs, and leadership conventions and conferences.
- Full Potential: How to Perform Best Under Pressure
According to a Harvard Medical School study, an astounding 96% of leaders said they experience feelings of burnout.
How do you create a sustainable pace and sustainable success while feeling under pressure and stress? Steve Gutzler, President of Leadership Quest, is a renowned speaker and author on the science of Emotional Intelligence, stress resiliency, leadership, and sustainable success.
Steve has personally coached and worked with senior leaders and teams at a number of Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations, including Microsoft, Seattle Seahawks, Starbucks, the Ritz Carlton, Pandora Radio, Boeing, along with several government and law enforcement agencies.
Discover the FIVE SHIFTS to take your team’s performance to the next level!
This dynamic keynote addresses the epidemic of stress and pressure. Through inspiring stories and real-life case studies, Steve explains how leaders today need to be both “smart and healthy”. How to avoid self-sabotage and burnout through the science of Emotional Intelligence and stress resiliency tactics. How to continue to operate at optimum levels while facing deadlines and challenging relationships.
Steve will help your team increase performance and provide you with breakthrough techniques and strategies for self-leadership. Learn how to employ Emotional Intelligence for peak performance. This keynote will provide you with inspiration and actionable tools to get to the next level of performance.
Key Takeaways:
- How to self-manage those 17% moments when interactions in business become challenging and pressure-packed.
- How to create stress-resiliency tactics for sustainable success
- How to operate at full potential and tap into confidence, optimism, resiliency, and enthusiasm
- How to remain healthy and recognize exhaustion and burnout is not considered a badge of honor
- How leaders help others manage, energy and emotion when it matters most
- Learn the five shifts to grow your influence, impact, and inspiration.
- Discover the power shift from victim to leader.
- Gain clarity around your MVP (Most Valuable and Profitable) accomplishments.
- Become both smart and healthy.
If you are looking for a dynamic speaker to motivate, inform, encourage and inspire your audience to become leaders in their field, Steve Gutzler is the best there is. Whether it’s a group of senior executives or an audience of 1,000, Steve is a powerful keynote speaker that will leave the room feeling energized and wanting to get to the “next level” of performance.
- Emotional Health and Balance
Not surprisingly, a new study from Harvard Business Review shows burnout, anxiety, and depression are on a rapid increase for employees today, regardless of their title or position.
- 89% of the respondents said their work-life balance is getting worse, not better
- 85% said they struggle with stress, anxiety, and burnout.
- 82% said emotional health and well-being are in decline
- 76% said they’d welcome help in wellness strategies for improved emotional health and balance.
In today’s fast-paced and competitive environment, a person’s emotional health affects their overall work performance; how they cultivate meaningful relationships inside and outside the business; and how they will manage their overall mental health and sustainability moving forward.
In this interactive program, you’ll discover the same proven and actionable strategies employed by frontline health professionals, SWAT teams, leading corporate executives, and personal leaders. These proven tactics help reset and calibrate emotional wellness to handle stress in these rapid-changing times, resulting in achievable (and sustainable) balance.
Key Takeaways:
- Learn how emotional health and balance are the new fundamental currency for successful personal leaders and teams today
- Discover the power of energy management
- Identify the five stages of trauma that hold you back
- Learn how stress hijacks job performance and shuts down creativity and memory function
- Discover the “window of tolerance” as the key to playing and performing at our best
- Unlock self-leadership and self-care strategies to stress-proof your personal leadership and regain emotional health and balance
Target Audience:
Ideal for any audience, and customized for each organization, this interactive presentation is designed to help leaders, teams, and individual contributors reset and recharge.