The best organisations don't choose between performance and people. They build both.
Anna Glynn helps organisations rethink how sustainable high performance is built in an AI-powered, high-pressure and increasingly uncertain world.
With more than 15 years of commercial experience, including leading national sales teams within financial services, Anna understands firsthand the realities of delivering results in complex, fast-changing environments. Throughout her career, she became increasingly curious about a question few organisations were asking: Why does high performance so often come at the expense of the very people creating it?
Determined to find a better way, Anna completed a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (First Class Honours) at the University of Melbourne and has since dedicated her work to understanding how organisations can build exceptional performance without sacrificing their people.
Today, Anna is the author of STRONG and creator of proprietary frameworks including STRONGER, The Human Edge and AI Crafting -practical intellectual property that helps organisations create greater value, grow stronger through pressure and sustain performance through uncertainty.
Her work combines cutting-edge research with commercial experience to challenge outdated assumptions about leadership, performance and success, replacing them with practical strategies leaders and teams can apply immediately.
Anna's insights have been featured in Forbes, CEO World and SmartCompany, and she is trusted by organisations across financial services, professional services, healthcare, education and technology.
At the heart of Anna's work is a simple belief: The best organisations don't choose between outstanding performance and thriving people. They build both.
Talking Points
The Human Edge: Creating Value in an AI-Enhanced World
Everyone is talking about how AI can make people more productive. But productivity isn't the goal. Value is.The Human Edge: Creating Value in an AI-Enhanced World
As AI transforms the way we work, organisations have a once-in-a-generation opportunity not simply to automate tasks, but to fundamentally rethink where people create the greatest value.
The organisations that thrive won’t be those that use AI to help people do more, but those that use AI to create capacity - giving their people more time to solve complex problems, strengthen relationships, innovate, deliver exceptional customer experiences and do the work that only humans can.
Because the real competitive edge in an AI-enhanced world won’t come from technology but from people.
In this thought-provoking keynote, Anna challenges audiences to rethink the role of AI - not as a replacement for human capability, nor simply as another productivity tool, but as a catalyst for creating better work, stronger cultures and more sustainable high performance.
Drawing on positive psychology, she introduces The Human Edge Framework and her concept of AI Crafting - a practical approach to intentionally redesign work so technology does what it does best, while people spend more time applying the uniquely human capabilities that create lasting value.
Rather than asking, "How do we use AI?", organisations should be asking a far more valuable question: "What becomes possible when AI creates the capacity for people to do their most valuable work?"
This keynote gives leaders and teams a practical roadmap for answering that question - helping move beyond automation and productivity to unlock higher engagement, stronger cultures, greater innovation and more meaningful customer impact.
Because the future will belong to those that create the greatest human value.
Key Takeaways:
• Understand why AI’s greatest opportunity isn’t productivity - it's creating capacity for higher-value work.
• Identify the human capabilities that become even more valuable as AI becomes more capable.
• Apply the principles of AI Crafting to redesign work around people's strengths.
• Reinvest the capacity AI creates into stronger cultures, deeper customer relationships, greater innovation and sustainable high performance.
Becoming Stronger: Building the Capability to Grow from Pressure
Pressure has become one of the defining realities of modern work - stemming from constant change, higher expectations, increasing complexity and less certainty. Becoming Stronger: Building the Capability to Grow from Pressure
The question isn't whether people will experience pressure, but what pressure will produce.
For too long we've defined resilience by how quickly people recover but recovery simply returns us to where we were before.
Today's organisations need more than resilience. They need people who become stronger because of pressure.
In this practical and inspiring keynote, Anna challenges one of the biggest myths in today's workplace - that pressure is something to avoid, manage or simply survive. Instead, she introduces a new way of thinking.
Every setback, challenge and disruption presents an opportunity to build greater capability, stronger leadership and more sustainable performance.
Drawing on positive psychology and her Stronger Framework, Anna equips audiences with the practical strategies to transform pressure into growth - strengthening confidence, adaptability and performance when it matters most.
Because pressure is inevitable but becoming stronger is a choice.
Key Takeaways:
• Reframe pressure as a catalyst for growth rather than a barrier to performance.
• Build the mindset, skillset and toolset that strengthen adaptability, confidence and capability under pressure.
• Create team cultures that can sustain high performance without sacrificing wellbeing or long-term resilience.
Beyond the Outcome: Sustaining High Performance When Results Lag
When results become harder to achieve, most organisations double down on the scoreboard - more targets, more pressure, more focus on performance.Beyond the Outcome: Sustaining High Performance When Results Lag
Ironically, that's often the very thing that undermines it.
When confidence and motivation become tied to results people can't always control, performance becomes increasingly fragile.
Anna calls this The Performance Trap - the tendency to judge success only by outcomes while overlooking the behaviours, habits and choices that create them.
The organisations that sustain high performance through uncertainty understand something different:
while outcomes will always fluctuate, capability doesn't have to.
In this powerful keynote, Anna helps leaders and teams break free from The Performance Trap by expanding the definition of success beyond the scoreboard alone. She equips audiences with practical strategies to strengthen the leading indicators that drive lasting performance - confidence, capability, learning, contribution, relationships and purposeful action - even when results take longer to follow.
Because sustainable high performance isn't built by chasing the scoreboard but by strengthening the people who move it.
Key Takeaways:
• Recognise The Performance Trap and why outcome-dependent confidence creates fragile performance.
• Shift attention from the results that can’t always be controlled to the behaviours that can.
• Build the habits to maintain motivation, confidence and engagement during challenging periods when results are slower to come.
Video
Anna Glynn | Speaker Reel
Anna Glynn | The Human Edge | Saxton Speakers
Anna's keynote struck the perfect balance between insight, interaction and inspiration. It challenged thinking, left our teams feeling informed, confident and optimistic, and people were sti ... keep reading MYOB
Three years ago, Anna spoke to our team, and what she said has stuck with us ever since. Having her back to deliver her new keynote, there were multiple moments throughout where people had those ‘oh wow’ moments — the kind that make you stop and think, ‘I do that…’ The content was incredibly relatable and clearly resonated because people were still talking about it long after it finished. This talk would suit any team in any industry who are chasing performance, but it goes beyond performance by giving people perspectives they hadn’t considered before and practical shifts they immediately want to implement in their daily lives. That’s the kind of thinking that sticks.
What sets Anna apart is her ability to connect research and lived experience with the bespoke objectives of each client she works with. Anna presented a keynote for a client recently, and prior to the session she took the time to deeply understand their needs and challenges, which resulted in a highly engaging, relevant and practical presentation.
We engaged Anna to deliver both the keynote and workshop at our inaugural Professional Staff Conference. Her ability to connect with our audience, combined with practical insights on navigating change, AI and the future of work, resonated strongly across the event. The organising committee received a stream of positive feedback on the value delivered and the impact of the session.
It is rare to come across someone with Anna’s talents. Whether she's energising a room full of people in Australia or keeping a Zoom audience full of leaders from Saudi Arabia engaged, our clients are always delighted to have benefited from Anna’s evidence-based insights and practical take-away actions. She is always professional, personable and highly reliable. Our clients could not be in safer hands.
Anna is a dedicated and professional speaker who connects on a deeply personal level. She’s always enthusiastic, making subject matter come to life whilst delivering with a calming approach to the topic at hand, resulting in her presentations being incredibly engaging.
Anna is totally relatable, incredibly engaging and quite funny. She captured our team’s attention right from the start and broke down barriers. I really do believe that the changes we’ve committed to will be for the betterment of our business, our culture, our teams, and our customers.
Months later, our team still talks about Anna and the positive influence she had on us. Most of our team still use one or two of Anna’s strategies every day, and these have been critical for us during these uncertain times. Anna is valuable to any business who has team culture and performance at the forefront of their business plan.
Anna Glynn was an outstanding keynote speaker at our recent Distribution conference attended by 110 delegates. Her presentation was insightful, impactful, and highly relevant with practical takeaways. Anna invested her time in understanding our theme, and desired outcomes, and landed these perfectly in her keynote. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from attendees and would highly recommend Anna to any organisation seeking a speaker who can genuinely engage and motivate their audience!
What sets Anna apart is her ability to connect academic and lived experience with the bespoke needs and objectives of each client she works with. Anna presented a keynote session for a client recently, and prior to the session Anna took the time to research and understand deeply the client and attendees, before tailoring the session which resulted in a highly engaging, relevant and practical keynote.
