A professor in the Faculty of Arts at York University and an instructor in the Executive Development Program at the Schulich School of Business, Dalton Kehoe is a leading expert on leadership, as well as communication at the interpersonal, small group and organizational levels. His dynamic presentation style and compelling use of images and anecdotes have made him a favourite of students and a sought-after speaker, trainer and consultant. While he is an academic by training, he has successfully translated his research and teaching interests into practical applications for business people.

Kehoe is a past winner of York's University-Wide Teaching award and of the OCUFA Award for being one of the top teachers in Ontario; he was also chosen as one of the participants in a recent TV Ontario special that featured the province's best lecturers. Not surprisingly, he is also one of the most highly rated seminar leaders at Schulich's Division of Executive Development, where he trains executives and managers from Canada's leading companies.

Grounded in the latest research, his presentations are always accessible to, and relevant for, a non-academic audience, and are delivered in a compelling and memorable way. His consulting work has brought him into contact with a wide variety of companies and employees at all levels, and given him rich insight into the dynamics of successful business relationships.

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In today’s organizations—where people are being asked to change their work, their behavior and their way of seeing themselves and others—the Three F's of organizational change are usually put into play. There's Fear (crisis gets their attention), and Facts (tell them what to do to avoid crisis.) And, finally, there's Force (threaten their jobs to make something happen.) This approach is quick, but the changes come slowly, awkwardly or not all. We reason that people don’t like change, when the reality is that people don’t like being changed from the outside, as with the Three Fs. They stimulate the wrong emotion – fear – and the wrong action – self-defense—for creating any kind of lasting change..

To create rapid and lasting change, Dalton Kehoe says, we need to evoke the emotions underlying hope: optimism and acceptance. We need to embrace the three essentials of Appreciation: (1) understanding people’s situations by asking good questions and listening before asking for change; (2) valuing and honoring people for what they’ve already done and unlocking their potential to do it in a changing future; and as a result, 3) increasing the value of everything we do. Kehoe show us why Appreciation and Appreciative Intelligence are the forces that must shape our attitude and define how we communicate with others. Audiences will learn how Appreciative Inquiry can bring these elements into our work and personal relationships and help us to get what we want. With humour and optimism, Kehoe delivers practical value and emotional punch, underscored with a real sense of purpose. (Kehoe has also successfully customized this talk for other organizational challenges, such as leadership, employee engagement and customer service.)

A good deal of what we do every day as human beings in the process of preparing to talk to other people is pretty much automatic. Most of our internal, "natural" acts of processing information—perception, cognition and emotion—are schematic, automatic processes focused on creating a comforting certainty about what's going on and what's going to happen next. We don't think very much before we talk in most situations. And that's fine as long as nothing upsets our view of our selves (our "rightness") or our perception of other people's view of us. Automatic fast and closed ("Blink Talk") is the way we live our lives.

This kind of "CONNECT talk" is fine in situations that are well structured and predictable. However, when we are faced with differences, disagreement and disorder in our relationships with others, we must move into a new mode—"D.I.A.L.O.G.U.E. talk". In this speech, which can also be delivered in workshop format, Professor Dalton Kehoe teaches his audience the principles of effective communication in difficult situations. Each element in this process— Descriptive talk, I messages, Appreciative questions, Listening actively, Open acknowledgement, Genuine support, Understanding first, and Emotional self-management—help to overcome our natural tendency to become defensive and controlling when confronted with conflict, and move the discussion along to a productive, or less harmful conclusion. Learning this approach to communication in difficult circumstances helps audience members to become more mindful of their behaviour, and gives them the tools to preserve relationships when disagreements happen.