“My name is Michael. I can hop. Do you want to see me hop?” That’s how I introduced myself to bemused strangers at the supermarket when I was three. Honestly, not much has changed. Here’s the formal bio, with the best bits at the end.

Michael Bungay Stanier has shaped how organizations around the world make being coach-like an essential leadership competency. His book The Coaching Habit is the best-selling coaching book of this century, is the best-selling coaching book of this century.

In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching, and in 2023, he won the coaching award from Thinkers 50, “the Oscars of management.” Michael was the first Canadian Coach of the Year, has been named a Global Coaching Guru since 2014, and was a Rhodes Scholar. His most recent book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, shows how to create psychological safety by building the Best Possible Relationship with the key people at work.

Michael is the host of the Change Signal podcast, which cuts through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change management.

Michael founded Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that had helped hundreds of organizations transform from advice-driven to curiosity-led.

Michael is a compelling speaker and facilitator who combines practicality, humour, and an unprecedented degree of engagement with the audience. He’s spoken on stages and screens around the world in front of crowds of ten to ten thousand, and his TEDx talks have been watched by more than two million people.

En route to today—and these are essential parts of his origin story—Michael knocked himself unconscious as a labourer by hitting himself in the head with a shovel, mastered stagecraft at law school by appearing in a skit called Synchronized Nude Male Modelling, and his first paid piece of writing was a Harlequin Romance-esque story involving a misdelivered letter… and called The Male Delivery.

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