Most leaders try to increase engagement by focusing on behavior. They coach harder, train longer, or layer on new initiatives. But engagement isn’t a behavior problem. It’s an influence problem.

People don’t stay engaged because they’re told to — they stay engaged because they’re moved to.

In this high-energy session, best-selling author, former rock star, and Apple Top 15 podcast host, Brant Menswar, explores what actually creates influence in a way people feel, trust, and follow. Instead of pushing motivation from the outside, Brant shows how the most effective trainers generate pull — the kind that inspires others to step forward, not back.

Participants will learn how to:

• Build the kind of influence that earns emotional buy-in
• Spark engagement that lasts beyond the moment or meeting
• Lead in a way that feels personal, not performative
• Create connection that survives pressure, pace, and turnover

When influence is rooted in what matters most, people don’t just deliver the work — they take ownership of it. That’s the difference between a flicker of engagement… and burning with purpose. 

Brant will also join us at the Boston conference in July to double the impact with Own Your Moment, focusing on how connection, collaboration, and deliberate action turn that inner purpose into visible momentum. Together, these sessions move from inspiration to implementation — from understanding what drives team engagement to owning the moments that bring it to life.

Sarah Beckett
VP of Sales and Marketing | Intouch Insight
LinkedIn

You don’t need a drive-thru window to learn from the best in speed-of-service and friendliness. Intouch Insight shares highlights from their nationally watched Drive-Thru Report and turns those insights into aha-moments for training.

In hospitality, small communication misses can snowball into guest dissatisfaction, delays, and team frustration. These challenges will be brought to life through a fast-paced experiential activity that reveals just how quickly misunderstanding creeps in – and how clear and intentional interpersonal communication can fix it. You won’t just hear about effective communication; you’ll feel the impact of it firsthand.

Attendee teams will compete in a fast paced exercise shifting roles and testing different communication styles to uncover the behaviors that create clarity, build trust, and reduce costly errors on the job. The activity will equip hospitality trainers with practical tools to immediately strengthen team communication back home. Turn insight into action!

Participants will learn how to:

• Achieve deeper understanding in less time
• Build credibility and trust with peers and frontline teams
• Improve accuracy and efficiency by “doing it right the first time”
• Prevent avoidable misunderstandings that impact guest experience
• Boost morale through clearer expectations and shared success
• Create alignment across shifting roles, responsibilities, and service needs
• Strengthen internal and external customer service with more effective communication

This session is for leaders looking to make an impact on their teams, as well as program designers who want to implement mentorship programs into their organizations.

Mentoring is one of the most powerful ways to develop talent and strengthen organizational culture. Yet, many leaders struggle to move beyond informal advice and create meaningful, structured mentoring relationships. This session will explore why mentoring matters, what makes it effective, and how you can become a mentor who inspires growth and confidence. You’ll learn practical strategies for building trust, setting clear expectations, and guiding others through challenges. By the end, you’ll have a framework for mentoring that not only supports individual development, but also drives engagement and long-term success across your team.

Your key takeaways: 

• Understand the philosophy and benefits of individualized mentoring.   
• Participate in exercises that reinforce the positive results of impactful mentoring.    
• Gain strategies for implementation of similar programs in your organization.   

This session is for learning leaders and managers who are ready to correlate learning with execution and profits, and who want to earn the budget their programs actually deserve!

What if CEOs called L&D first when they needed to increase profits?

This session challenges the traditional view of Learning & Development (L&D) by positioning it as a growth engine – not a cost center – by adopting the same systems Marketing uses to engage customers and applying them to learning.

Participants will explore how to create and track Learning Campaigns that generate real data and bring receipts to leadership – clearly correlating learning initiatives to performance, execution, and profitability. Through practical examples and in-session activities, you’ll learn how to follow proven marketing workflows, master ROI fundamentals, and communicate impact in ways executives understand and value. By the end of the session, you’ll leave with a clear, actionable 90-day roadmap you can implement right away.

Your blueprint for success:

• Learn how to launch Learning Campaigns instead of traditional training rollouts.
• Master ROI factors including cost, impact, measurement, and communication.
• Complete in-session activities that support future campaign development.
• Gain new super-power strategies for requesting data from other departments, communicating ROI to stakeholders, and using video storytelling to amplify your wins and make your ROI data come alive for leadership. 
• Leave with a 90-day roadmap for your Campaign Blueprint. You'll have checkboxes, deadlines, and tools so you can start executing immediately.

This high-energy, hands-on workshop is designed for organizational learning strategists who are tired of being overwhelmed by competing priorities and ready to take control of their learning roadmap.   

Did you say yes to a training initiative last year that didn’t get completed? Are you tired of saying yes to every training request while your strategic priorities gather dust? In this sprint-style workshop, you’ll be fixing that!

If you’ve ever felt like you’re saying “yes” to everything and accomplishing nothing, this session will transform how you plan, prioritize, and prove your impact by duplicating the exact strategic planning process used to build a comprehensive annual learning plan for a 59-location restaurant organization growing 20% YOY. This isn’t theory – it’s a battle tested system that can help secure additional headcount and resources, gain executing buy in, and shift your approach from reactive fire-fighting to proactive partnership. You’ll leave with actual work product: a draft annual learning plan for your organization that you can refine and implement immediately.  

What you’ll be taking home:

• A Prioritization Matrix That Proves Your Value – Learn how to score and rank initiatives using objective criteria that align with organization goals, helping you justify budget requests, defend your “no” decisions, and demonstrate strategic thinking to executive leadership.
• The RASCI Framework for Workload Distribution – Discover how to assign roles for each initiative revealing resource gaps before they become crises and ensuring your team isn’t set up for burnout.
• Strategic Timeline Mapping with Built-in Resilience – Master the art of front-loading critical projects to create buffer time for inevitable interruptions, pushing non-essential work to future quarters without guilt, and setting realistic deadlines your team can actually meet.
• Stakeholder Buy-In Through Inclusive Planning – Understand how incorporating initiatives from other departments into YOUR learning plan transforms you from order taker to strategic partner and gets everyone invested in your success.
• Data-Driven Decision Making Over Emotional Attachment – Gain the framework and confidence to separate what you’re passionate about developing from what will actually move the business forward, making strategic choices that maximize your limited time, budget, and team capacity.  

This isn’t a lecture, it’s a working session. Bring your coffee and list of competing priorities and we’ll bring the rest to send you home with clarity, a plan, and the tools to finally spend your resources on what matters most.  

This session is designed for trainers, L&D professionals, and people leaders who want to expand their impact beyond content delivery and become more strategic, visible, and influential within their organizations.

Come for a forward-focused exploration of what it means to transform your role from delivering content to shaping culture, driving performance, and inspiring meaningful change. This new perspective positions you not just as an expert in learning, but as a strategic partner who aligns talent development with organizational goals. You become a catalyst: someone who anticipates needs, influences decisions, builds relationships across teams, and champions growth at every level.

By embracing the power of influence, you move from simply facilitating learning to forging connections, guiding transformation, and ensuring that every training moment becomes part of a larger narrative of success. This is your pathway to greater leadership, visibility, and impact – within your organization and in your professional career.

Your key takeaways:

• Understand how to anticipate needs, influence decisions, and build cross-team relationships.
• Learn how each L&D initiative can contribute to a larger narrative of organizational success and your own professional growth.
• Move beyond content delivery and actively shape the broader environment in which learning happens.

• Identify proven strategies for influencing learning adoption among audiences they do not directly manage, including franchisees, field leaders, and decentralized business units.
• Translate training initiatives into business-relevant value propositions by aligning learning outcomes to operational goals, performance metrics, and stakeholder priorities.
• Apply practical techniques to increase voluntary engagement in non-mandated training through the use of pilot data, peer proof, and real-world success examples.
• Design training approaches that balance consistency with autonomy, ensuring brand standards and organizational goals are met without relying on enforcement.

This interactive session is designed for trainers, facilitators, HR professionals, and leaders who want to move beyond delivering information and start driving real behavioral change through conversation.

Change rarely fails because of a lack of training; it fails because the conversations that follow don’t create clarity, connection, or ownership. Too often, dialogue becomes reactive, defensive, or superficial, leaving teams disengaged and resistant to change. Come and discover how everyday conversations can become powerful leadership moments when approached with intention and the right tools.

You will learn a practical conversation framework that helps spark engagement, reduce resistance, and foster accountability across all levels of an organization. Through interactive exercises and real-life workplace scenarios, you’ll practice facilitation techniques that transform difficult or uncomfortable conversations into opportunities for growth and alignment.

You will leave with ready-to-use conversation prompts, a simple yet effective conversation model, and the confidence to apply these skills in your own work. Whether you lead training sessions, coach employees, or influence culture through daily interactions, this session will equip you to spark meaningful change, one conversation at a time.

Your key takeaways:

• Learn practical facilitation techniques to spark meaningful, behavior-shifting conversations. 
• Practice real-life conversation scenarios through ready-to-use prompts and frameworks. 
• Discover how to reduce resistance and increase ownership through curiosity, clarity, and connection. 
• Apply a simple conversation model that can be used immediately in training, coaching, and leadership settings. 
• Commit to one intentional conversation that drives change beyond the session. 

This engaging, hands-on workshop is designed for trainers at all levels who want to apply storytelling principles to design training that is memorable and impactful.

Traditional training often overwhelms learners with information and relies on one-and-done delivery models that fail to stick. Come and learn how applying storytelling principles inspired by successful streaming content can dramatically improve learning effectiveness.

Using a Netflix-style framework, you’ll explore how to design training around a compelling plot, short episodic content, relatable characters, and strategic cliffhangers that drive continued engagement. Real operational examples will demonstrate how required training can be transformed into creative, scalable learning experiences.

Through hands-on activities and practical tips, you will:  

• Learn a practical framework for transforming traditional training into episodic, story-driven learning experiences. 
• Identify where creativity in training can intersect with operational needs to drive measurable behavior change. 
• Participate in a hands-on activity to design a mini “training episode” using the Netflix-inspired approach. 

Audrey Benet
Associate Adjunct Professor | Valencia College School of Hospitality and Culinary Management
LinkedIn

This session is designed for trainers and leaders who work with frontline employees through executive teams, are responsible for designing and delivering training, and are actively seeking ways to improve engagement, retention, and skill transfer.

The moment participants hear the words “role-play,” tension rises, energy drops, and learning shuts down. Yet interactive practice is essential for skill-building at every level of hospitality. This fun and fast-paced session replaces traditional role-play with game-based training built on improv principles that reduce resistance while increasing engagement and skill transfer.

This session is fully interactive and co-created with the audience. Participants will bring real training challenges they are trying to solve – service recovery, coaching conversations, leadership presence, communication breakdowns – and will be guided to the right improv-based game to address each scenario. These games remove performance pressure while still building real-world skills. Attendees will leave energized, inspired, and equipped with tools they can immediately use in any training environment. Come ready to play!

You will take home:

• A curated toolkit of improv-based games mapped to common training and leadership scenarios.
• A decision framework for selecting the right game based on skill level, audience, and objective.
• Techniques for facilitating interactive training that feels safe, playful, and effective—without scripts or forced acting.

This session is for leaders who need frontline training to drive real results—not just exist.

Frontline training is breaking under the weight of scale, speed, and a workforce that learns differently than it did even five years ago. Working in small groups to design solutions that actually hold up on the floor, participants in this workshop will tackle a real operational training challenge drawn from hospitality. The discussion will explore how bite-sized, mobile-first learning can drive faster ramp-up, better retention, and more consistent execution across locations. Participants will leave with practical insights and decision frameworks they can apply immediately as they rethink frontline training in their own organizations.

What participants will take away:

• Clarity on when frontline training actually drives business results
• Hands-on experience solving a real hospitality training challenge
• Practical tools to diagnose performance gaps and design training that works on the floor
• Actionable strategies for reinforcing and scaling mobile-first training across locations

Jennifer Bonilla, CGSP, CHT
Sales Manager, North America Career & Workforce Advancement | National Restaurant Association
LinkedIn

To set your brand apart, outstanding customer service isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a powerful driver of revenue, brand loyalty, and sustainable growth. This dynamic panel brings together industry leaders who will share proven strategies and real-world insights on how exceptional guest experiences translate into measurable business success.

Attendees will learn best practices in guest service training, customer service skills, and the critical role of interpersonal and soft skills in creating memorable experiences that keep guests coming back. From cultivating a service-first culture to empowering teams with the tools and confidence to exceed expectations, this session will provide actionable takeaways to elevate your organization’s approach to hospitality.

Key Topics:

• Building a customer-centric culture that drives profitability
• Effective training programs for front-line staff
• Developing interpersonal and soft skills for lasting guest relationships
• Leveraging exceptional service as a competitive advantage