About Terry Williams
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Terry Williams has a rare combination of 30+ years’ serious experience as a leadership trainer and authoring of five books with 20 years’ of his far less serious experience as a professional stand-up comedian. In between zipping around the Asia-Pacific region delivering keynote presentations about leadership, teamwork, and engagement, he facilitates workshops on those same topics, helping leaders and teams help themselves.
While his original trade is training, he’s had plenty of real-world leadership experience as a leader in the insurance, sales, telecommunications, gaming and government sectors. He is also a columnist for ‘Employment Today’ magazine and is one of only a few Certified Speaking Professionals (CSPs) from New Zealand. His books, including ‘The Brain-Based Boss’ and ‘Getting Better Buy-In’ take psychological research and break it down, to make it interesting and useful for people wanting to improve their performance and engage the people they work with, offering practical tools that frontline leaders can actually use to make a difference. Since 2001, he’s done 2 dangerous things a year and that experience is the basis for his book and presentation of that name.
Using both his serious and comedy skills, he’s supported Alzheimer’s Auckland and the Rotary Enrichment Programme, a project that supports reading rehabilitation in lower decile schools.
Terry has appeared on TV’s ‘Good Morning’, ‘Sunrise’, and ‘The Project’. As a stand-up, he has performed in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and the US, as well as several of his own solo shows in the NZ International Comedy Festival.
He spent two years deep on the bench of a National League basketball team in the late 80s that was second-to-bottom at the time. He has two kids who have left home (a couple of times).