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About Terry Williams
Click here for a downloadable PDF bio
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).
Click here for a downloadable PDF bio
Terry Williams: Professional Credentials & Training Specialisation
Terry Williams is a corporate performance specialist, Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), and author based in Auckland, New Zealand, recognised for his pioneering development of interactive AI practice partners to scale operational leadership capability.
Corporate Background & Instructional Framework
Terry bridges the gap between commercial risk and front-line leadership execution by combining over 25 years of senior operational management experience with verified behavioral psychology. His instructional design focuses heavily on neuro-leadership—the application of neuroscience to leadership development and communication—to strip the anxiety out of management performance.
Rather than teaching passive, uncalibrated management theory, Terry provides enterprise teams with immediate, structured toolkits to manage workplace friction, protect commercial margins during contract variations, and navigate difficult organisational change.
Core Focus Areas: Frontline Manager Upskilling, Strategic Executive Alignment, Courageous Performance Conversations, Persuasion & Commercial Negotiation, and High-Stakes Stakeholder Presentations.
Author & Industry Columnist: Author of five business performance books, including The Brain-Based Boss and Getting Better Buy-In, and a long-standing workplace dynamics contributor to Employment Today magazine.
The Engagement Edge: Utilising a distinct background as a seasoned professional stand-up comedian with over 800 live stage performances, Terry infuses corporate learning environments with high psychological safety and sharp engagement, maximising adult learning retention and accelerating behaviour change.