Boston keynote speaker for healthcare, academic, and association events.
Chris Sund is a keynote speaker, Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach, and sitting executive who leads national healthcare staffing organizations. He speaks on workforce motivation, leadership, retention, and human potential for health systems, universities, national associations, and employers across Greater Boston.
Response within one business day.
A large share of your workforce is in a temporary job holding permanent responsibility, and you hold their whole future.
Boston gets described as the capital of American medicine, which is true and not very useful. The more interesting fact is what that status does to the employment relationship inside this city’s institutions.
Mass General Brigham employs somewhere around eighty two thousand people locally as the state’s largest private employer, built on Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s, both primary teaching affiliates of Harvard Medical School, and it runs the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the United States. Health care and social assistance accounts for better than one hundred fifty thousand jobs in the city. Greater Boston’s employment share in education services runs about three times the national average.
Put those together and a very large number of the people doing the actual work here are residents, fellows, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. Those are positions with all of the responsibility of a career and almost none of its protections. A resident makes real clinical decisions at three in the morning. A postdoc runs the experiments the grant was written for. And the person supervising them, the attending or the principal investigator, controls not only their current position but their entire future, because a career in medicine or research moves on recommendation.
That is a power asymmetry unlike nearly any other employment relationship in the country, and it breaks the usual advice. Ordinary management assumes a two-way relationship where the employee has options and can walk. A third-year fellow cannot walk. She can finish or she can lose the years already spent.
Which makes the essential leadership skill here restraint rather than motivation. An offhand dismissive remark from an attending lands with a force the attending cannot feel, because they are speaking to somebody whose career they are holding. Knowing that your ordinary voice is amplified in that room, and calibrating for it, is the specific competence that separates the supervisors people seek out from the ones they warn each other about. Reputations in this city are permanent and they travel through a very small professional world.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and has keynoted state association conferences in eleven states, including LeadingAge Illinois and health care associations in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado.
Operator, Not Consultant
President and COO of national healthcare staffing organizations, still making the hiring and retention calls he speaks about.
AHCA/NCAL Conference
People Quit People, Not Companies, delivered to long-term and post-acute care leaders at the national AHCA/NCAL conference.
Definitive Healthcare Sales Kickoff
You Are Capable of More: Sales, delivered to 800+ sales professionals and leaders.
Groups Chris speaks for.
Boston concentrates academic medicine, higher education, and research more densely than anywhere in the country, which makes it a distinctive market for a leadership keynote.
- Mass General Brigham, the state’s largest private employer, spanning two flagship academic medical centers, five specialty hospitals, eleven community hospitals, and community care networks across eastern New England
- Boston Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess, Dana-Farber, and Tufts Medical Center, for nurse leadership, graduate medical education, and all-staff days
- MGH Institute of Health Professions, founded in 1977, offering graduate programs in nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and physician assistant studies
- Universities across Greater Boston including Boston University, Northeastern, Boston College, Harvard, Tufts, UMass Boston, Emerson, and Berklee, for faculty, staff, and student leadership programming
- Life sciences and research organizations across Boston and Cambridge, employing large early-career scientific workforces
- National associations holding annual meetings in Boston, the format Chris works in most often
- Financial services and insurance employers, long-term care providers, and Massachusetts statewide associations
Boston employers with the same asymmetry.
Healthcare is where Chris operates, but the trainee relationship runs through this whole economy.
Academic Medicine
Residency and fellowship programs where the supervising physician holds a trainee’s clinical future in a letter.
Higher Education and Research
Labs and departments where postdocs and graduate students carry the work and depend entirely on one advisor.
Life Sciences
Research organizations whose scientists invest years in programs that can be discontinued for reasons unrelated to their work.
Finance and Professional Services
Firms with steep early-career pyramids where advancement depends on a small number of senior opinions.
Boston and Greater Boston venues.
- The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and Hynes for national association annual meetings and general sessions
- Longwood Medical Area institutions for graduate medical education, nurse leadership, and all-staff days
- Mass General Brigham campuses across Boston, Somerville, and eastern New England
- University campuses across Boston, Cambridge, and Medford for faculty, staff, and student programming
- Cambridge and Kendall Square for life sciences and research organization events
- Downtown and Seaport hotel ballrooms for corporate leadership summits and association meetings
Boston events Chris speaks at.
Hospital and Health System Events
Leadership days, nurse recognition events, and all-staff meetings across the country’s densest academic medical market.
Nurse Leadership and Preceptors
Charge nurse, preceptor, and program leadership development for the people who shape what a career expects.
Association Conferences
National association annual meetings and general sessions, the format Chris works in most often.
University and Student Leadership
Campus leadership programming, graduate student and trainee events, and faculty and staff development.
Retention and Frontline Leadership
Supervisor development for environments with steep power asymmetry between leader and led.
Long-Term and Senior Care
Skilled nursing, assisted living, and continuing care conferences and in-service days.
Keynote topics for your Boston event.
Every session is customized for the audience, the format, and what you are actually trying to change.
See what conference organizers and HR leaders have said after booking Chris.
Booking a keynote speaker in Boston
Has Chris spoken for academic medical centers and health systems?
Does Chris travel to Boston?
Can the session be built for program directors and attendings specifically?
Our audience is highly credentialed and skeptical of motivational speakers.
Can the session run for multiple shifts and sites?
What does a Boston keynote cost?
Can Chris speak virtually to a Boston audience?
Bring Chris to your Boston event.
Send your date, location, and audience. You will get availability and a quote back within one business day.
info@chrissund.com · 402-212-5771 · Massachusetts speaking · All locations
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