Speaker Spotlight
They Say the Door Is Always Open, Then Look Irritated When Someone Walks Through It. Her Entire Framework Lives in That Gap.
Jody Urquhart — Creator of Quietly Disruptive Leadership™ · 26 Years and 2,000+ Audiences · Former Stand-Up Comedian · Canadian Bestselling Author · Calgary
Almost every leader you will ever put in a room has good intentions. That is not usually the problem.
Jody Urquhart’s argument is that leaders do not lead according to their intentions. They lead according to their habits. They say the door is always open, then look irritated when someone walks through it. They ask for honest feedback, then defend themselves instead of listening. Nobody plans either of those. They just happen, on autopilot, several times a week.
Quietly Disruptive Leadership™ is built on interrupting that autopilot rather than adding more information on top of it, which is a meaningfully different proposition from a session that hands leaders another model.
Twenty-Six Years and Not One Slide
Jody was a stand-up comedian before she was a leadership speaker, and she has never used PowerPoint. Not as a preference or a recent experiment. Ever.
The comedy is the mechanism rather than the decoration. A room that is laughing has dropped its defenses, and a room with its defenses down will look honestly at itself. Her own description of the experience is the most accurate one: deep enough to make you ponder your life choices, funny enough that you do not take it personally.
That line came from Cambridge Health Alliance, and it tells you what planners are actually reacting to. Sun Life Global Investments put the mechanism plainly: the comedy broke down their team’s defenses and got people to stop living on autopilot. Kruger drew the distinction that matters most for a buyer, noting this is not another motivational speech but a rewiring of how professionals engage and lead.
She Is Unusually Easy to Program
This section exists because it will save a planner real work.
No slides means no deck deadline, no AV rehearsal, no laptop, no clicker, no technical failure mid-keynote. She needs a roaming microphone. Her ideal room is 250 to 500 seats, she is highly interactive, and she works equally well virtually.
She delivers more than 50 events a year and has worked with over 2,000 audiences across 26 years, so there is no learning curve on logistics either.
Two Audiences She Is Built For
Healthcare and municipal government are where she is strongest, and the reason is specific. Both are full of people who are responsible for everything and in control of almost nothing, which is exactly the pressure her material is designed around.
She recently opened the Maryland Municipal League conference for more than 2,000 municipal leaders, and she keynotes the Canadian Dental Hygienists Association conference this November. For clinical audiences she delivers a healthcare-specific version of The Joy of the Job called The Joy of the Career, aimed at protecting the thing that drew people into the profession before the pressure of the work quietly trains it out of them.
Her corporate client list runs alongside that: Discover Card, Sun Life Global Investments, Manpower, Kruger, Cambridge Health Alliance and Aspira.
Five Ways to Program Her
This Would Be Funny If It Wasn’t Happening to Me is the change session, for organizations mid-transformation and for the quiet isolation people carry through it.
How to Speak Human is the leadership keynote, for a management group that has read the books and still cannot get out of its own way.
Crazybusy is the wellbeing session, and it is not a productivity talk. It works on why we use busyness as a shield, with the reframe that your struggle is not what separates you from the room but what you have in common with it.
The Joy of the Job suits frontline teams, employee appreciation events and association conferences, with the healthcare variant noted above.
Follow Me, I’m Right Behind You is for leadership summits and supervisor development, and swaps culture fit for culture transformation.
She tailors every keynote to the audience and industry. Full descriptions are on her speaker profile.
Book Jody Urquhart
Available for keynotes on leadership habits, workplace culture, change, burnout and connection, for corporate, healthcare, municipal and association audiences, in person and virtually.