Pete Steinberg

Building Championship Teams

Transform your good team into an elite, self-running system of excellence. Drawing from coaching the USA Women’s Rugby Team to their first World Cup semifinal in 20 years and leading Penn State to multiple National Championships, Pete Steinberg reveals the five-dimensional framework that separates teams that merely perform from those that achieve the extraordinary. Through compelling stories—from leaving his best player off the World Cup team to turning a 40-point loss into six championships—Pete demonstrates how championship teams master Strategy, Structure, Systems, Relationships, and Identity to perform brilliantly when their leader isn’t in the room. His High-Performance Team Model shows exactly why most teams plateau at “good enough” and provides the roadmap to break through. With over two decades of building championship cultures in both elite sport and corporate environments, Pete engages audiences by providing immediately actionable insights on making the hard decisions that define culture, on building progressive autonomy that develops self-managing excellence, and on creating the belonging that drives effort. This high-impact presentation equips leaders with tools to stop managing talented individuals and start building true championship teams that run themselves.

Leadership Shock: Authenticity and Leadership

Navigate the hidden dangers of career success and discover your authentic leadership style with Pete Steinberg’s proven framework. Drawing from his remarkable dual career—executive coach to Fortune 500 leaders and Olympic rugby coach who led Penn State to ten national championships and USA Rugby to a 2017 World Cup semifinal — Pete reveals why 70% of leaders struggle when transitioning to new roles. Through gripping stories from the boardroom and the rugby pitch, he demonstrates how the very behaviors that brought past success can become obstacles in new environments. Learn the Authentic Leadership Model that helps executives examine their purpose, reset their priorities, and adapt their approach to thrive amid complexity. This transformative keynote equips leaders with the self-awareness and practical tools to overcome “leadership shock”—that disorienting moment when what worked before suddenly doesn’t—and emerge as more intentional, resilient leaders who can navigate any transition with authenticity and impact.

Leading Through Transformation

Learn how to navigate organizational transformation and build high-performing teams as Pete Steinberg shares powerful lessons from coaching the USA Women’s Rugby team through two World Cups and guiding Fortune 500 executives through major transformations. What does it take to lead when the rules of the game are constantly changing? With experience coaching national champions and advising C-suite leaders through mergers, cultural shifts, and strategic pivots, Pete reveals why technical expertise alone isn’t enough as transformation requires fundamentally different leadership capabilities. Pete inspires audiences with unforgettable stories of championship victories and devastating losses that became foundations for success. Pete provides practical frameworks for leading through influence, building autonomous teams, and making decisions that serve both immediate performance and long-term organizational capability. This dynamic presentation motivates leaders to recognize when their proven approach stops working, to adapt authentically without losing their voice, and to create the systems and relationships that enable teams to perform autonomously under pressure, allowing times of transition to convert from a survival challenge into a competitive advantage.

Hacking the Change Curve: Why Your GenAI Strategy Needs an Explorer’s Mindset

What separates the 20% of organizations that successfully transform with GenAI from the 80% that fail despite massive investments? Innovation strategist Pete Steinberg reveals why most AI transformations fail—and how to flip those odds in your favor through his revolutionary “Innovation Advantage” methodology.

With 25+ years guiding Fortune 500 companies through complex transformations, Pete has discovered the fatal flaw in most GenAI strategies: treating innovation as a technology problem rather than a human adoption challenge. Drawing from his unique background, which includes coaching the USA Women’s Rugby team to two World Cups and pioneering innovation approaches at companies from Big 4 Accounting Firms to major airlines, Steinberg brings an athlete’s discipline and strategist’s insight to organizational change.

Through compelling case studies, Steinberg demonstrates why IT shouldn’t lead your GenAI strategy and why HR might be your secret weapon. His “Hacking the Change Curve” approach transforms stakeholders from resistors to champions before resistance can form, using strategic prototyping and an “Explorer mindset” that embraces complexity rather than forcing predetermined solutions.

Steinberg’s three-tiered framework moves organizations from individual AI efficiency to entirely new capabilities they never thought possible. His signature “Innovation Bootcamps” bring cross-functional teams together to create paper prototypes that consistently outperform traditional expert-led transformations. The result? Organizations that don’t just adopt AI, they build cultures of continuous innovation, and executives leave with actionable strategies for building adaptive organizations that thrive on change. This isn’t another tech talk about AI’s possibilities; it’s a pragmatic blueprint from someone who’s been in the trenches, making those possibilities a reality. Steinberg shows you how to identify your organization’s true transformation barriers, engage the right stakeholders at the right time, and build the “Explorer” leadership your company needs to win in an AI-enabled future.