Liz Wiseman, CEO of The Wiseman Group, Thinkers50 Leadership Award recipient, and author of Multipliers and Impact Players.
Most organizations promote their best individual performers and hope they become good leaders. Liz Wiseman built a career studying what happens next: some of those leaders make a team brilliant, and others, often without meaning to do so, make it smaller.
That research became Multipliers, a New York Times bestseller, and it made Wiseman one of the most recognized voices on leadership in business.
She is CEO of The Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm in Silicon Valley, a recipient of the Thinkers50 Leadership Award, and a named speaker at the Thinkers50 London Summit and Leaders50 Awards Gala at Guildhall on November 2, 2026.
She is also among Aurum Speakers Bureau’s Thinkers50 speakers, and her ideas have reached organizations including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Disney, and Nike.
Here is what her work says, and why leaders keep inviting her to say it in person. Along the way, we also introduce a few other voices who approach leadership from different angles, so you leave with a wider set of perspectives to consider, whether or not Wiseman turns out to be the right fit for your event.
The idea behind Multipliers
The Liz Wiseman Multipliers framework rests on research across 150 executives in 35 countries, according to The Wiseman Group. It sorts leaders into two kinds. Multipliers use their own intelligence to amplify the intelligence of the people around them. Diminishers, often unintentionally, drain it. The gap between the two is large.
According to The Wiseman Group, Multipliers get an average of 1.97 times more capability from their people than Diminishers do. In plain terms, a Multiplier is a leader who gets nearly twice the capability out of the same team by making others smarter and more capable, rather than relying on being the smartest person in the room.
The five Multiplier disciplines and the Diminisher type each one counters, from Liz Wiseman’s research.
Multipliers share five disciplines:
The Talent Magnet attracts people and develops them for bigger roles.
The Liberator creates room for strong work and treats mistakes as learning.
The Challenger pushes a team with questions it cannot yet answer.
The Debate Maker draws on the full brainpower of the group before deciding.
The Investor hands over real ownership and supports people with coaching and resources.
Each has a counterpart in the five Diminisher types: the Empire Builder, the Tyrant, the Know-It-All, the Decision Maker, and the Micromanager.
What makes the research uncomfortable is how many Diminishers are well-meaning. A leader who jumps in to rescue a struggling project, or who fills every silence with an answer, may believe they are helping.
It is the same territory Marshall Goldsmith explores in his work on executive coaching and the habits that limit leaders, approached from a different direction.
Impact Players: the other side of the equation
Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact (Harper Business, 2021), named to the Thinkers50 Best New Management Booklist in 2022.
Multipliers speaks to the leader. Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact speaks to everyone else. The book looks at what separates contributors who are merely good from those who become indispensable, and it distills five practices, including how to treat threatening situations as opportunities rather than risks.
It also shows how Impact Players help the leaders around them become Multipliers, which is why the two ideas work as a pair. Thinkers50 named Impact Players to its Best New Management Booklist in 2022, and the book was shortlisted for the 2023 Thinkers50 Talent Award.
For HR and learning leaders building programs around this kind of contribution, our talent management speakers offer related perspectives.
Rookie Smarts and the advantage of a beginner’s mind
Wiseman’s earlier book, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work, makes a case that suits an era of constant change: when conditions shift quickly, a beginner’s curiosity can outperform an expert’s experience.
The same instinct runs through the work of Tsedal Neeley on the digital mindset, where adapting and learning faster than the context changes becomes the central skill.
A Thinkers50 voice with a long record
Few management thinkers have been on the Thinkers50 ranking for as long as Wiseman.
She has appeared in every edition since 2013, moving from number 48 that year to number 17 in 2019, the same year she received the Thinkers50 Leadership Award. In 2025, when only the top ten receive numbered positions, she was again named among the ranked thinkers.
Thinkers50 itself describes her big idea as latent intelligence: the capability that sits all around us in organizations, often underused. It is a clear way to frame what she asks leaders to consider.
Where Wiseman focuses on how leaders raise the people around them, fellow Thinkers50 voice Herminia Ibarra turns the lens on how leaders reinvent themselves, a theme we explore in our feature on Herminia Ibarra on leadership and reinvention.
Why the Multipliers question matters now
Leaders today are asked to deliver more from teams that are stretched, distributed, and absorbing new tools and expectations faster than any hiring plan can match. The Multipliers question becomes practical: how much of the capability already inside the organization is actually being used?
The answer rarely depends on adding headcount. It depends on how leaders behave in meetings, in decisions, and in the moments when a team is struggling. That is a question about daily habits as much as strategy, and it connects naturally to the science of how teams perform, as explored in our piece on David Burkus on high-performing teams.
What a Liz Wiseman keynote looks like
Wiseman’s keynotes are built to be interactive, with audiences working through the ideas rather than only listening. Here’s a bit of a taste for you to check for yourself:
Her two core sessions follow her two best-known frameworks. The first, drawn from Multipliers, asks “Are Your Leaders Geniuses or Genius Makers?” and helps participants identify where they might unintentionally diminish others.
The second, drawn from Impact Players, asks “Are Your People Contributing to Their Fullest?” and gives teams practical guidance for producing work with real impact.
Both suit conferences, executive offsites, and company-wide events, and both give audiences language they can use the following Monday. Among our leadership speakers, she is the natural choice when the goal is to change how leaders and teams work together.
To explore her topics and availability, start with our Liz Wiseman speaker profile.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Liz Wiseman?
Liz Wiseman is a leadership researcher, executive advisor, and CEO of The Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm in Silicon Valley. A former vice president of Oracle University, she is the author of Multipliers, The Multiplier Effect, Rookie Smarts, and Impact Players, and a recipient of the Thinkers50 Leadership Award. She writes for Harvard Business Review and Fortune and lectures at Stanford University and Brigham Young University.
What is a Multiplier, according to Liz Wiseman?
A Multiplier is a leader who uses their own intelligence to amplify the intelligence and capability of the people around them. According to The Wiseman Group, Multipliers get an average of 1.97 times more capability from their people than Diminishers, the leaders who, often unintentionally, drain it. The research draws on 150 executives in 35 countries.
What are the five disciplines of a Multiplier?
The five disciplines are the Talent Magnet, who attracts and develops talent; the Liberator, who creates room for strong work; the Challenger, who stretches a team with hard questions; the Debate Maker, who draws on the full brainpower of the group before deciding; and the Investor, who hands over ownership and supports people to succeed.
What are Liz Wiseman’s keynote topics?
Wiseman speaks on Multipliers and the leadership behaviors that bring out a team’s full capability, on Impact Players and the habits that turn good contributors into indispensable ones, and on Rookie Smarts and the value of a beginner’s mindset in times of disruption. Her keynotes are interactive and suit conferences, executive offsites, and company-wide events.
How can I book Liz Wiseman to speak at an event?
Liz Wiseman can be booked through Aurum Speakers Bureau for keynotes and corporate events worldwide. To check her availability and fit for your event, contact Aurum Speakers Bureau.
The strongest case for Wiseman’s work is how easily it passes the simplest test a leader can apply: do the people around me leave a conversation with me smarter, or more cautious? Her research gives that question a name, a measure, and a set of habits to change.
To bring that perspective to your stage, contact Aurum Speakers Bureau and one of our founders will respond within 24 hours.
