Happiness Tripwires

Meet Joelle

As seen in

Who it's for

Bring Joelle when your best people are doing fine work instead of their best. When remote and hybrid teams have lost the hallway moments that used to hold them together. When an AI rollout has people anxious, overloaded, and heads-down. Your audience leaves able to rebuild the connection that makes teams sell more, stay longer, and perform under pressure.

AI Rollouts

Your team stops turning to the person two desks over. The work speeds up, and the room goes quiet. Nobody notices, because the work still gets done.

Joelle's been working in AI since 1996 and has coached more than 50 executives on what to model and what to say while their teams sort it out. She's not warning you off it. She uses it every day. The rollout just needs a plan for the humans.

Connection isn't a morale problem. It's a revenue problem.
Against the least connected teams, the most connected deliver:

better performance

Engagement and belonging are the closest measured cousins of connection.
Sources: Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 2024. BetterUp, The Value of Belonging at Work, 2019. Cigna, 2022.

A happiness tripwire, experienced.

A happiness tripwire is a small moment of connection you set in advance, aimed at a hard moment you know is coming. It fires on its own when the moment arrives, and it keeps firing.

For one person

A favorite song that shows up in a teammate's inbox right at the Monday slump. A two-line note timed for the afternoon before a big deadline.

For teams, it has to be structural

Most teams hold a postmortem after something goes wrong. Instead of an uncomfortable "accountability" or complaint session, I learned to use Plus/Delta from XPlane, which starts by asking everyone to share things that went well (plus) and then what they'd change (Delta). The Plus/Delta is a happiness tripwire run after every major milestone or project.

Delta

What we would change

The plus column is the tripwire. It fires on a cue, it names real people doing real things, and nobody has to remember to be grateful. The delta column is why the room trusts it. This isn't a gratitude circle. It's a debrief that happens to leave people feeling seen. It happens at a meeting that was already on the calendar.

Nobody ignores a tripwire because it's hard. They miss it because it looks too small to matter or they're too busy to register it.

The same tripwire doesn't work everywhere. The difference is where the team is starting.

A new team has no history to draw on. The tripwire builds the first shared experience, fast.

An inherited team has history, and some of it isn't yours. The tripwire is how a new leader earns credibility at the start.

A team that has lost faith. Connection alone won't fix a team that has stopped believing the work matters. What a tripwire does there is protect the belief that's still left while you fix the actual problem.

Joelle has led all three, including all three at once, and that story is in the keynote.

Growth mindset

Curiosity is a team sport.

A brain under threat narrows. It defends, it protects, it stops asking questions. A brain with charge in the battery does the opposite. It widens. It explores. It treats a failure as information instead of a verdict.

That's the difference between a team that learns and a team that covers.

Tripwires are how you keep the charge up. Growth and learning are what become possible once it's there.

Fredrickson & Branigan, Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires, Cognition and Emotion, 2005, 19(3), 313 to 332. Positive emotion measurably widens attention and the range of actions people consider. Negative emotion narrows both.

What your audience leaves with

A question

The question that gets people to admit what AI is actually doing to their work and team.

Cancer runs through Joelle's family across generations. Hers was triple-negative breast cancer in 2023. 

Joelle turned that year into one of her happiest using the same science and practices that made all her teams perform, and she shows leaders how to engineer that connection on purpose in the AI era.

About Joelle

Joelle Kaufman is a former $4B CMO and CRO, a TEDx speaker, and the best-selling author of Crushing the Cancer Curveball.

Her keynote, Happiness Tripwires, shows leaders how to build teams that outperform their wildest expectations.

She developed the approach in growth-stage companies, where there’s no extra team to absorb a disengaged person, and every person’s energy shows up in that quarter’s numbers.

Reactivity was acquired by Cisco, Adify was acquired by Cox, and Bloomreach became a unicorn. At each one, her teams posted the company's highest performance and eNPS.

She was a caregiver nine times before she was ever a patient, and she turned her own cancer year into one of her happiest using the same practices.

The numbers, verified.

call it engaging

Measured by Talkadot

Formats

Every talk is tailored to your theme, your audience, and the outcome you need on the day.

Rooms from 8 people to 1,300. Joelle fronts a rock band, so a big room isn't a problem.

Booked for

Executive teams planning an offsite, when the group has gotten good at working next to each other and out of practice at noticing each other.

CROs and sales leaders building a kickoff, who want the room to leave with a tool instead of a t-shirt.

Chief people officers and heads of L&D, when engagement scores are sliding and another survey won't fix it.

Conference and association programmers, when the agenda needs a session people talk about afterward.

Fees on request, tiered by format.

Travel and expenses are billed at pre-approved cost. Nothing lands on your budget that you haven't approved first.