Leading When Nobody Has to Listen to You
How millennials and Gen Z build authority when hierarchy alone no longer works — and what actually earns trust from people who can and will leave.
Keynote Speaker
Modern leadership.
Modern leadership.
No corporate bullshit.
Amanda Litman is a keynote speaker and author of When We're in Charge. She speaks to millennial and Gen Z leaders navigating the part nobody warned them about: the teams, the trust, the burnout, and the institutional collapse happening in real time.
Book Amanda →"I will show up and say the thing."
The case for booking
Millennials and Gen Z didn't inherit a clean leadership handoff. They inherited burnout, institutional distrust, and a generation of managers who either checked out or never learned. The old playbook — authority through hierarchy, loyalty through fear, authenticity as a brand strategy — is visibly failing.
Amanda speaks about what replaces it.
TIME100 Next
Written by Hillary Clinton
Fortune
40 Under 40
Politico
Politico 50
Obama Foundation
USA Leader 2025–26
Financial Times
Best Business Book
Keynote Topics
Something specific
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02
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Something specific
to say.
Every talk is built from real management experience — not theory. Customizable for your audience, industry, or moment.
Clarity and Backbone
How leaders navigate competing pressures — political, organizational, interpersonal — without becoming reactive, vague, or performatively brave.
What Burned-Out Teams Actually Need From You
The management interventions that actually help versus the well-intentioned ones that don't. What younger workers need from their managers right now, specifically.
What Politics Can Teach You About Trust
Running campaigns is a masterclass in building credibility fast with people who owe you nothing. Every organization can use that playbook.
The Authenticity Trap
Everyone says they want authentic leaders. They're (unintentionally) full of it. This talk is about the difference between honesty and oversharing, identity and brand, visibility and performing yourself into a corner.
How Not to Lose Your Best People
What organizations actually need to do to retain ambitious younger talent — without recreating the toxic workplace cultures that drove people out in the first place.
Audiences leave
with something
to actually do.
Not a vague sense of inspiration. Not a tweet-sized takeaway. Something useful for Monday morning.
- A framework for building authority that doesn't require a title
- Concrete tools for managing people who are fried and still showing up
- A clearer sense of what "leading well" actually looks like day-to-day
- Permission to stop performing leadership and start practicing it
- Strategies for building trust quickly with people who are skeptical of institutions
- Ways to lead without reproducing the management culture they were trained in
Practical advice.
Not executive
clichés.
Not executive
clichés.
Amanda has managed teams, built a multimillion-dollar organization from a Google Doc and a press release, and written a leadership book based on 130 interviews. Before that, she ran the email operation for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign — raising $330 million from more than 3 million donors. She has watched what she preached both work and visibly fail in real time. Her talks are built from that. Not from theory.
She is not neutral about what good leadership looks like. She has opinions about what managers get wrong, what organizations owe their people, and what the next generation of leaders actually needs to hear — as opposed to what sounds good on a conference keynote slide.
"Designed to leave audiences with something useful to do on Monday morning — not just something inspirational to tweet about."
Amanda does not do corporate optimism. She does not do HR language. She does not pretend things are simpler than they are. She does do specific, honest, occasionally uncomfortable, and genuinely useful.
Who books Amanda
Rooms full of people
Rooms full of people
who are actually trying.
Amanda has spoken at leadership conferences, management retreats, universities, nonprofits, women's leadership summits, and mission-driven organizations across the country — including Charter, the Albany Business Review Women's Summit, and professional development conferences for wellness executives, plus students at dozens of universities. The common thread: audiences who are already doing the work and running out of road on the old playbook.
Leadership Conferences
Management Retreats
Universities
Foundations
Nonprofit Executive Teams
Women's Leadership Summits
Mission-Driven Organizations
Political Organizations
"A refreshingly candid, delightfully irreverent guide to leadership for the next generation."
— Adam Grant, author of Think Again
What it's like in the room
See for yourself.
University of Albany, Fall 2025 — on generational leadership
Charter Workplace Summit 2025 — on next-generation management
About Amanda
The short version.
Amanda Litman is the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which she built from a Google Doc into an organization that has helped elect more than 1,650 candidates to state and local office across the country.
She's the author of When We're in Charge (Crooked Media Reads / Zando) — named a best business book by the Financial Times, endorsed by Adam Grant, and based on 130 interviews with next-generation leaders across every sector.
Before RFS, she was National Email Director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, where she oversaw a digital fundraising operation that raised $330 million from more than 3 million donors. She's been named to TIME100 Next, Fortune 40 Under 40, Politico 50, and Bloomberg People to Watch. She's a 2025–26 Obama Foundation USA Leader.
She does not do motivational posters.
Book Amanda
Let's find out if
Let's find out if
it's a good fit.
Share a bit about your event and audience. Amanda's team will respond within a few days.
Or email directly: hello@amandalitman.com