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Collaborative Hardball
What if the most powerful force for transforming conflict, leadership, and global systems is the untapped negotiation
power of women?
Big Idea
Across politics, business, and society, we are facing crises that our current models of power and negotiation are failing to solve.
Women represent the largest untapped leadership resource on the planet. Yet most negotiation models were designed in systems shaped primarily by masculine norms of competition, hierarchy, and power-over.
Collaborative Hardball introduces a new negotiation paradigm—one that integrates strategic clarity with relational intelligence, courage with empathy, and firmness with fairness.
When women fully claim their power as negotiators—not by imitating existing models of dominance, but by transforming them—we unlock a new capacity to resolve conflict, reshape institutions, and build a more sustainable and equitable future.
This keynote shows how a new generation of negotiation—rooted in both strength and collaboration—can become one of the most powerful forces for systemic change.
Keynote Description
For decades, negotiation has been taught as a tactical skill used to win deals, close transactions, or advance individual interests. But the challenges of our time—from political polarization to climate crisis to organizational breakdown—demand something far greater.
They demand a transformation in how power itself is understood and exercised.
In this compelling keynote, negotiation and conflict-resolution expert Susan Coleman introduces the concept of Collaborative Hardball—a bold new approach that combines strategic toughness with relational intelligence and systemic awareness.
Drawing on decades of work in international diplomacy, business negotiation, and leadership training, Coleman reveals why traditional negotiation frameworks often fail women—and why women’s leadership may be uniquely positioned to evolve them.
Participants will discover how integrating traditionally “feminine” capacities—empathy, relational awareness, ethical grounding, and long-term thinking—with clarity, courage, and strategic power creates a new form of leadership urgently needed in our time.
Rather than asking women to adapt to existing power systems, Collaborative Hardball shows how women can transform those systems themselves.
The result is a powerful roadmap for negotiating conflict, influence, and change in organizations, communities, and the world.
Outcomes & Experiences
Target Audience
This keynote is ideal for:
Women’s leadership conferences
Corporate leadership events
Universities and academic institutions
Social impact and nonprofit organizations
Public policy and global affairs forums
Organizations seeking to advance gender equity and inclusive leadership
It is particularly powerful for audiences interested in leadership, negotiation, systems change, and the future of power in a rapidly transforming world.
Participants will
Gain a new understanding of how traditional models of power and negotiation shape our institutions—and why they are increasingly failing us.
Discover the principles of Collaborative Hardball, a negotiation framework that integrates strategic strength with relational and systemic intelligence.
Explore how women’s leadership capacities can expand and transform how power is exercised in organizations and society.
Learn how negotiation can be used not just to resolve disputes—but to reshape systems and create lasting change.
Leave inspired with a new vision of leadership grounded in courage, collaboration, and transformative power.
One suggestion I’d make for speaker bureaus:
You might slightly shorten the title in listings to: Collaborative Hardball: A New Negotiation for Women Changing the World
Then keep the full subtitle in the description.