Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

Transform your event with Joris Merks-Benjaminsen!
Booking Joris makes your event really unforgettable.
For everybody. In every aspect.
Looking for leadership?
Looking for a speaker to awaken your leaders and help close the gap between saying and doing? Joris Merks-Benjaminsen is the speaker you need!
Consistent leadership at all levels
In many organizations, leaders’ careers benefit from spending a relatively large amount of time “managing upwards”, often at the expense of paying attention to their teams. Focus on easily measurable results is often at the expense of the things that really matter. With a holistic approach and ‘upward feedback’ from teams to their leaders and a rich set of practical tools, Joris makes it easy and rewarding to turn good intentions into consistent behavior by leaders in all layers of the organization.
People-focused and performance-focused
In performance-oriented organizations, humanity is often far away and human organizations often lack direction and accountability. Both can make organizations political, slow and opportunistic. Joris shows how you can strike a healthy balance between performance pressure and humanity in all aspects of leadership, thus bringing out the best in your teams.
Looking for leadership? Looking for a speaker to awaken your leaders and help close the gap between saying and doing? Joris Merks-Benjaminsen is the speaker you need! Consistent leadership at all levels In many organizations, leaders’ careers benefit from spending a relatively large amount of time “managing upwards”, often at the expense of paying attention to their teams. Focus on easily measurable results is often at View more…
What is Joris talking about?
How can you close the gap between saying and doing? How can you actually translate beautifully formulated mission statements, leadership principles and cultural values into action within your organization? With his years of experience and in-depth knowledge of leadership, Joris answers these questions in his fascinating keynotes.
Find some of his keynotes here. Customization is always an option, please ask about the possibilities.
The brilliant basics of Managing Without Power
You create a new style of leadership in an organization only with a holistic approach, applied consistently. That starts with the fundamentals: the five Brilliant Basics of Managing Without Power practically show how to apply moral leadership every day, building teams and organizations that operate based on trust and intrinsic motivation.
What if inclusion is not a word but reality?
Inclusion is not waving a pride flag, or symbolically hiring more women and minorities. Inclusion must be the “default setting” of your organization. That means the principles are embedded in everything you do as a manager and leader: how you hire people, how you run meetings, the example you set, how you make decisions about pay and progression and more. Only then will you create an environment where all types of people can be successful in their own way.
Leadership in the 21st century
Creating space to do the right thing with moral and servant leadership
Leaders often ask how to get people on board with change. That assumes they don’t want to. That is usually incorrect. In fact, people try to change all kinds of things about the organization. But they bump into walls when they try to do “the right thing,” for the customer, for teamwork, for the world long term. We have enslaved organizations to the KPIs by which we optimize them. With Managing Without Power, managers learn to lead with data, mind AND heart.
Transforming Organizations
The most frequently asked question about Organizational Transformation is “how do I transform an organization?”. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong question: one that leads to top-down change programs and an organization that quickly becomes tires of changes. In fact, organizations are constantly in multiple transformations simultaneously. You can only do that successfully if you know how to intrinsically motivate people to push the boundaries of the organization themselves. You get an organization that constantly reinvents itself from the inside out. This requires a new kind of leader.
Performance management on a human level
‘A manager once said to me: I am performance-oriented, you are people-oriented. That’s not possible at all, because people perform at their best when you invest in them and create an environment where they can be impactful in their own way.‘
Organizations that think they can create a high performance culture by introducing strict performance reviews usually end up in a “survival of the toughest” culture where mostly people with thick skin and sharp elbows survive. Then, by definition, you are not high-performing, that would only happen if 90% of your people are their best selves.
Setting a high bar starts with investing in your team. The more you invest, the higher you get to set the bar and the more you get back from your team. It’s all about the balance between humanity and accountability.
The brilliant basics of Managing Without Power
You create a new style of leadership in an organization only with a holistic approach, applied consistently. That starts with the fundamentals: the five Brilliant Basics of Managing Without Power practically show how to apply moral leadership every day, building teams and organizations that operate based on trust and intrinsic motivation.
What if inclusion is not a word but reality?
Inclusion is not waving a pride flag, or symbolically hiring more women and minorities. Inclusion must be the “default setting” of your organization. That means the principles are embedded in everything you do as a manager and leader: how you hire people, how you run meetings, the example you set, how you make decisions about pay and progression and more. Only then will you create an environment where all types of people can be successful in their own way.
Leadership in the 21st century
Creating space to do the right thing with moral and servant leadership
Leaders often ask how to get people on board with change. That assumes they don’t want to. That is usually incorrect. In fact, people try to change all kinds of things about the organization. But they bump into walls when they try to do “the right thing,” for the customer, for teamwork, for the world long term. We have enslaved organizations to the KPIs by which we optimize them. With Managing Without Power, managers learn to lead with data, mind AND heart.
Transforming Organizations
The most frequently asked question about Organizational Transformation is “how do I transform an organization?”. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong question: one that leads to top-down change programs and an organization that quickly becomes tires of changes. In fact, organizations are constantly in multiple transformations simultaneously. You can only do that successfully if you know how to intrinsically motivate people to push the boundaries of the organization themselves. You get an organization that constantly reinvents itself from the inside out. This requires a new kind of leader.
Performance management on a human level
‘A manager once said to me: I am performance-oriented, you are people-oriented. That’s not possible at all, because people perform at their best when you invest in them and create an environment where they can be impactful in their own way.‘
Organizations that think they can create a high performance culture by introducing strict performance reviews usually end up in a “survival of the toughest” culture where mostly people with thick skin and sharp elbows survive. Then, by definition, you are not high-performing, that would only happen if 90% of your people are their best selves.
Setting a high bar starts with investing in your team. The more you invest, the higher you get to set the bar and the more you get back from your team. It’s all about the balance between humanity and accountability.
“Pure focus on profit and revenue comes at the expense of the world, the people, but ultimately of the organization.”
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen helps organizations perform by creating space for people to do the right thing.
Joris’ view of the world is fundamentally different from others, he noticed that when he goes for an office job after 20 years of competitive martial arts training. He is irreversibly injured, and his sports career ended abruptly. He chose business, but the culture shock was huge.
“I felt unhappy and unsafe for the first eight years. I changed jobs often. From martial arts, I was used to the fact that you can win if you try hard, here the rules were different.”
The games, politics, power struggles, stress and psychological insecurity that were constantly present in organizations was not for him. Neither was the way people – including managers – interacted with each other in the workplace. He was raised with open-mindedness and respect for others, which is incompatible with the harsh “downward pushing” he witnessed.
Yet there is hope when he started working as a consultant for a media research firm, where for the first time he feels truly comfortable within the corporate culture. So it is possible after all. This was later reaffirmed when he started working at Google.
“I wanted to stay at Google for a maximum of 4 years, but it turned out to be 12. I was allowed to do such great work here, had nice colleagues and was given the space and confidence to develop all kinds of things. I really felt at home.”
He got a unique ‘evangelist role’ from his employer to start giving workshops at companies on digital transformation, which became so successful that he soon had a European team of 20 people under his belt: Google Digital Academy. What he had long tried to avoid happened: he became a manager.
“I decided; if I did become a manager, I will become the manager I would have liked to have myself at one time. Not someone who is only concerned about his own career, but who has personal attention for his team and invests in them.”
His unique view of leadership, with a human approach at the heart of it, and the 100% score he was awarded 12 times in a row by his team (a record), didn’t go unnoticed. Joris gradually began to train fellow managers according to the principle of leading from trust, rather than from fear and control.
Joris also wrote a book about this leadership style; “Managing without Power”. After 12 years he ended his career at Google. In March 2023 he founded his own training agency ‘Managing without Power’ and gives regular lectures on leadership, organizational cultures and dynamics to all types of people can be their best self.
Besides all this, Joris lives in Amersfoort with his wife Claire and their two children.
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen helps organizations perform by creating space for people to do the right thing. Joris’ view of the world is fundamentally different from others, he noticed that when he goes for an office job after 20 years of competitive martial arts training. He is irreversibly injured, and his sports career ended abruptly. He chose business, but the culture shock was huge. “I felt unhappy and View more…
"Performance and humanity are not opposites, they are inseparable."

"Moral leadership is not reserved for idealistic startups; any manager with their heart in the right place can bring change."
Is power the enemy of diversity?
“Who is the male and who is the female?” Joris ponders. “The one most often burns the potatoes must then be the male.”
It’s a question Joris has often been asked in his childhood. He grew up from the age of five with two mothers, which was completely normal for him. “That question is complete nonsense” he says. “Why do you necessarily have to be one or the other? But those pigeonholes, assumptions and prejudices still exist, even in the workplace.”
“My mother was a vulnerable woman who lived at a time when being a lesbian was not really accepted. That left its mark. It also shaped me, and lit the fire to address biases in business.”
Joris’ mission is to create organizations in which people of all backgrounds have equal opportunities and the space to do what is right. Joris says: “That is only possible if leaders start managing without power, reset the force field and dare to change the system.” He explains that in many organizations there is a dynamic in which short-term thinking and political games pay off.
“Managers who do have an eye for people end up in an impossible split caused by this system. Unnecessary, because performance and humanity are anything but opposites. On the contrary, they are inseparable. You cannot expect maximum output from your team if as a manager you give minimal input.”
Joris proved after years of kicking against political systems at an American listed company, providing successful management trainings for formal leaders, that things really can be done differently. And this is not only possible for idealistic startups, but every manager with their heart in the right place can accelerate change through moral leadership. That can literally start today.
Want to book Joris as a speaker?
Would you like to book Joris Merks-Benjaminsen for your event? Ask about the possibilities and his availability.
1. Proven approach
Joris knows despite commercial and political pressures in organizations, as a manager and leader how you can create the space for your team to do the right things. He became one of Google’s highest scoring managers through this approach and helped many large organizations with breakthroughs in transformations.
2. Recognizable and enlightening
Joris offers both painful and enlightening insights into the forces that keep us from doing the right thing in large organizations. He makes you smile at your own inabilities and opens the door and provides concrete tools to do things differently.
3. Human and personal
Joris makes sensitive issues open for discussion, makes the unconscious visible and creates space for all perspectives. He helps you to manage in your own unique way without power, keeping an eye for people as well as organizational objectives.
4. Hands-on and interaction
As an experienced workshop facilitator, Joris helps groups of managers and leaders reflect together, engage in conversation, find barriers align principles actions.
5. Customization is the norm
With an intensive intake in advance, leadership and management principles are placed in the context of your own organization.
1. Proven approach
Joris knows despite commercial and political pressures in organizations, as a manager and leader how you can create the space for your team to do the right things. He became one of Google’s highest scoring managers through this approach and helped many large organizations with breakthroughs in transformations.
2. Recognizable and enlightening
Joris offers both painful and enlightening insights into the forces that keep us from doing the right thing in large organizations. He makes you smile at your own inabilities and opens the door and provides concrete tools to do things differently.
3. Human and personal
Joris makes sensitive issues open for discussion, makes the unconscious visible and creates space for all perspectives. He helps you to manage in your own unique way without power, keeping an eye for people as well as organizational objectives.
4. Hands-on and interaction
As an experienced workshop facilitator, Joris helps groups of managers and leaders reflect together, engage in conversation, find barriers align principles actions.
5. Customization is the norm
With an intensive intake in advance, leadership and management principles are placed in the context of your own organization.
Four questions for:
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

For Good: what does that mean to you?
“Making the world a little more beautiful, leaving it in a better shape I found it. That is about past and future, but I also want to be in the here and now doing something for people.
For good in my field means helping formal leaders build teams and organizations that truly add something to society, and where people experience their work (life) as enjoyable and meaningful.”
Walk the Talk: what is your added value?
“As a manager and leader for many years, I have been a buffer for my team, creating space despite high commercial and political pressures. Space for all types of people to be their best selves and to do the right things. Now, with my books, trainings, workshops and lectures, I help as many managers and leaders as possible to do the same for their teams and organizations.
By the way, a word I like to stay far away from is “inspire,” because just by inspiring you don’t improve the situation. In fact, an “inspiration shot” can be deceptive. It can maintain the illusion that leaders are changing the organization, while words are not backed up by actions. Then I miss my goal of actually getting managers and leaders into action mode.”
Who is your greatest role model or inspiration?
“Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google. Even though Google is now often criticized, about being too powerful, I think there has rarely been an organization that has managed to guard its mission and culture for so long despite commercial success and the size of the company. That has everything to do with the powerful convictions of these two founders.
It was inevitable that there would also be downsides, as a large organization eventually takes on a life of its own. So, it is also good that the power of the company should be critically examined. But the scale and duration at which these two managed to keep their idealistic vision afloat is, in my view, unprecedented and still inspires me.”
What do you love and what makes you happy?
“That was always martial arts, judo among others, but unfortunately that is no longer possible. I now consciously work less to give my wife Claire the space she deserves to develop as she wants. I still exercise a lot, in my home gym to stay fit and I play the guitar, just like my mother did.
I also spend time with my children, where I try to teach them about sustainable living with a diversity of people. And writing books also makes me happy of course; ‘Managing without Power’ is my sixth and who knows, maybe there will be a seventh!”
For Good: what does that mean to you?
“Making the world a little more beautiful, leaving it in a better shape I found it. That is about past and future, but I also want to be in the here and now doing something for people.
For good in my field means helping formal leaders build teams and organizations that truly add something to society, and where people experience their work (life) as enjoyable and meaningful.”
Walk the Talk: what is your added value?
“As a manager and leader for many years, I have been a buffer for my team, creating space despite high commercial and political pressures. Space for all types of people to be their best selves and to do the right things. Now, with my books, trainings, workshops and lectures, I help as many managers and leaders as possible to do the same for their teams and organizations.
By the way, a word I like to stay far away from is “inspire,” because just by inspiring you don’t improve the situation. In fact, an “inspiration shot” can be deceptive. It can maintain the illusion that leaders are changing the organization, while words are not backed up by actions. Then I miss my goal of actually getting managers and leaders into action mode.”
Who is your greatest role model or inspiration?
“Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google. Even though Google is now often criticized, about being too powerful, I think there has rarely been an organization that has managed to guard its mission and culture for so long despite commercial success and the size of the company. That has everything to do with the powerful convictions of these two founders.
It was inevitable that there would also be downsides, as a large organization eventually takes on a life of its own. So, it is also good that the power of the company should be critically examined. But the scale and duration at which these two managed to keep their idealistic vision afloat is, in my view, unprecedented and still inspires me.”
What do you love and what makes you happy?
“That was always martial arts, judo among others, but unfortunately that is no longer possible. I now consciously work less to give my wife Claire the space she deserves to develop as she wants. I still exercise a lot, in my home gym to stay fit and I play the guitar, just like my mother did.
I also spend time with my children, where I try to teach them about sustainable living with a diversity of people. And writing books also makes me happy of course; ‘Managing without Power’ is my sixth and who knows, maybe there will be a seventh!”
A selection of companies and people that Joris Merks-Benjaminsen already had impactful collaborations with….
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“Managing Without Power is NOT ‘Edutainment’. It’s practical application of learning. It achieves change and transformation at a systemic level, which is the only way to achieve lasting impact in my experience. I can highly recommend working with Joris.”
Senior Director Talent Development EMEA & LATAM at LinkedIn
Stephanie Conway -
“Joris makes complexity actionable and has a story that touches and engages people. He brings people along on the journey. He genuinely cares about making your organization better and more effective.”
Managing Director at Yonego
Hank van Dijk -
“Joris is a rare kind of leader and mentor: generous, super smart, insanely knowledgeable, insightful and humble. He’s truly collaborative, and fun with an abundance of quiet energy. He is the person you really want to be leading your team. And if you can’t have that, you definitely need him to be working WITH your team to enable them to be the best they possibly can be.”
AVA Head of People, Culture and Capabilities
Jo Royce -
“Joris’s program is not for leaders looking to brush up a skill here or there. When you really have the ambition to excel as leader, team and organization, this is the program for you.”
Manager Transformation at HEMA
Niels FC Willems -
“I’ve rarely worked with someone so conscientious and deliberate about modelling best practice in getting the best from individuals and teams. Everyone who works with Joris learns a thing or two about leading with thoughtfulness, consistency and humanity.”
Chief Client & Growth Officer at Kite Insights
Shuvo Saha -
“If you’re a manager, or are looking to upskill managers, if you want to establish an inclusive culture with start-up spirit in a large organization, or you’re a scale-up, growing rapidly but eager to maintain the culture you’ve built, then look no further than Joris’s Managing Without Power.”
Global Director of People Development & Chang at Fartech
Kim Wylie -
GroupM Coolblue.GroupM Coolblue
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ING Bank.ING Bank
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G-Star.G-Star
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Heineken.Heineken
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TUI.TUI
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PON Automobiles.PON Automobiles
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Google.Google
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Unilever.Unilever
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L’Oreal.L’Oreal
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Odido.Odido
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Philips.Philips