Annie Canning: Leadership speaker for teams that need to hear it straight
Looking for a speaker who will build self-awareness, confidence, and practical leadership skills your team can use straight away?
Nice to meet you
Hi, I’m Annie Canning.
I'm the founder of Canning, and a speaker and facilitator on leadership and performance.
For 8+ years I've worked alongside business owners, CEOs and leadership teams who are ready to break through their personal ceilings and build high-performance cultures.
When I speak, my job is to sit in your audience's corner: to name the thing they've been stepping around, stress-test the way they're leading, and hand them frameworks they can use on Monday morning (and I promise to do it with more humour than most leadership sessions allow!).
Whether it's a keynote, conference session, leadership offsite, or workshop series, your people will leave with a higher standard for themselves, plus a clear idea of what to do with it.
Leadership and performance topics I cover
These are the topics I'm asked for most. Each can be delivered as a keynote, a half-day workshop or a multi-part series, and tailored to your audience and sector.
✓ Leading from within - self-awareness as a leadership tool, knowing your values well enough to make a hard call fast, and building habits that hold up when the week goes sideways.
✓ Emotional intelligence - reading the room before you lead it, interrupting the defensiveness reflex, and creating the conditions where people bring you the hard stuff early.
✓ Handling conflict - a practical structure for courageous conversations.
✓ Delegation - delegating to build capability rather than offload tasks and making authority explicit.
✓ Building performance - swapping directing for coaching, establishing a repeatable coaching rhythm, and creating a no-blame accountability culture that lifts the whole team.
✓ Building performance - why leadership starts with you and how to cascade a higher standard from you, to your team, to your organisation.
Let's chat
Looking for a speaker who'll hold the room and send your leaders back to work with something they can actually use? Tell me about your event, audience and what you want them to walk away with, and I'll be in touch to talk it through.
Your questions, answered
Can you tailor a session to our industry or team?
Yes, and I'd rather do that than deliver something generic. Every topic on this page is a starting point. Before the event we'll talk about your audience, what's going on for them and what you want to be different afterwards, and I'll shape the content around that.
How long is a typical session?
Keynotes run 30 to 45 minutes, with time for questions if you want it. Workshops are usually half a day, and the Leadership Series format runs as four half-day sessions spread over several weeks so people can apply what they learn between them.
How many people can you work with?
Keynotes work for any audience size. For workshops, I keep groups small enough that everyone participates, typically 12 to 25 people to enable conversation.
Where are you based, and do you travel?
I'm based in Rotorua and work with organisations across New Zealand and Australia. Travel is straightforward; we'll build it into the quote. Sessions can also be delivered online.
What does it cost?
It depends on the format, length, audience size and how much tailoring is involved. Send me the details of your event and I'll come back with a quote.
What will our people walk away with?
Something they can use the next day. Every session is built around practical frameworks and real workplace scenarios rather than theory. Across four Leadership Series with the Rotorua Business Chamber, for example, 99.4% of participants said they'd recommend the programme, and common feedback was that they could apply it straight away.
To see how Annie Canning's Performance Pathway can positively impact your life, please get in touch.
