Steve Holloway
Roles: Keynote Speaker, Speaker, MC, Panel Host
Themes: Business, Lifestyle & Wellbeing, Motivation, Sports
Steve built New Zealand’s most popular podcast from nothing
No budget. No network. No production. Just a microphone in his garage and one skill he spent six years obsessively refining: getting people - guarded, successful, media-trained people - to say what they actually think. On the record. In public. Every single time.
His guests are founders, executives, athletes, and public figures. People who are very good at saying a lot without revealing much. Getting them to open up, reliably, across 250+ episodes and millions of downloads, isn't luck or charisma.
It's craft. A specific, learnable set of skills. And they work just as powerfully in a boardroom as they do behind a microphone.
Most speakers on this topic are researchers or coaches. Steve is neither. He does this visibly, every week, in front of an audience that would notice immediately if he didn't. Funny, direct, and uncomfortably recognisable. Steve doesn't do theory - he does craft, demonstrated through stories from six years of high-stakes public conversations with people who came in guarded and left saying more than they planned.
Best for Sales conferences · Leadership off sites · Executive teams · Management development · Any organisation where the quality of decisions depends on the honesty of conversations
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Asking Questions That Get Real Answers
Listening That Build Buy-In
Handling Silence, Emotion & Disagreement
Feedback That Lands
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Nobody’s Telling You The Truth
The craft of getting people to say what they actually think.
Right now, somewhere in your organisation, someone knows something you need to know - and they're not telling you.
Not because they're disloyal. Not because they don't care. Because every conversation they've had with leadership has quietly taught them that the polished version goes down better than the real one. So that's what you get. Polished versions. Carefully managed updates. Answers designed to satisfy rather than inform.
The result is visible everywhere, once you know what you're looking at: decisions made on incomplete information, good people who leave without warning, customers who seemed fine until they weren't, feedback conversations that changed absolutely nothing.
Most leaders assume this is a culture problem. It isn't. It's a conversation problem. And it's solvable.
What this talk is about
How to get the truth - reliably, in any conversation that matters.
Not by being pushy or clever. By creating the conditions where people want to be straight with you. Where the honest answer feels safer than the polished one. Where trust builds fast enough that the real conversation actually happens.
Most leaders are making decisions based on the version of reality their people are comfortable sharing. This talk changes that.
What you'll leave with
How to ask questions that bypass the rehearsed answer and get to what's actually true
How to read a silence, a non-answer, and a pivot - and know precisely what to do next
How to become the leader people are honest with, not the one they carefully manage upwards
How to have the hard conversation that's been avoided - and have it strengthen the relationship instead of strain it
Why the best leaders, salespeople, and negotiators all share one conversational habit - and how to make it your
