The most popular TED Talks on leadership

Amy Cuddy’s 2012 talk – ‘Your body language may shape who you are’ – is the most popular TED Talk on leadership.

The topic of leadership never fails to pique users’ interest on social media. Currently, #leadership has 1.7B views on TikTok, with short clips of Ted Talks focusing on this topic regularly being shared amongst users on the platform.

Leadership is an enormously popular topic and TED’s back catalogue reflects this, containing dozens of fascinating insights on the qualities that make people great leaders.

VBQ Speakers has conducted research into almost 200 talks on the TED website that include the following tags: ‘leadership’, ‘business’, ‘management’ and ‘authority’. They then ranked them by the number of views to see which talks had gained the most traction.

These are the most popular TED Talks on leadership

The most popular Ted Talk on leadership, with 67M views, was ‘Your body language may shape who you are’, by Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy. In this inspiring talk from 2012, Cuddy discusses how someone’s body position influences others – and even their own brain.

A close runner-up, with 61M views, was Simon Sinek. Sinek’s talk explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change. He uses examples like Apple, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers.

Over 54M people have now watched Julian Treasure’s powerful speech on speaking tips. In his Ted Talk, Treasure explains how to speak with empathy so that people will listen.

Susain Cain’s Ted Talk brings a different perspective on introverts, focusing on the extraordinary talents and abilities that they tend to have. It’s been watched by 32M viewers.

10 most popular TED Talks surrounding leadership, business, management and authority were:

1. Amy Cuddy, Your body language may shape who you are 67M (67,763,678)
2. Simon Sinek, How great leaders inspire action, 61M (61,504,689)
3. Julian Treasure, How to speak so that people want to listen, 54M (54,015,399)
4. Susan Cain, The power of introverts, 32M (32,631,405)
5. Elon Musk, The future we’re building — and boring, 31M (31,213,851)
6. Angela Lee Duckworth, Grit: The power of passion and perseverance, 29M (29,334,430)
7. Dan Pink, The puzzle of  motivation, 29M (29,323,884)
8. Jon Ronson, Strange answers to the psychopath test, 28M (28,660,264)
9. Shawn Achor, The happy secret to better work, 25M (25,283,954)
10. Adam Grant, The surprising habits of original thinkers, 20M (20,763,218)

VBQ Speakers Founder & Director, Leo von Bülow-Quirk said: “Running a business in 2023 isn’t easy. Leaders are having to navigate their organisations through the uncertainties of geopolitical upheaval, climate change, accelerating technologies, financial instability, the new era of hybrid working and a highly polarised political landscape.

“How do you develop strategies that mitigate the risks and take advantage of the opportunities of this context? How do you build creative cultures with a sense of common purpose? These are big questions, and the survival of an organisation can depend on getting the answers right.”

Sam McAlister’s talk on how she negotiated ‘that interview’ with Price Andrew for Panorama was a great hit at PA Life Summit 2022.