Member since September 2026
Sarah Mosseri, PhD, is a keynote speaker, organizational strategist, and sociologist of work. She is the author of Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us (University of California Press, 2026), based on more than 1,200 hours of NSF-funded fieldwork inside four workplaces: a marketing agency, a restaurant, a tech start-up, and the ride-hail circuit. The book received an honorable mention for the ASA Labor & Labor Movements Book Award.
What sets Sarah apart is where she looks. Engagement scores and org charts describe the formal organization; her research maps the informal one — the favors, workarounds, unwritten rules, and personal relationships that actually hold a workplace together. Left unexamined, these informal processes become organizational liabilities: retention that rests on one person's goodwill, crisis heroics that stand in for functional systems, and AI tools trained on habits no one has audited.
Her talks give audiences language for dynamics they have felt at work but found hard to name: the buffering labor that exhausts good managers, the crisis cultures that fuel constant firefighting, and what happens when good intentions are handed to bad systems. Every talk can be delivered as an 18-minute TED-style talk, a 35-40 minute keynote, or a 60-90 minute session with interactive components, virtual or in person.
Recent stages and clients include the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors, University of Maryland System, Expel Technology, UVA Darden Business School, and the California Department of Health. Before writing about workplace trust, Sarah spent twenty years researching and advising organizations, from Madison Avenue agencies and tech startups to California state government and global leadership consultancies. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Virginia and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney Business School.
I first noticed it in advertising, sitting behind the glass at consumer focus groups: the part of the job I loved most was listening to people talk, noticing patterns in what they said, and figuring out what those patterns meant in practice. That is still the work. Across 1,200+ hours of fieldwork, what I found is that people bring enormous care to their jobs — and the systems around them often waste it. My favorite moment on a stage is when someone recognizes a dynamic they have felt for years and finally has a name for it.
To write Trust Fall, I embedded inside four workplaces: I waited tables at a restaurant, sat at the hot desk of a tech start-up, shadowed teams at a marketing agency, and sat in airport parking lots with ride-hail drivers. In every one of them, the org chart told one story and the room told another. The real safety net was informal: a manager bending a rule as a favor, a coworker covering for someone without being asked. Those arrangements were generous — and they were fragile, because they left when the person did. That is the story I keep telling from the stage: the difference between a favor and a structure, and what it costs an organization to confuse the two.
For years, I was the kind of worker who gave everything to the job: long days, late nights, weekends, willing to travel, even move. I tried to be exactly what a manager would want: useful, competent, always available. I didn't really expect work to love me back, but some part of me hoped it would. The mismatch between how much work could ask of me and how little I could ask of it became a question I kept returning to.
I first became interested in research while working in advertising in Manhattan. In retrospect, that interest wasn't new: I grew up in rural Georgia in a family that was half Egyptian Jewish and half Scottish-Irish, in a place where most people around me were white and Baptist, and I got used to noticing social cues and figuring out what people expected. That interest eventually took me to a PhD in sociology at the University of Virginia, a postdoc at the University of Sydney Business School, and work in program evaluation in Sacramento.
My book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us (University of California Press), grew out of years of research on workplace relationships and the role they play in shaping people's experiences at work. I now bring that research to stages and organizations as a speaker and consultant, helping people understand dynamics at work that are often easy to feel but harder to name.
How work gained a monopoly on Americans' trust, and what it's costing us.
Over fifty years, Americans appear to have lost trust in nearly everything: churches, Congress, the press, neighbors, even family. Surveys suggest workplace relationships are the exception. Most of us still trust our managers and coworkers, and more than any other institution, a job is where we go to prove our worth, meet our obligations, and find fulfillment and belonging. That's a dangerous monopoly of trust, especially when employers themselves are most loyal to shareholders. This talk is about how we got here, what it's costing our democracy, and what it would take to turn that trust into meaningful solidarity and stop living on a prayer.
Best for: Public-ideas festivals, cultural institutes, TED-style stages, commencements, and conferences.
What your AI will learn from you, and how to keep it from learning the wrong things.
An AI system learns from your organization's records: who got promoted, who got flagged, who got the benefit of the doubt. Those records are a history of your habits, including the ones nobody has looked at closely. So a new system doesn't just automate your decisions. It automates the reasons behind them, and once it does, those reasons are harder to see and harder to argue with. In the workplaces I studied, the habits that did the most damage were the ones everyone had stopped noticing. This talk is for leaders deciding how to bring AI in. It covers what to fix before you build, what not to lose, what not to encode, and one test to run on any system before it goes live.
Best for: Leadership teams and HR leaders planning an AI rollout, boards, executive education programs, technology and product conferences.
Trust doesn't live inside people. It lives between them, in the moments that test it.
Most advice about trust at work is aimed at individuals: be more trustworthy, set boundaries, say no. But trust is something that happens between people, and the situation you're in shapes how it goes. This talk looks at three situations that test trust in almost every workplace: the crisis, when everyone is asked to give more; the favor, when a manager offers protection off the books; and the hangout, when work friendships blur into evaluation. For each one, I show where people get caught and offer a few practical moves for handling it, including what's safe to accept on a handshake and what should always be in writing.
Best for: Early-career and emerging-leader programs, women's leadership and ERG events, staff development days, professional associations.
Your most dependable people are your least visible risk.
The week after a good soldier leaves is when most organizations find out what they were doing: the translating, the smoothing over, the absorbing of what others couldn't, none of it in the job description. Every workplace I studied ran on a few people like this, and leaders always knew who they were. What almost no one had mapped was what those people were carrying. This talk gives the people carrying the load, and the people who depend on them, three questions for mapping it before a resignation does.
Best for: Leadership and HR teams, professional associations, all-hands where managers and staff sit together.
To write Trust Fall, I embedded inside four workplaces: I waited tables at a restaurant, sat at the hot desk of a tech start-up, shadowed teams at a marketing agency, and sat in airport parking lots with ride-hail drivers. In every one of them, the org chart told one story and the room told another. The real safety net was informal: a manager bending a rule as a favor, a coworker covering for someone without being asked. Those arrangements were generous — and they were fragile, because they left when the person did. That is the story I keep telling from the stage: the difference between a favor and a structure, and what it costs an organization to confuse the two.
For years, I was the kind of worker who gave everything to the job: long days, late nights, weekends, willing to travel, even move. I tried to be exactly what a manager would want: useful, competent, always available. I didn't really expect work to love me back, but some part of me hoped it would. The mismatch between how much work could ask of me and how little I could ask of it became a question I kept returning to.
I first became interested in research while working in advertising in Manhattan. In retrospect, that interest wasn't new: I grew up in rural Georgia in a family that was half Egyptian Jewish and half Scottish-Irish, in a place where most people around me were white and Baptist, and I got used to noticing social cues and figuring out what people expected. That interest eventually took me to a PhD in sociology at the University of Virginia, a postdoc at the University of Sydney Business School, and work in program evaluation in Sacramento.
My book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us (University of California Press), grew out of years of research on workplace relationships and the role they play in shaping people's experiences at work. I now bring that research to stages and organizations as a speaker and consultant, helping people understand dynamics at work that are often easy to feel but harder to name.
How work gained a monopoly on Americans' trust, and what it's costing us.
Over fifty years, Americans appear to have lost trust in nearly everything: churches, Congress, the press, neighbors, even family. Surveys suggest workplace relationships are the exception. Most of us still trust our managers and coworkers, and more than any other institution, a job is where we go to prove our worth, meet our obligations, and find fulfillment and belonging. That's a dangerous monopoly of trust, especially when employers themselves are most loyal to shareholders. This talk is about how we got here, what it's costing our democracy, and what it would take to turn that trust into meaningful solidarity and stop living on a prayer.
Best for: Public-ideas festivals, cultural institutes, TED-style stages, commencements, and conferences.
What your AI will learn from you, and how to keep it from learning the wrong things.
An AI system learns from your organization's records: who got promoted, who got flagged, who got the benefit of the doubt. Those records are a history of your habits, including the ones nobody has looked at closely. So a new system doesn't just automate your decisions. It automates the reasons behind them, and once it does, those reasons are harder to see and harder to argue with. In the workplaces I studied, the habits that did the most damage were the ones everyone had stopped noticing. This talk is for leaders deciding how to bring AI in. It covers what to fix before you build, what not to lose, what not to encode, and one test to run on any system before it goes live.
Best for: Leadership teams and HR leaders planning an AI rollout, boards, executive education programs, technology and product conferences.
Trust doesn't live inside people. It lives between them, in the moments that test it.
Most advice about trust at work is aimed at individuals: be more trustworthy, set boundaries, say no. But trust is something that happens between people, and the situation you're in shapes how it goes. This talk looks at three situations that test trust in almost every workplace: the crisis, when everyone is asked to give more; the favor, when a manager offers protection off the books; and the hangout, when work friendships blur into evaluation. For each one, I show where people get caught and offer a few practical moves for handling it, including what's safe to accept on a handshake and what should always be in writing.
Best for: Early-career and emerging-leader programs, women's leadership and ERG events, staff development days, professional associations.
Your most dependable people are your least visible risk.
The week after a good soldier leaves is when most organizations find out what they were doing: the translating, the smoothing over, the absorbing of what others couldn't, none of it in the job description. Every workplace I studied ran on a few people like this, and leaders always knew who they were. What almost no one had mapped was what those people were carrying. This talk gives the people carrying the load, and the people who depend on them, three questions for mapping it before a resignation does.
Best for: Leadership and HR teams, professional associations, all-hands where managers and staff sit together.
