WorldGaming Executive Think Tank: Trust Under Pressure: Navigating M&A

M&As. Restructures. Leadership shakeups. In gaming, change isn’t the exception, it’s the operating system. Here’s what most leaders get wrong: they think transparency means telling people everything, or nothing. Neither works. One shakes the ground people walk on, the other erodes trust completely.

In this interactive session, Saroca CEO Emily Haruko unpacks how to powerfully lead through change, build and sustain trust and will answer the real question every leader faces during a transition: how much do you share, when, and why. You’ll walk through the psychology of trust during uncertainty, the impact of over and under-communication on team performance, and practical frameworks for making the transparency call in real time, even when you don’t have all the answers yourself.

Bring your questions. Bring your hardest scenario. This one’s built for the room.

Who it’s for: Executives and leaders navigating (or bracing for) organizational change.

What they’ll walk away with:

1) A framework for making the transparency call. A practical way to decide how much to share, when, and why.

2) An understanding of how change actually lands on teams. The psychology of what happens to trust and performance when communication is mismanaged during M&As or restructures.

3) Language for moments when you don’t have answers. Real scripts and approaches for leading through ambiguity honestly, without pretending you have certainty you lack.

Format: Live, interactive. Come ready to participate.

Emily’s bio:

Emily Haruko is the founder and CEO of Saroca, a transformational coaching and leadership development firm serving iGaming, cybersecurity, healthcare, and SaaS. With 17+ years of iGaming experience and a coaching lineage rooted in ontology-based work, she leads a network of 55+ coaches worldwide, working as an executive coach, speaker, facilitator, and panel moderator.

Emily has spent recent years inside the messiest parts of change: M&As, restructures, leadership transitions, and the trust that gets tested when the ground shifts underneath a team. That experience shapes her upcoming session for World Gaming Executive, Trust Under Pressure: Navigating M&A, where she’ll unpack how leaders decide what to share, when, and why, and what that decision does to the people counting on them.

An entrepreneur since incorporating her first business at 19, Emily brings a founder’s instinct for navigating uncertainty to every room she leads.