Chris Roebuck
Most large organisations are sitting on ten percent of performance they never access. The cause is not strategy, technology, or cost base. It is that senior leaders, under pressure of time and volume, default to managing activity rather than building the conditions in which people give their best.
Chris Roebuck is the leadership thinker who introduced entrepreneurial leadership into the corporate world at UBS, and helps senior leaders unlock the hidden performance buried inside their organisations.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck
- He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale.
- He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition.
- He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in.
- HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list.
Biography highlights
- Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm
- Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes)
- Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list
- Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall
- Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011)
- Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera
Biography
UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world.
That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021.
The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame.
The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change
- Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations
- Senior team behaviour and executive performance
- Talent identification and leadership pipelines
- Employee engagement as an organisational lever
- Leadership in conditions of uncertainty
- Human leadership in the AI era
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change
- CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously
- Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform
- Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions
Audience outcomes
- A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it
- The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector
- A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development
- A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100
Talks
A working session on how senior leaders generate the hidden ten percent of performance that most organisations leave on the table, using behaviours proven at UBS and inside the NHS.
Key takeaways:
- What actually engages people to give their best, and what most leaders get wrong about it
- How to use insights from psychology and neuroscience to raise the quality of day-to-day leadership decisions
- A simple set of actions senior leaders can take immediately to shift the performance of the teams they run
The original corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership, taught by the person who built it at UBS, adapted for leaders running businesses through volatile markets.
Key takeaways:
- How to scan the environment and identify opportunities that competitors are missing
- How to move a senior team from treating uncertainty as threat to treating it as an operating advantage
- How to build team flexibility so that strategy can be redirected without losing momentum
A senior-leader briefing on running transformation and integration programmes without losing the organisation underneath, drawn from UBS, London Underground, and the NHS.
Key takeaways:
- How to identify the changes that will actually generate return, and ignore the ones that will not
- How to set a vision for change that the top 200 will carry into their own teams
- How to anticipate and absorb the setbacks that every major transformation generates
How organisations build a leadership pipeline that is strong enough to carry the next decade of strategy, based on the national talent system Roebuck helped design for the NHS.
Key takeaways:
- Why a talent system is a litmus test for the rest of the organisation’s leadership
- The specific roles of the C-suite, HR, and line leaders in growing high performers
- Simple day-to-day practices that turn a department into a talent generator
Videos
Testimonials
Books
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| South America | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US West Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |