Roger Delves
Senior leaders are asked to act decisively in conditions they do not fully understand, with teams who can see through performance. The credibility gap between the values an organisation prints and the behaviour leaders demonstrate under pressure is now its single biggest engagement risk. Closing that gap is not a communications problem; it is a leadership development problem.
Roger Delves is Professor of Leadership Practice at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, helping senior leaders develop the authenticity, emotional intelligence and judgement that hold up under pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Roger Delves
- Two decades inside one of Europe’s most established executive education faculties, teaching senior leaders in London, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and across Europe.
- Co-author of The Top 50 Management Dilemmas (Pearson) and co-editor of Inspiring Leadership (Bloomsbury), so his content is tested against the everyday tensions managers actually face, not theoretical models.
- A practitioner background that runs through advertising board directorship and founding Ireland’s first international advertising agency. Leadership content built from operator experience, not academic distance.
- Multiple-time Hult Professor of the Year, voted by MBA and EMBA cohorts. He earns the trust of the audiences senior buyers want him in front of.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Leadership Practice and Dean of Qualifications, Hult Ashridge Executive Education
- Director of the Ashridge MBA and Ashridge Masters in Management
- Co-author, The Top 50 Management Dilemmas (Pearson, 2013) with Sona Sherratt
- Co-editor, Inspiring Leadership: Becoming a Dynamic and Engaging Leader (Bloomsbury, 2017) with Dr Kerrie Fleming
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; MA, English, St Catherine’s College, Oxford
- Multiple-time Hult Professor of the Year, voted by MBA and EMBA students
Biography
Most leadership content tells senior leaders what good looks like. Very little of it survives contact with a fatigued team, a contested decision, or a quarter when the strategy is not landing. Delves’s teaching is built for that gap. His subject matter is the practical content of authenticity, emotional intelligence and integrity when leaders are under real pressure, not the language of values when conditions are calm.
That perspective comes from a hybrid career. He spent his early years in advertising, reaching UK board director at DMB&B, then founded Ireland’s first international advertising agency, serving Mars Masterfoods and Procter & Gamble. He moved into executive education through Cranfield’s Centre for Customised Executive Education before joining Ashridge, where he is now Professor of Leadership Practice and Dean of Qualifications across the MBA and Masters in Management.
The published work reflects the same orientation. The Top 50 Management Dilemmas, co-authored with Sona Sherratt for Pearson, takes the recurring tensions managers describe in the room and works through them as decisions rather than concepts. Inspiring Leadership, co-edited with Dr Kerrie Fleming for Bloomsbury, brings together faculty perspectives on what actually develops leaders rather than what merely describes them. He has been voted Hult Professor of the Year by MBA and EMBA students on multiple occasions, and teaches across London, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Europe.
What organisations get from him is a serious examination of how leaders make defensible decisions when the data is incomplete and the audience is watching. He treats authenticity as a discipline, not a slogan, and he is comfortable saying so in front of senior cohorts who have heard most of it before.
Key speaking topics
- Authentic leadership
- Emotional intelligence in senior leadership
- Leadership decision-making under pressure
- Transformational leadership and change
- Values, ethics and integrity in management
- Team engagement and follower psychology
- Leadership in uncertain conditions
Ideal for
- Senior leadership programmes for executive committees, divisional MDs, and high-potential cohorts
- Heads of leadership development and CLOs designing flagship leader interventions
- CHROs and CPOs commissioning content for engagement and culture programmes
- MBA, EMBA and partner cohorts within corporate universities
Audience outcomes
- A sharper read on where their own leadership credibility comes from, and where it leaks
- Working language for emotional intelligence that is usable in a leadership team, not a workshop
- Specific tests for whether a decision is authentic or merely consistent
- A diagnostic for the everyday management dilemmas that erode trust if handled badly
- Confidence to lead through ambiguity without retreating into process