Emotional Intelligence

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

Why organisations work with Rachel Stone A coach’s diagnostic eye rather than a speaker’s set piece. She reads what is actually happening between a leader and their team and names it, then offers next steps the leader can act on the same week. Direct experience of the operator’s chair. Commercial buying, retail management at Safeways PLC, classroom teaching and senior college leadership, before twelve years coaching 130-plus companies. The advice lands because it is grounded in those rooms. A clear behavioural model. The “breathe life into people” frame and the Kindness Economy (People, Planet, Profit) give leaders a vocabulary for what trust-based leadership looks like day to day. Tools that travel back to the workplace. ICQ Global DISC and Growth Zone diagnostics give audiences something concrete to use with their own teams, not just a takeaway feeling. Biography highlights Founder of Rachel Stone Coaching Ltd, established 2012. Author of “Spend Time With Me: A Story to Inspire Transformational Leaders” (2024), foreword by Professor Damian Hughes. Accredited ICQ Global DISC Profile and Growth Zone Practitioner. Qualified business coach via The Coaching Academy. Coached 130-plus companies and 250-plus leaders across construction, retail, education, manufacturing and professional services. Earlier career: commercial buyer in electronics, retail manager at Safeways PLC, Business Studies teacher and senior college manager. Biography Most managers are promoted for being good at the job they used to do. The job they now have is different, and the gap between the two is where engagement breaks, conflict festers and culture quietly drifts. Stone built her practice around closing that gap. She works with business owners and senior teams on the small behavioural shifts that change how a team performs, not on abstract leadership theory. Her route into coaching was unusual. After commercial buying in electronics and retail management at Safeways PLC, she retrained as a Business Studies teacher, took on senior college management, and in 2012 left to start her own coaching business. Twelve years later the client list runs to more than 130 companies across construction, retail, education and manufacturing, with over 250 individual leaders coached. The work spans board-level transformation, embedding coaching cultures, and middle-management development. The intellectual frame is set out in her 2024 book “Spend Time With Me: A Story to Inspire Transformational Leaders”, with a foreword by Professor Damian Hughes of the High Performance podcast. The book pairs her own story with the principles she teaches: trust as a leadership currency, the “Kindness Economy” of People, Planet and Profit, and the idea that leaders “breathe life into people” rather than extract performance from them. Audiences leave with usable language and a diagnostic. ICQ Global DISC and Growth Zone tools give leaders a way to read their own behaviour and their team’s. The delivery is pacey and pragmatic; the focus is on what a leader can do differently on Monday morning. Key speaking topics Transformational leadership Coaching cultures and coaching as a leadership skill Trust and team performance Communication and conflict in teams Employee engagement and burnout Resilience and self-management for leaders The Kindness Economy: People, Planet, Profit Workplace culture in hybrid and growing businesses Ideal for Business owners and founder-CEOs scaling beyond a hands-on operating model. Senior leadership teams in mid-market and SME organisations who need a behavioural reset, not a strategy day. HR and L&D leads commissioning manager development or embedding a coaching culture. Leadership groups in sectors that promote technically (construction, manufacturing, professional services, education). Audience outcomes A clearer read on how their own behaviour shapes their team’s engagement and output. Practical coaching techniques managers can use in one-to-ones and team conversations from the next working day. A shared vocabulary for trust, conflict and culture that survives beyond the session. Tools to spot early signs of burnout and disengagement before they cost the business people. A working definition of transformational leadership grounded in behaviour, not theory.

Why organisations work with Rachel DeAlto She brings a working framework for relatability that translates a soft concept into specific leader behaviours, sourced from her own research and applied across Fortune 500, government and nonprofit settings. Her dual training in law and psychology gives her credibility with both legal-minded executives and people-function leaders, two audiences that often talk past each other on culture work. As Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, she works inside a business whose product is human connection at scale, which gives her examples that land with commercial audiences rather than HR-only ones. She holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation and has worked across more than 200 national media platforms, so the delivery is polished without sliding into performance. The work is built for multigenerational teams specifically, which is where most leadership programmes fail in practice. Biography highlights Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, parent company of Match.com, Tinder and Hinge. Author of The Relatable Leader and relatable, both published by Simon & Schuster. TEDx speaker; Being Authentic in a Filtered World featured on TED.com. Television expert on Lifetime’s Married at First Sight and TLC’s Kate+Date. Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association. JD, Seton Hall University; MA in Psychology, Arizona State University; BA in Communications, Syracuse University. Biography Most organisational culture problems present as engagement problems first. People stop volunteering ideas, hand-offs get sloppy, turnover ticks up in the wrong roles. The diagnosis is usually slower than the decline. Rachel DeAlto’s argument is that what looks like disengagement is often a relational deficit at the leader level, and that the deficit is fixable with specific skills rather than slogans. Her two books, relatable and The Relatable Leader, both published by Simon & Schuster, build the case. The first sets out how people connect with each other under conditions of distraction, filtering and fatigue. The second turns the argument toward leadership and the practical question of how a senior manager builds trust quickly across a workforce that spans five generations and several working modes. DeAlto’s background is unusual for the topic. She trained as an attorney at Seton Hall, holds a master’s in psychology from Arizona State, and now serves as Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, where connection is the commercial product. That combination shapes the work. She speaks the language of executives, draws on psychological research rather than anecdote, and tests her frameworks against a business whose users vote on connection every day. The audience is corporate, but the substance is granular. Whitepapers on the multigenerational workforce, signature programmes on customer experience and sales relatability, and a Certified Speaking Professional designation that signals a craft-level investment in delivery. The closing claim is not that culture is everything. It is that culture is built from countable leader behaviours, and those behaviours can be taught. Key speaking topics Relatability and human connection Leadership and team performance Multigenerational workforce dynamics Communication and emotional intelligence Customer experience and relatable sales Organisational culture and engagement Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers building engagement and retention strategy Senior leaders managing newly hybrid or distributed teams Sales and customer experience leaders rebuilding trust in long-cycle buyer relationships Leadership development teams designing programmes for multigenerational workforces Audience outcomes A vocabulary and a framework for relatability that turns a soft concept into observable leader behaviours A clearer view of where engagement breaks down inside multigenerational teams and what to do about it Specific tactics for building trust at speed in hybrid and high-turnover environments A shift in how senior leaders think about communication, from broadcast to connection

Why organisations work with Steve Gutzler Translates emotional intelligence research into specific behaviours senior leaders can run inside high-stakes meetings, escalations, and team conversations. Coaches at the operator level. His client list (Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, Spotify, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, U.S. Department of Commerce) is built around enterprise leadership development, not after-dinner motivation. Author of Splash and co-author of Lead With No Fear, two books that give a sponsor team a defensible body of work to point to when justifying the investment internally. Bring a coaching, not lecturing, posture into the room. Useful when the audience is senior enough to resent generic frameworks and wants to leave with something they will actually use on Monday. Biography highlights President of Leadership Quest, a leadership development and executive coaching firm. Author of Splash: The Ten Remarkable Traits to Build Momentum in Life and Leadership. Co-author of Lead With No Fear with Mike Acker, a 90-day leader-shift workbook with a companion edition. Creator of the Life and Leadership Journal, a 52-week guided self-reflection tool used in his coaching engagements. Keynote and coaching client roster includes Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, Spotify, Starbucks, Seattle Seahawks, Ritz-Carlton, Starwood Hotels, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Marriott, U.S. Department of Commerce. Recent keynote platforms include the 2024 BNI Global Convention and the ECHL 2024 league meetings. Biography Most leadership programmes still teach influence as an intellectual problem. The hard part for senior leaders is rarely the analysis. It is the half-second after a difficult question, the tone of the next email, the look on the face when the quarterly numbers slip. Emotional intelligence is the discipline that decides those moments, and it is the discipline most leadership curricula skip. Leadership Quest, the firm Gutzler runs, exists to close that gap. The work draws on neuroscience-grounded emotional intelligence research and translates it into observable behaviour for executives operating under pressure. It is built for leaders who are already capable on paper and need the next layer of self-management, presence, and team effect. His writing reinforces the same argument. Splash sets out the everyday leadership traits that compound into team momentum. Lead With No Fear, co-authored with Mike Acker, walks leaders through a structured 90-day shift away from worry, insecurity, and self-doubt toward clarity and confidence. Both books are practical rather than theoretical, and both are used as backbone material in his coaching engagements. The client roster reads as a working list of organisations that buy leadership development seriously: Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, Spotify, Starbucks, the Ritz-Carlton group, the Seattle Seahawks, the U.S. Department of Commerce. The pattern across them is consistent. They are buying a coach who can stand in front of a senior audience, name what is actually difficult about leadership, and leave the room with leaders behaving differently the same week. Key speaking topics Emotional intelligence for senior leaders Executive presence and influence Leadership performance under pressure Human-centered leadership High-performance teams Stress, composure and emotional agility Personal leadership and accountability Ideal for Heads of leadership development and L&D sponsors building EI into senior leadership curricula. CHROs and Chief People Officers running executive offsites and high-potential programmes. Business unit leaders and CEOs whose senior teams are technically strong but stretched on composure, presence, and team effect. Sales, customer-facing and front-line leadership populations where interaction quality drives commercial outcomes. Audience outcomes A working definition of emotional intelligence as a performance variable, with named behaviours that leaders can identify in themselves and their teams. Specific habits for managing reactivity, tone and presence in high-stakes interactions. A clearer view of how stress and self-management show up in team output, retention and trust. Language to use with direct reports about emotional regulation without making it feel like therapy. A simple structure (drawn from Splash and Lead With No Fear) for sustaining the change after the keynote.

Why organisations work with Tom Flatau He brings formal NeuroLeadership Institute accreditation into client rooms, so the brain science behind his coaching is grounded in a recognised body of research rather than self-styled commentary. His firm’s programmes are quality-assured by the Institute of Leadership and Management, which gives L and D buyers a credentialed delivery standard alongside the keynote. Two decades of repeat work with HSBC, Unilever, Siemens, Louis Vuitton, Emirates and the BBC means the material has been pressure-tested across regulated finance, consumer goods, engineering, luxury retail and broadcast. He translates neuroplasticity, threat response and bias research into specific leadership practice on negotiation, change communication and team collaboration, so audiences leave with mechanism, not metaphor. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Teamworking International, with custom leadership programmes quality-assured by the Institute of Leadership and Management. Accredited brain and behaviour specialist trained by the NeuroLeadership Institute. Master’s in Business Analysis and Systems Design; Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management. Long-standing client roster including HSBC, Unilever, Siemens, Louis Vuitton, Emirates, American Express, Qatar Airways, British American Tobacco and the BBC. Conference speaker for bodies including the Chartered Institute of Building and the Institute of Directors. Signature keynote portfolio covering the inner game of leadership, the neuroscience of unconscious bias, leading through change, team collaboration, sales mastery and black belt negotiation. Biography Most behaviour change in organisations fails because it stops at the conscious mind. Leaders are taught new frameworks and new vocabulary, then return to the same threat responses, biases and habits the moment a quarter goes sideways. Tom Flatau built Teamworking International around a different premise: that leadership behaviour shifts when the brain underneath it shifts. The credentials matter here. Flatau is an accredited brain and behaviour specialist trained by the NeuroLeadership Institute, holds a Master’s in Business Analysis and Systems Design, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management. His firm’s programmes are quality-assured by the ILM, which is unusual in a market crowded with self-styled neuroscience commentators. For more than two decades, the work has been delivered into HSBC, Unilever, Siemens, Louis Vuitton, Emirates, American Express, Qatar Airways, British American Tobacco and the BBC. Across regulated banking, consumer goods, engineering, luxury and broadcast, the same patterns surface: leaders making decisions under threat, teams misreading each other’s intent, salespeople reverting to scripts. His material translates the relevant brain research into practice for each. His keynote portfolio sits along that line. “The inner game of leadership” examines the subconscious behaviours that erode senior credibility. “The neuroscience of unconscious bias” treats bias as a wiring problem with intervention points, not a values lecture. “Black belt negotiation” and “Sales mastery: hello science, goodbye myths” apply the same lens to deal-making. The throughline is mechanism: what is happening in the brain, and what to do about it. Key speaking topics Applied neuroscience for leadership Neuroscience of unconscious bias Leading through change Executive coaching and the inner game of leadership Mindset and team collaboration Negotiation and influence Sales behaviour and buyer psychology Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and senior leadership teams are responsible for behaviour change at the top of the organisation CHROs, L and D directors and heads of leadership development, designing accredited leadership pipelines Sales and commercial leadership teams looking to upgrade negotiation and buyer engagement Diversity and inclusion leads who want a brain-science framing of bias rather than a values framing Audience outcomes A working understanding of how stress, threat and reward responses shape leadership decisions in real time Specific mechanisms for interrupting unconscious bias in hiring, promotion and day-to-day team interactions Practical communication moves for leading people through change without losing trust Sharper read on the neuroscience of negotiation and how buyer brains actually respond to influence attempts

Why organisations work with Clive Branson He gives wellbeing and safety teams something internal communications cannot produce: an unsentimental first-person account of suicidal crisis and psychiatric admission, delivered by someone who spent seventeen years on the employer side of workplace duty-of-care conversations. His professional background in Ministry of Defence industrial relations means he speaks the language of HR, health and safety, and line managers rather than clinical or motivational language. He carries three concurrent diagnoses, Motor Neurone Disease, Stage Two prostate cancer, and acute anxiety, and talks about functioning through them rather than recovering from them. Audiences dealing with long-term illness in colleagues recognise the reality he describes. He has been trusted inside HM Prison Service settings as well as corporate audiences such as Network Rail, Ecolab and Guy Carpenter, which tells a booker he holds a room across very different registers. Biography highlights Three years Royal Air Force service, followed by seventeen years in UK Ministry of Defence Industrial Relations. Founded and ran a health and safety consultancy before health challenges forced him to step back. Diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease in late 2017 and subsequently with Stage Two prostate cancer. Seven-week inpatient admission across two psychiatric hospitals for acute anxiety and suicidal ideation. Featured speaker at CarFest in 2022 and 2023. Delivers talks voluntarily inside HM Prison Service and to corporate audiences including Network Rail, Ecolab, Intermediate Capital Group, Guy Carpenter and Tindall Riley. Biography Most corporate mental health content is written by people who have read the research. Branson sat on the other side of the table for nearly two decades. In Ministry of Defence industrial relations he handled the employer-side conversations about employment law, occupational health and the human condition at work, which is to say he knew the policy apparatus before he needed any of it. In late 2017 he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. A Stage Two prostate cancer diagnosis followed. Surgery was ruled out because of the MND. Acute anxiety took over, and he was admitted to two psychiatric hospitals for a combined seven weeks after considering suicide. He lost his father, father-in-law and mother in the same stretch of years. What makes the talk useful to organisations is the combination of that experience with his prior role. He can describe, from the inside, what a line manager’s words actually landed as; why disclosure felt impossible; what policy language reads like to someone in crisis. He is not a clinician and does not claim to be. He is the employee that wellbeing policies are written for, who once wrote them. He works across corporate audiences including Network Rail, Ecolab, Intermediate Capital Group and Guy Carpenter, and volunteers inside HM Prison Service. He was a featured speaker at CarFest in 2022 and 2023 and has discussed resilience on BBC Radio Shropshire. The register adjusts to the room; the underlying account does not soften. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health Resilience under sustained adversity Suicide awareness and crisis disclosure Living and working with long-term illness Line manager communication in duty-of-care conversations Men’s mental health Grief and bereavement at work Ideal for CHROs, wellbeing leads and health and safety directors shaping workforce mental health programmes Line manager and people manager development audiences Employee resource groups focused on men’s health, long-term illness or cancer Organisations marking World Mental Health Day, Men’s Health Week or Mental Health Awareness Week with an internal keynote Audience outcomes A first-person account of what a suicidal crisis and psychiatric admission actually look like, from someone who once wrote workplace policy Specific language cues for line managers, on what helps and what closes a conversation down A reframing of vulnerability at work as something to surface rather than manage around Recognition of how long-term diagnosis reshapes an employee’s relationship with work, useful to colleagues and managers alike

Why organisations work with Emma Reed Turrell She brings the consulting room into the boardroom. The frameworks she uses with audiences are the same ones she works with in private clinical practice, not a borrowed model dressed up for corporate slides. Two trade-published books with named theses, Please Yourself (HarperCollins) on people-pleasing and What Am I Missing? (Penguin) on four blind-spot profiles, give her content a recognisable structure that audiences can act on after the session. Her four-blind-spot typology (The Gladiator, The Bridge, The Hustler, The Rock) gives teams a shared, non-judgemental language for the friction that usually goes unnamed in 1:1s and team reviews. Co-hosting Best Friend Therapy with Elizabeth Day, now in its seventh season, has trained her to translate clinical material into conversation that lands with non-specialist audiences without losing precision. MBACP-accredited practitioner status means employers can route sensitive content (boundaries, self-worth, conflict avoidance) through a clinician on the register, not a motivational speaker working in adjacent territory. Biography highlights Author of Please Yourself: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Transform the Way You Live, HarperCollins. Author of What Am I Missing? Discover the Four Blind Spots That Are Holding You Back, Penguin. Co-host of Best Friend Therapy podcast with Elizabeth Day, in its seventh season. MBACP-accredited psychotherapist running a private practice (The Therapy Loft). English graduate of Queens’ College, Cambridge; ten years in commercial roles before retraining. Corporate engagements named on her bureau profiles include Diageo, Sky, AstraZeneca, ClearScore, Evelyn Partners, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Biography The most common complaints inside large organisations, people who cannot say no, leaders who cannot ask for help, talented staff who under-claim their work, sit downstream of the same psychological patterns that fill a therapist’s caseload. Emma Reed Turrell has spent fifteen years working with those patterns clinically, and her speaking is built directly on what she sees in the consulting room. She read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, spent a decade in commercial roles, then retrained as a psychotherapist and became MBACP-accredited. She now runs a private practice, The Therapy Loft, alongside her writing and speaking. The two books, Please Yourself with HarperCollins on the structure of people-pleasing, and What Am I Missing? with Penguin on four named blind-spot profiles, are the source material for her keynote content. Her co-hosted podcast with Elizabeth Day, Best Friend Therapy, now in its seventh season, has built her a reach beyond the clinical audience and trained her to make therapeutic ideas usable in everyday work conversations. The result is a speaker who can hold a non-specialist audience for an hour on people-pleasing, imposter syndrome, or unconscious blind spots, and leave them with a vocabulary they can take back into their team. Organisations that have booked her include Diageo, Sky, AstraZeneca, ClearScore, Evelyn Partners, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, employers for whom employee wellbeing and communication are not soft topics but live retention and productivity issues. Key speaking topics People-pleasing and workplace boundaries Imposter syndrome in high-performing teams Psychological blind spots and self-awareness Self-worth and confidence at work Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Non-conflict communication Resilience and stress management Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent, and L&D leads designing wellbeing and communication programmes for the wider workforce. Women’s networks and emerging-leader cohorts wrestling with imposter syndrome and self-worth. Senior teams that want a shared language for the friction patterns showing up in 1:1s and reviews. Employee conferences and all-hands events where wellbeing content needs clinical weight rather than motivational gloss. Audience outcomes A named vocabulary for the people-pleasing, imposter, and blind-spot patterns that shape day-to-day work. Specific tools for setting boundaries and managing self-worth that audiences can use the following week. Recognition of which of the four blind-spot profiles (Gladiator, Bridge, Hustler, Rock) is most active in their own behaviour. Practical anxiety-management techniques drawn from her clinical practice, including the worry-box approach. Permission to treat wellbeing as a serious operational topic, not a soft benefit.

Why organisations work with Daisy Buchanan A working novelist and journalist who teaches creative practice as a wellbeing discipline, not a soft skill. Her DK title Read Yourself Happy makes the case that reading is anxiety management with evidence, not a metaphor. Founder of the Creative Confidence Clinic and a tutor for Arvon, the UK creative writing charity. Her sessions on imposter syndrome and creative risk are built on a teaching practice, not a single keynote. Host of the literature podcast You’re Booked, with hundreds of long-form author interviews. She brings a tested craft of asking good questions, which transfers directly into panel hosting, internal town halls and leadership Q and A formats. Catalogue of four Sphere novels and three non-fiction books across DK, Headline and Hachette. The credibility is in the working output, not the speaker reel. Broadcast fluency across Woman’s Hour, the Today programme, This Morning and Good Morning Britain. Audiences get a speaker who can hold a room, an interviewee and a live moment with the same control. Biography highlights Author of four novels published by Sphere (Little, Brown): Insatiable, Careering, Limelight and Pity Party. Insatiable was longlisted for the CWIP prize. Author of three non-fiction books: How To Be A Grown Up, The Sisterhood, and Read Yourself Happy (DK, 2025), on reading as a tool for anxiety. Host of the You’re Booked podcast, interviewing authors on their reading lives. Founder of the Creative Confidence Clinic, a writing community on Substack, and creator of the Write Like A Reader course. Tutor for the Arvon Foundation. Journalism in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, Grazia (former “Dear Daisy” agony aunt), Marie Claire and The Pool. Broadcast credits include Woman’s Hour, Today, A Good Read, This Morning and Good Morning Britain. Guest-presented Booker Prize coverage for BBC News. Biography Wellbeing programmes have multiplied inside organisations over the past decade, and so has the language of psychological safety. Yet many leaders still find their teams cautious, distracted and reluctant to bring a half-formed idea into the room. The missing piece is often the daily practice of imagination, attention and honest conversation, which used to happen on the page and in long forms of reading. Buchanan’s books take this on directly. Read Yourself Happy, published by DK in 2025, argues that the right book habit is a clinically meaningful intervention in anxiety. Her novels with Sphere, including Insatiable, Careering (adapted by BBC Radio 4) and Limelight, examine ambition, money and self-worth in working women’s lives. Her non-fiction includes The Sisterhood and How To Be A Grown Up, both written for readers navigating early career and adult identity. The teaching grew out of the writing. She founded the Creative Confidence Clinic on Substack, tutors for the Arvon Foundation and hosts You’re Booked, a long-running literature podcast in which she conducts the kind of careful, generous author interview that is now uncommon in mainstream culture. The discipline of asking good questions and listening to the answer sits underneath her workplace sessions on imposter syndrome, creative risk and reading for wellbeing. For organisations, the value is in the combination of a working journalist’s discipline, a novelist’s specificity about emotional life, and a broadcaster’s room presence. Audiences leave able to name what they were anxious about, with a small number of usable habits for attention and creative risk. Her broadcast work, from the Today programme to guest-presenting Booker Prize coverage for BBC News, also makes her a credible host for internal events where the speaker needs to land a difficult conversation, not deliver a slide deck. Key speaking topics Reading and book habits as a tool for anxiety and mental health Creative confidence and imposter syndrome at work Asking better questions in leadership and team conversations Storytelling and narrative craft for business communication Women, ambition and the working life Event hosting, panel moderation and author-in-conversation formats Ideal for People, culture and wellbeing leaders looking for a wellbeing voice that is literary and specific rather than clinical or generic Internal communications and L&D teams running sessions on creative confidence, imposter syndrome or storytelling Conference organisers needing a credible host or moderator for an author-in-conversation or fireside format Women’s networks, ERGs and book clubs inside organisations Audience outcomes A working definition of creative confidence that they can practise without leaving their job A small set of reading and attention habits with a defensible link to anxiety reduction Sharper questions to take into one-to-ones, town halls and difficult team conversations Permission to take creative risk in writing, presenting and contributing in meetings A more honest sense of the gap between performed confidence and the real thing

Why organisations work with Nigel Taberner His “Level 2 listening” framework – drawn from 10 years of operational hostage negotiation, not from theory – gives leaders a named, structured method for building trust and influencing outcomes when positional power and concessions are unavailable. The “negotiating when you have nothing to give” argument maps directly to the situations most commercial and leadership teams actually face: a resistant enterprise client, a difficult board conversation, a supplier who holds all the terms. An operational record of more than 130 high-risk incidents – armed sieges, suicide interventions, and international kidnap situations – resolved without loss of life at any incident he attended gives his principles a level of practical validation that is genuinely rare. He contributed to the national training programmes that produced negotiators for forces in the UK, Finland, Australia, and the FBI, meaning the frameworks he teaches have been tested and refined across different cultures and high-stakes operational contexts. His interactive masterclasses give leadership and sales teams direct practice in the specific listening and influence techniques – not a theory of why they work, but structured repetition of actually applying them. Biography highlights 30-year career with Greater Manchester Police, rising from Police Constable in Moss Side to Detective Inspector 10 years as an operational hostage negotiator, attending more than 130 armed sieges, suicide interventions, and international kidnap situations States that no incident he attended ended in loss of life Detective Inspector for counter-terrorism policing operations at Manchester Airport and Liverpool John Lennon Airport Member of the national negotiator training team responsible for programmes delivered in the UK, Finland, Australia, and the FBI Founder and Managing Director of Level2Communications Featured speaker at AICPA and CIMA events on commercial negotiation and leadership communication Biography Nigel Taberner joined Greater Manchester Police as a constable in Moss Side in the early 1990s. Three decades later, he retired as a Detective Inspector, having led counter-terrorism operations at Manchester Airport and Liverpool John Lennon Airport. In between, he spent 10 years as an operational hostage negotiator. During those 10 years, he attended more than 130 high-risk incidents – armed sieges, suicide interventions, and international kidnap situations. He states that no one died in any incident he attended. From that experience, he drew a precise argument: what separates a resolved negotiation from a failed one is almost always the quality of listening, not the strength of the opening position. He calls this Level 2 listening – attending fully to what the other person is actually communicating, rather than preparing a response. The commercial application is direct. Most business negotiations happen without meaningful leverage. A sales team pursuing a reluctant client, a leader managing a team through unwanted change, a CFO trying to hold a supplier to terms – each faces the same dynamic a hostage negotiator faces when they hold no cards and can offer nothing in return. That is where the framework Taberner developed applies most sharply. He was a member of the national training team that developed new generations of negotiators for forces in the UK, Finland, Australia, and the FBI. Since founding Level2Communications, he has brought those same principles to corporate audiences, including events run by AICPA and CIMA. Key speaking topics Negotiation without leverage High-stakes communication Active listening and influence Trust-building under pressure Crisis communication Leadership under pressure Emotional intelligence in negotiation Ideal for Senior leaders and executive teams facing difficult internal or external stakeholder conversations Sales and commercial teams whose negotiations depend on relationship and trust rather than pricing power Risk, security, and crisis management professionals HR and people leaders managing conflict, sensitive conversations, or organisational change Audience outcomes A named, structured framework – Level 2 listening – for influencing outcomes when leverage is absent Practical techniques for building trust quickly in unfamiliar or high-pressure conversations A clearer understanding of how professional negotiators approach conversations most people find difficult, and why their methods work Greater confidence in handling conflict, resistant stakeholders, and high-stakes decisions A reframed view of listening as a strategic tool rather than a passive courtesy

Why organisations work with Janine Hamner Holman She translates neuroscience into HR-grade interventions, drawing on more than a decade studying brain science alongside a SHRM-CP and SHRM Inclusive Cultures certification, which gives operational HR teams a usable language rather than a TED-style abstraction. Her Mind The Gap: A Thought Leader’s Guide to 21st Century Conscious Leadership gives buyers a defined thesis on the distance between stated values and observed leadership behaviour, useful for boards trying to diagnose culture programmes that stall. She speaks credibly to both nonprofit and Fortune 200 contexts, having spent twenty years in nonprofit leadership followed by close to a decade inside a Fortune 200, which makes her unusual in audiences that mix public-sector, mission-driven, and corporate buyers. Her Cost of Not Paying Attention podcast and signature talk on civility give her a sustained body of public material on workplace incivility as a P&L line, not as a tone-of-voice issue. Biography highlights CEO, J&J Consulting Group; 30+ years as executive and consultant. Author, Mind The Gap: A Thought Leader’s Guide to 21st Century Conscious Leadership; contributing author, On The Shoulders of Mighty Women. Host, The Cost of Not Paying Attention podcast. Named a USA Today Keynote Speaker to Watch in 2024 and LA Weekly Top 10 Trailblazing Entrepreneur in 2023. Winner of the CXO 2.0 Leadership Award. Certified in the Psychology of Leadership (Cornell); SHRM-CP and SHRM Inclusive Cultures certified; Certified Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence. Biography Workplace culture is now a measurable variable on the P&L. Engagement, attrition, and incivility numbers move customer outcomes, and senior leaders increasingly want interventions that change behaviour, not posters. The cost of getting it wrong has stopped being soft. J&J Consulting Group, the firm Janine Hamner Holman leads as CEO, sits in that gap. Her professional history runs across twenty years of nonprofit leadership and almost a decade inside a Fortune 200, with close work alongside the public sector. That mix lets her talk to mission-driven and commercial audiences without flattening either. The intellectual spine of the work is applied neurobiology. More than a decade studying brain science, plus a Cornell certification in the Psychology of Leadership, sits underneath her practice on psychological safety, belonging, and conscious leadership. Her book Mind The Gap sets out the thesis: the distance between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour is where culture programmes fail. Public recognition tracks the same content. USA Today named her a Keynote Speaker to Watch in 2024, LA Weekly placed her in its 2023 Top 10 Trailblazing Entrepreneurs, and she won the CXO 2.0 Leadership Award at the CXO2 Conference in Las Vegas. Her podcast, The Cost of Not Paying Attention, gives buyers a sustained sense of the argument before they book the room. Key speaking topics Conscious leadership Organisational culture change Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging Psychological safety at work Employee engagement and retention Workplace incivility and its commercial cost Change management and neurobiology Emotional intelligence Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People wrestling with engagement, attrition, and DEIB delivery Executive teams running culture transformation programmes that have stalled at policy level Boards and CEOs treating culture as a commercial variable rather than a values statement Nonprofit and mission-driven leadership teams managing growth and professionalisation Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that HR and line managers can operationalise A practical view of how incivility shows up on the P&L through retention, customer experience, and productivity A neuroscience-grounded model for why change resistance is predictable, and what to do about it A clearer separation between DEIB as compliance theatre and DEIB as belonging that affects performance A diagnostic for the gap between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour

Why organisations work with Charlene Douglas A clinically trained therapist, not a wellbeing presenter. Diplomas in Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychosexual Studies (2018), BACP-registered, with a private practice in London behind every session she delivers. Public credibility from Channel 4’s Married at First Sight UK gives her unusual reach into employee audiences who would tune out a more traditional speaker, without diluting the substance of what she covers. Author of Come Closer (Penguin Random House / DK, 2024), a published synthesis of the communication, intimacy and self-awareness frameworks she uses with clients, available as anchor content for follow-on workshops. Talks about boundaries, communication and stress with the directness of a working therapist, which lands differently inside organisations than corporate wellbeing language usually does. Brings a Black woman entrepreneur’s lens to belonging and imposter syndrome conversations, drawn from her own practice rather than from a DEI framework deck. Biography highlights Sex and relationship therapist on Channel 4’s Married at First Sight UK since 2021. Diploma in Psychodynamic Counselling, Highgate Counselling Centre (2018). Diploma in Psychosexual Studies, Centre of Psychosexual Health (2018). Registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Author of Come Closer: Everything You Ever Wanted to Ask a Sex and Relationship Therapist (Penguin Random House / DK, 2024). Founder of private practice The Intimacy Coach; broadcast and podcast credits include Good Morning Britain, Steph’s Packed Lunch, E4’s The Sex Clinic, and The Referral with Dr Karan. Biography Most workplace wellbeing programmes are built around the individual. The relationships people are inside, with managers, peers, and themselves, are where the strain actually shows. That is the territory Charlene Douglas has worked in for almost a decade as a clinically trained therapist, and it translates more directly into team performance than the wellbeing industry usually admits. Douglas qualified through the Highgate Counselling Centre in psychodynamic counselling and the Centre of Psychosexual Health in psychosexual studies, both in 2018. She is registered with the BACP and runs The Intimacy Coach, a private practice working with individuals and couples in London and online. The clinical grounding is what separates her from the broader category of relationship commentators. Channel 4 brought her onto the expert panel of Married at First Sight UK in 2021, which has given her a public platform that few therapists with comparable credentials have. She has used it to publish Come Closer with Penguin Random House in 2024, a book that captures the communication and self-awareness work she does with couples and adapts it for a general reader. For corporate audiences, she draws on the same clinical material to talk about boundaries, communication, stress, and the quiet ways relationships at work erode under pressure. Her own experience as a Black woman building a private practice and a public profile feeds directly into how she handles questions of belonging, voice, and confidence with senior audiences. Key speaking topics Communication and boundaries at work Stress, self-care and burnout prevention Resilience, wellbeing and mental health Team dynamics and psychological safety Belonging and imposter syndrome Leadership with empathy Inclusion and the lived experience of difference Ideal for HR, People and Culture leaders building wellbeing programmes that need clinical credibility Employee resource groups and women’s networks, including events centred on women of colour Internal communications and town hall events seeking a recognisable name with substantive content Leadership development cohorts working on empathy, listening and difficult conversations Audience outcomes A clearer language for what good and bad communication look like in everyday work relationships Practical boundary-setting techniques drawn from clinical practice rather than self-help Direct frameworks for managing stress and protecting personal capacity under sustained pressure A more honest conversation about belonging and confidence that does not retreat into corporate DEI vocabulary

Why organisations work with Ben Hines A signature programme, Know the Score, delivered with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other professional ensembles, that puts senior leaders in the room with a world-class team operating in real time. Faculty appointments at Henley Business School and Korn Ferry International, anchoring the experiential work in a credible leadership development frame. Eighteen years in financial and legal services, including strategic marketing leadership at Barclays PLC, which keeps the corporate translation grounded rather than theatrical. A coaching credential (ACC, International Coach Federation) and a music degree from the University of York, sitting behind a method that other speakers cannot replicate. Biography highlights Founder of Moving Performance (2009), a leadership development firm using music and live musicians as the medium for senior team work. Creator of Know the Score, the first leadership programme to be developed in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Senior Associate faculty at Henley Business School, Korn Ferry International, and Altitude Leadership Partners. Associate Certified Coach, International Coach Federation. BA (Hons) Music, University of York. Earlier career as a strategic marketer at Barclays PLC and advisor to CPA Global. Biography A high-performing orchestra and a high-performing executive team face the same problem. Many specialists, one shared outcome, no rehearsal time. Most leadership development programmes describe that problem in abstract terms. Ben Hines puts it on a stage and lets leaders watch it solved in front of them. Moving Performance, the firm he founded in 2009, places professional musicians inside leadership sessions for serious organisations. The signature programme, Know the Score, runs in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and was the first leadership format developed with that orchestra. Senior teams observe how a group of experts coordinates without verbal instruction, then translate what they have seen into their own decision rhythms, listening habits, and roles under pressure. The credibility of the work rests on the corporate spine behind it. Eighteen years inside financial and legal services, including strategic marketing leadership at Barclays PLC across multiple international markets and an advisory role at CPA Global, sit underneath the musical method. Senior Associate faculty appointments at Henley Business School and Korn Ferry International, and an ACC coaching credential from the International Coach Federation, place the practice inside recognised leadership development infrastructure. Clients to date include Accenture, BP, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Borse, Jaguar Land Rover, PwC, Telekom Austria, Thames Water, and Wise. Key speaking topics High-performing teams Leadership and team development Change leadership Emotional intelligence in senior teams Communication and listening Executive presence Ideal for Chief Executives and executive committees running team off-sites and leadership conferences Heads of Leadership Development and CHROs commissioning senior team programmes Transformation leads using a leadership intervention to reset team behaviour during change Conference organisers needing a substantive keynote that doubles as a shared experience for the room Audience outcomes A common reference point for how an expert team coordinates without hierarchy interrupting the work Specific behavioural cues from professional musicians that translate into meeting and decision rhythms Sharper attention to listening, non-verbal signals, and timing in senior team interaction A shared experience the group keeps referring back to long after the session