Emotional Intelligence speakers

Why organisations work with Roberto Forzoni Authored the textbook the Football Association embedded into its national coaching curriculum (The Official FA Guide to Psychology for Football, Hodder, 2004). The intellectual model has been tested at scale across FA coach education, not only in private practice. Built the “Team Murray” multidisciplinary support model during his tenure as National Performance Psychologist at the Lawn Tennis Association, 2007 to 2009. The structure has since been adopted by other federations and players as a template. Has done the hands-on work alongside the consultancy. First-team coaching roles under Steve Coppell at Crystal Palace, Brentford and Brighton; performance psychology at West Ham United, Southampton, Charlton and Norwich City. He has been in the dressing room when pressure broke a team and when it did not. Holds an MSc in Sport Sciences (Distinction) from Brunel University and BASES accreditation, with applied training in CBT, motivational interviewing and solution-focused practice. The clinical depth is unusual for a performance speaker. Standing BBC consultant on performance and mindset for more than two decades, with further contributions on Sky and Al Jazeera. The perspective has been publicly tested over time, not assembled for the stage. Biography highlights Lead author of The Official FA Guide to Psychology for Football (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004), embedded by the Football Association into its national coaching curriculum. National Performance Psychologist at the Lawn Tennis Association from 2007 to 2009. Created the “Team Murray” multidisciplinary support model during Andy Murray’s early Grand Slam years. First-team coaching and performance psychology roles across eight Premier League clubs, including West Ham United, Southampton, Brentford, Brighton, Crystal Palace, Charlton Athletic and Norwich City. MSc Sport Sciences (Distinction), Brunel University. BASES-accredited Sport Psychologist, with further training in CBT, motivational interviewing and solution-focused practice. BBC consultant on performance and mindset across BBC TV and BBC Radio for more than two decades, with further contributions on Sky and Al Jazeera. Psychological coach to Olympic and World Championship athletes, including heavyweight Derek Chisora’s preparation for his title fight against Tyson Fury and Olympic sprinter Ashleigh Nelson. Biography The West Ham squad that brought in Roberto Forzoni as performance psychologist was running a 23% win rate. Nine games later, after the team had completed a Premier League double over both Manchester United and Arsenal, the win rate sat at 78%. The intervention was psychological. That kind of recovery has shown up repeatedly across Forzoni’s thirty years inside elite sport. He has held first-team coaching and performance psychology roles at eight Premier League clubs, including West Ham United, Southampton, Brentford and Crystal Palace. He prepared heavyweight Derek Chisora for the title fight against Tyson Fury, and built the “Team Murray” multidisciplinary model during Andy Murray’s early years on the tour. The published work sits in football. Forzoni is the lead author of The Official FA Guide to Psychology for Football, the textbook the Football Association embedded into its coach education programme in 2004. The intellectual base draws on an MSc in Sport Sciences (Distinction) from Brunel University, BASES accreditation, and applied training in CBT and solution-focused practice. More than two decades of BBC consultancy on performance and mindset have put the perspective into wide public circulation. What Forzoni brings into a corporate room is a particular reading of senior team behaviour under pressure. The patterns he watches for were diagnosed in dressing rooms and on Centre Court. Composure narrows under scrutiny. Strong personalities stop bringing their best to the group when results turn. For Forzoni, these are coachable problems, drawn from the same evidence base a relegation-threatened Premier League squad would use. Key speaking topics Performance psychology Team dynamics under pressure Composure and emotional regulation in senior leadership Recovery from public setback Mindset and behavioural change in elite environments Wellbeing and sustained performance Ideal for Senior leadership teams under sustained external scrutiny or after a publicly visible setback CEOs and executive committees in restructure, post-merger integration or change cycles, where the constraint has become team behaviour CHROs and L&D directors building team-effectiveness and resilience programmes for senior talent High-stakes client-facing teams in sales, professional services and trading environments Audience outcomes A specific language for the behaviours that hold a team together under pressure and the behaviours that split it apart The techniques used inside Premier League dressing rooms and Grand Slam tennis to regulate nerves and recover after a public setback An honest read of the gap between a leadership team’s stated values and how it actually behaves when results stall Composure approached as a deliberate behaviour leaders can train, with specific drills Forzoni uses inside elite sport The discipline of asking “Did I work as hard as I could today?” as a daily performance check, a question Forzoni draws from elite athletes

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 Rohit Bassi Three decades of cross-cultural coaching across 21 countries, with named engagements at the World Bank, Oracle, Honeywell, PwC, Bank of America, Canon, and Emirates NBD. A named method, Speak Like A W.I.S.E. CEO, that maps four bearings to four disciplines: words with courage, intention with clarity, silence with conviction, and energy with compassion. It gives leaders a repeatable structure for the specific conversation in front of them. A Gulf-based perspective on executive presence that translates between Western corporate norms and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian leadership cultures, useful for organisations with distributed senior teams. A practitioner record spanning keynote speaking, sales communication coaching, and authorship of Living Through Self Compassion, which lets him work credibly with commercial leaders and people leaders in the same organisation. Biography highlights Founder of ROI Talks, the coaching and training practice he established in Dubai. Creator of the Speak Like A W.I.S.E. CEO framework for high-stakes communication. Author of five books including Beyond Words on mindful public speaking, Soul of Sales on ethical selling, and Living Through Self Compassion, plus contributing author of Success Mastery alongside Jack Canfield. TEDx speaker, “The Miracle of Compassion” (TEDxCCQ), hosted on the TED platform. Executive Contributor at Brainz Magazine, and member of the National Academy of Best-Selling Authors. Three decades of speaking, coaching, and training across more than 21 countries, with named engagements including the World Bank, Oracle, Honeywell, PwC, Bank of America, Canon, and Emirates NBD. Biography Most leaders are not promoted for how they communicate. They are promoted in spite of it, and only at senior level does the cost surface, in a board that loses patience or a deal that quietly stalls. ROI Talks, the practice Rohit Bassi founded in Dubai, was built for that gap. His method, Speak Like A W.I.S.E. CEO, rests on four bearings. Words carry courage, intention carries clarity, silence carries conviction, and energy carries compassion. Drawn from a long study of mindfulness, it applies to the situations leaders face: executive presence, persuasion under pressure, conflict that has turned organisational, and the daily habits that build or erode trust. He has worked across more than 21 countries with named clients including the World Bank, Oracle, Honeywell, PwC, Bank of America, Canon, and Emirates NBD. His writing runs along the same lines as the coaching. Beyond Words sets out his approach to mindful public speaking, Soul of Sales makes the case for trust-based selling, and Living Through Self Compassion tells the personal story behind the method, a return from depression and self-sabotage. He is also a contributing author of Success Mastery alongside Jack Canfield, and his TEDx talk, The Miracle of Compassion, sits on the TED platform. Known to clients as The Communication Wizard, he coaches senior leaders across Western, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian cultures, and writes as an Executive Contributor for Brainz Magazine. For organisations with leadership teams spread across those regions, that cross-cultural read on executive presence is rare in the category. Key speaking topics Leadership communication and executive presence Persuasion and influence in high-stakes conversations Mindful communication and emotional intelligence Sales communication for senior leaders Conflict, difficult conversations, and trust repair Resilience and self-leadership under pressure Public speaking for executives Ideal for CEOs and business unit heads preparing for board, investor, or all-hands communication, including investor pitch coaching Sales leadership and commercial teams running high-stakes, value-based B2B conversations Heads of L&D, talent, and executive development commissioning leadership communication programmes Senior leadership teams in multinational and Gulf-based organisations with cross-cultural workforces Audience outcomes The four bearings of the W.I.S.E. compass in language they can use in the next difficult conversation Specific handling for high-stakes moments: persuasion, conflict, trust repair, and assertive listening A read on what each high-stakes conversation puts at stake: financial value, time, risk exposure, and the authority carried into the next room A working approach to composure under pressure that applies the next working day

Why organisations work with Rose Cartolari Operator-grade credibility with senior leaders: she co-founded and ran the operations of Scharper Pharmaceuticals through to a 2011 sale, then turned that experience into a coaching practice. She has sat in the chair the room is talking about. A board-level lens on inclusion as leadership capability, built through her Executive Committee role at European Women on Boards and the Board Readiness Programme she launched there. Cross-cultural fluency that holds up in genuinely complex settings, drawn from senior roles at American Express and UNICEF and on-the-ground postings in India, Indonesia and Somalia. A coaching toolkit grounded in neuroleadership, emotional intelligence and social styles, applied to specific senior problems: influence across the C-suite, executive presence, succession readiness. Teaches the material as well as practises it, through executive programmes at Columbia Business School, SDA Bocconi and the University of Milan-Bicocca. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director, RC Consulting, advising C-suite leaders and their teams on leadership, influence and inclusion. Executive Committee member, European Women on Boards; launched the EWOB Board Readiness Programme. Co-founder and former COO, Scharper Pharmaceuticals SpA, exited in 2011. Senior corporate roles at American Express and UNICEF, with field postings across India, Indonesia and Somalia. Executive education faculty at Columbia Business School, SDA Bocconi and the University of Milan-Bicocca. MBA, Columbia Business School. BA, Brown University. Forbes Coaches Council member. TEDx speaker (TEDxArona). Co-author, Winning Mindset: Elite Strategies for Peak Performance (Erik Seversen, ed., 2021). Biography Senior leadership rarely fails on technical knowledge. It fails on composure, influence and the ability to hold a team together when conditions stop being stable. That is the territory Rose Cartolari works in, and she works in it from the position of someone who has held an operating role at scale and then chosen to coach the people who hold those roles now. Cartolari is Founder and Managing Director of RC Consulting, a leadership advisory and executive coaching practice for the C-suite and their teams. Before founding RC, she co-founded and served as COO of Scharper Pharmaceuticals SpA, a European pharmaceuticals business sold in 2011, after senior roles at American Express and UNICEF, including field assignments in India, Indonesia and Somalia. That operator history is the reason her conversations with senior leaders sound like conversations between peers, not between a leader and an outside expert. Her work sits at the point where leadership behaviour meets inclusion practice. On the European Women on Boards Executive Committee she launched the Board Readiness Programme, which prepares senior women for credible non-executive roles. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Brown, sits on the Forbes Coaches Council, and teaches executive programmes at Columbia Business School, SDA Bocconi and the University of Milan-Bicocca. She is co-author of Winning Mindset: Elite Strategies for Peak Performance and a TEDx speaker (TEDxArona). The throughline of the work is practical: senior leaders, under pressure, learning to influence other senior people, hold their own counsel under ambiguity and turn inclusion from a value statement into a leadership behaviour. Key speaking topics Executive presence and influence across the C-suite Inclusive leadership as a senior capability Leading senior teams through change and ambiguity Board readiness and the path to non-executive roles Personal leadership and self-awareness for senior roles Cross-cultural leadership in multinational organisations Emotional intelligence applied to executive performance Ideal for C-suite executives and their direct reports working through ambiguity, restructure or succession Senior women preparing for non-executive director or board positions Heads of executive development, talent and inclusion building senior leadership pipelines Multinational leadership teams operating across multiple cultures and geographies Audience outcomes A sharper read on how senior influence works and where their own influence is leaking Language and practices for inclusive leadership that hold up in front of other senior leaders A specific view of board readiness, what selectors actually look for and how to close the gap Tools from neuroleadership, emotional intelligence and social styles applied to live senior dilemmas A working definition of executive presence that is behavioural, not stylistic

Why organisations work with Ryan Tillman Conflict and de-escalation content built from real shifts on patrol and in crisis negotiation, not adapted from a corporate training module. A direct, lived perspective on bias and inclusion from someone who once distrusted policing and chose to join it, which lands with audiences who have tuned out of standard DEI sessions. Author of Happy Eyes: Becoming All Things To All People, with a foreword by Dak Prescott and afterword by Gordon Graham, giving the keynote a published spine that leaders can read and pass on. Founder of Breaking Barriers United, a programme used by law enforcement agencies and corporate clients to rebuild communication between groups that have stopped trusting each other. Significant earned reach through the #ITSNEEDED podcast and a social audience that has accumulated over 100 million views, which lifts internal engagement before and after the event. Biography highlights Police Officer, Chino Police Department, Southern California, since 2013. Founder and CEO, Breaking Barriers United LLC. Author, Happy Eyes: Becoming All Things To All People, foreword by Dak Prescott, afterword by Gordon Graham, endorsed by Michael Strahan. Host, #ITSNEEDED podcast, with more than one million downloads. Featured on FOX 11 Los Angeles, NBC Los Angeles, ABC News and Voyage LA. Training and content partnerships with Lexipol, Open Sesame and the Heal America Movement. Biography Most organisational fractures begin as a communication problem. A manager misreads a team member, a customer interaction tips into hostility, a difficult conversation gets postponed until it becomes a grievance. The skills that prevent those failures are the same ones a patrol officer learns in the first minute of a call, and they are rarely taught inside corporate training. Ryan Tillman built his career inside that gap. A serving officer with the Chino Police Department in Southern California, he founded Breaking Barriers United to address what he saw on both sides of the badge: a breakdown in trust between people who needed to understand each other to function. The work began in policing and quickly moved into workplaces, where the underlying dynamics, bias, fear, misread intent, were identical. His book, Happy Eyes: Becoming All Things To All People, with a foreword by Dak Prescott and afterword by Gordon Graham, sets out the operating philosophy: meet people where they are, lead with respect, and use empathy as a practical tool rather than a slogan. The #ITSNEEDED podcast has carried that material into more than a million downloads, and his social channels have accumulated over 100 million views across appearances on FOX 11 LA, NBC Los Angeles and ABC News. What he brings into a corporate room is not motivation. It is a working method for the conversations that decide whether a culture holds together: how to read a situation before it escalates, how to disagree without losing trust, how to lead across difference without retreating into policy. Senior teams take from him the same thing his colleagues do on patrol, a steadier set of instincts for the moments that matter most. Key speaking topics Communication and trust at work De-escalation and conflict resolution Bias, inclusion and bridging divides Leadership under pressure Crisis response and personal safety Culture change in operational environments Empathy as a practical leadership skill Ideal for CHROs, heads of culture and DEI sponsors looking for content on inclusion that lands with sceptical audiences. Safety, security and risk leaders responsible for de-escalation, customer-facing conflict and frontline workforce protection. Senior leadership teams in operationally complex sectors (healthcare, retail, transport, public services) where communication failures carry real cost. Internal events focused on rebuilding engagement and trust after restructure, layoffs or visible cultural strain. Audience outcomes A clearer read on how everyday interactions either build or erode trust inside a team. Specific techniques for de-escalating conflict before it becomes a formal incident. A more confident vocabulary for talking about bias and difference without defaulting to slogans. A practical model for leading across viewpoints that disagree, drawn from policing and negotiation practice. A renewed sense among managers that culture is set in their own conversations, not in the policy document.

Why organisations work with Sara Ross A named, proprietary framework. LeadFULL gives leadership teams a shared operating language for shifting out of effort management and into capacity management, grounded in her own multi-year workplace vitality research. A book with a thesis, not a brand. Dear Work, Something Has to Change sets out a specific argument about why current wellbeing interventions fail and what replaces them, which gives leaders something to act on after the keynote. Independent recognition from named bodies. Global Gurus ranked her among its Top 10 Keynote Speakers for 2026, Real Leaders named her a Top Impact Speaker, and SUCCESS Magazine made her a 2023 Woman of Influence, the kind of third-party validation buyers use to defend a shortlist. A working track record in high-pressure organisations. Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, FedEx, and the U.S. Navy have used her work in environments where fatigue carries a direct operational cost. Biography highlights Founder and Chief Vitality Officer, BrainAMPED, a leadership research firm. Author of the bestselling Dear Work, Something Has to Change, built on a three-year Workplace Vitality Study of over 10,000 people. Global Gurus Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2026), Real Leaders Top Impact Speaker, and LinkedIn Top Voice in Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. 2023 Woman of Influence, SUCCESS Magazine. Featured in Fast Company, Forbes, The Globe and Mail, and Psychology Today, with more than 500 engagements delivered. Former executive with nearly two decades in leadership research and development; client work spans Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, FedEx, Deloitte, the U.S. Navy, and Stanford Health Care. Biography Wellbeing has been a corporate priority for a decade, and most senior teams are no closer to fixing the underlying problem. Capable people are still leaving, performance is still uneven, and the cost of fatigue is now showing up in decisions, not just disengagement scores. Sara Ross’s work begins with that observation. She is the founder of BrainAMPED, a leadership research firm, and author of Dear Work, Something Has to Change, which draws on her own multi-year study of workplace vitality. The book makes a specific argument: leaders have been taught to manage effort, when what now matters is managing state. Capacity, not endurance, becomes the operating variable. Out of that research she built LeadFULL, a framework she uses with senior teams to translate the argument into practical leadership behaviour. It sits at the intersection of emotional intelligence, behavioural science, and organisational culture, areas she has worked in for close to two decades, most recently as a global head of leadership innovation before founding BrainAMPED. The work has earned external recognition: a Top 10 Global Gurus keynote ranking for 2026, a Top Impact Speaker listing from Real Leaders, and a 2023 Woman of Influence award from SUCCESS Magazine. Her writing appears in Fast Company, Forbes, and Psychology Today. Across more than 500 engagements, her clients include Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, and the U.S. Navy, where fatigue carries a direct operational cost. Key speaking topics Workplace vitality and sustainable high performance Leadership in the age of burnout and fatigue Change leadership and future-ready resilience Human-centred leadership in the age of AI Emotional intelligence at senior levels The future of work and hybrid-era engagement Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning engagement and wellbeing strategy beyond the wellness-vendor cycle. CEOs and senior leadership teams carrying the cost of leadership fatigue and sustained operational pressure. Transformation and change leaders whose workforces are fatigued by repeated restructuring and AI-driven change. Heads of leadership development running flagship programmes for senior and high-potential leaders. Audience outcomes A clear, named distinction between managing effort and managing state, and why the second is the strategic variable. Specific leadership behaviours that reduce fatigue without lowering performance expectations. A practical reading of why current wellbeing initiatives stall, and what shifts the curve. Language senior teams can use with each other to talk about capacity, recovery, and sustained output without it sounding soft.

Why organisations work with Savvas Trichas A working academic record in the field he speaks on: peer-reviewed publication in The Leadership Quarterly on how facial expression shapes leadership perception, co-authored with Birgit Schyns. Certified coder in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), one of a small group qualified to read facial muscle activity to research standard, applied to executive communication. Guest lecturer for the FBI National Academy Associates Cyprus chapter on deception detection, giving leaders a credible voice on lie detection that does not rely on stage tricks. A practitioner’s grasp of negotiation drawn from Harvard and MIT-tradition material, paired with a researcher’s discipline on what the body signals during a deal. Material is built for boards and executive teams that already know what to say and want to know why they are not being heard. Biography highlights PhD in Human Resource Management and Marketing. Co-author, “The face of leadership: perceiving leaders from facial expression,” The Leadership Quarterly, 2012. Three-time TEDx speaker (Las Vegas, Lausanne, Athens). Certified coder, Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Manuscript reviewer, The Leadership Quarterly. Guest lecturer, FBI National Academy Associates Cyprus Police, on management, communication, and deception detection. Biography Most leadership training teaches what to say. Trichas works on the harder question of why audiences accept it. His peer-reviewed research with Birgit Schyns in The Leadership Quarterly examined how a leader’s facial expression shapes followers’ trust and judgements of effectiveness, a finding that sits underneath every senior communication moment, from a board update to a negotiation. That research base separates him from most communication speakers. He is a certified coder in the Facial Action Coding System, the anatomical method developed for the precise analysis of facial muscle movement, and he reviews manuscripts for The Leadership Quarterly. The science is not a credential dropped into a keynote; it is the source of the material. The applied work runs across persuasion, storytelling, negotiation, and deception detection. Trichas lectures for the FBI National Academy Associates Cyprus chapter on communication and deception, and has built a parallel track on negotiation drawn from the Harvard and MIT canon. Three TEDx appearances and a bestseller, “The Power of Communication,” sit alongside corporate work for organisations including PwC, Coca-Cola, and MDRT. The argument he offers a board is unfashionable and useful. Strategy and message are necessary but not sufficient. Whether a leader is trusted, whether a negotiation closes, whether a transformation lands, often turns on signals that operate below the words, and those signals are now well enough understood to teach. Key speaking topics Nonverbal communication and leadership perception Negotiation and persuasion Executive presence and credibility Storytelling for senior leaders Deception detection in business contexts Servant leadership and empathy Public speaking for executives Leading transformation through communication Ideal for Boards and executive teams preparing for high-stakes external communication: investor updates, M&A, regulatory testimony. CHROs and leadership development heads designing programmes for newly senior leaders on presence and credibility. CCOs, heads of negotiation, and commercial leaders responsible for high-value deals. Sales leadership conferences where persuasion and trust signals carry commercial outcomes. Audience outcomes A research-grounded view of how leaders are read, not just heard, in board and town hall settings. Specific cues from the Facial Action Coding System tradition that leaders can use to read counterparts in negotiation and meetings. A working framework for credibility that separates persuasion, narrative, and nonverbal channels rather than collapsing them into “communication skills.” A more disciplined view of deception detection, what the evidence supports and what it does not, useful for interviewing, due diligence, and negotiation. Confidence that the speaker’s claims rest on peer-reviewed research and applied work with law enforcement, not stage technique.

Why organisations work with Scott Tillema Practitioner authority that is genuinely operational. The negotiation craft was learned in live SWAT incidents in the Chicago area, not modelled in a classroom. That changes how a sceptical executive room receives the material. A single, transferable framework. The Four Pillars (Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect) gives an executive team a shared vocabulary they can use in the next M&A negotiation, regulator call, or internal escalation, not just remember from the talk. A proven public artefact. The TEDxNaperville talk “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators” has passed one million views, which means most participants arrive primed and engaged rather than cold. Cross-sector translation. The same material has been delivered to Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, YPO chapters across three continents, and audiences at SHRM and PMI conferences, which gives a buyer evidence that the content lands outside its origin context. A teaching credential at IMD. Five guest appearances on IMD Business School’s Advanced High Performance Leadership programme means the material has been pressure-tested in front of senior leaders inside one of Europe’s top executive education environments, not only on the keynote circuit. Biography highlights Twenty-plus years in law enforcement, retired SWAT hostage negotiator, Chicago area FBI-trained crisis negotiator Graduate degree in psychology and bachelor’s degree in behavioral science Negotiation training at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and at IMD Business School Five-time guest speaker on IMD Business School’s Advanced High Performance Leadership programme TEDxNaperville speaker, “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators”, over one million views Founder of Negotiation Excellence, LLC; clients include Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, the FBI, Harvard University and YPO chapters Biography Most negotiation training in corporate settings is built on case studies. Scott Tillema’s is built on incidents where someone’s life depended on the next sentence. Twenty years as a SWAT hostage negotiator in the Chicago area, FBI-trained, and the work shows up in the room as composure rather than theory. The academic foundation is real as well. A graduate degree in psychology, an undergraduate degree in behavioral science, and negotiation training at both Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and IMD Business School. The combination is what allows the operational material to be taught, not just demonstrated. Leaders leave with a framework they can use, not an anecdote they can retell. The framework is the Four Pillars: Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect. It was first laid out for a wider audience in the TEDxNaperville talk “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators”, which has now passed one million views. The same model now anchors the executive sessions he runs through Negotiation Excellence, LLC for Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, YPO chapters across three continents, and audiences at SHRM and PMI conferences. It is also the basis on which IMD invited him back five times to its Advanced High Performance Leadership programme. What a senior team typically takes from a session is not a lecture on persuasion. It is a more disciplined posture in the conversations that actually decide things, the regulator call, the M&A walk-through, the internal escalation, the workforce announcement that has to land cleanly the first time. Key speaking topics High-stakes communication Crisis negotiation and de-escalation Influence without authority Conflict resolution Trust building Leading difficult conversations Decision-making under pressure Ideal for CEOs, COOs and senior leadership teams preparing for board, regulator, or workforce conversations where the first sentence sets the outcome HR, people and ER leaders managing escalations, restructure conversations, or formal grievance processes Sales, business development and commercial leaders running enterprise negotiations Crisis, security and legal teams who need their senior leaders fluent in de-escalation, not just trained in process Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the Four Pillars (Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect) that a leadership team can use in their own conversations the following week A more disciplined sense of when to slow a conversation down and when to move Practical de-escalation techniques drawn from live crisis negotiation, not workshop simulations Greater confidence in conversations where authority alone will not produce the outcome

Why organisations work with Shola Kaye Her Emotional Audacity™ framework reframes empathy as an organisational capability – not a personal virtue – giving leaders a structured approach to courageous communication that is immediately applicable in high-pressure, high-stakes environments She holds an unusual credibility position: a Cambridge and Emory-trained scientist who also performed professionally on four continents. That combination makes her content land differently with technical and analytical audiences who typically resist people-skills programming Her work addresses a gap that DEI programmes and EQ training often miss separately: the intersection of speaking up, psychological safety, and inclusive communication as a single, integrated practice Her two published books and LinkedIn Learning instructor role mean buyers are extending into a content ecosystem, not just a single keynote She has worked across the full range of organisational contexts – from board-level at institutions including The United Nations and Deloitte to company-wide culture programmes – with consistent evidence of rebooking Biography highlights BA Natural Sciences, Cambridge University; PGCE, Oxford University; MSc Analytical Chemistry / Neuropharmacology, Emory University, with postgraduate research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Early career in IT management consulting with clients including Goldman Sachs and Prudential Assurance, followed by account director roles in aviation and finance Professional entertainer and jazz singer; performed on four continents including BBC appearances Author of How to be a D.I.V.A. at Public Speaking (Amazon.com #1 bestseller) and Big Talk, Small Talk and Everything in Between (Callisto Media, 2020) Winner of the Jenny Seagrove Speaking Award (2016); Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), Toastmasters International; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) Regular contributor to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management; featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, and BBC; TEDx speaker on empathy in the workplace Biography Shola Kaye spent her early career moving between worlds that rarely overlap: neuroscience research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, management consulting at investment banks in New York and London, and professional performance on stages across four continents. That trajectory is not a curiosity: it is the basis of her work. She understands analytically rigorous environments, the dynamics of corporate invisibility, and what it takes to hold a room. The core tension she addresses is one that organisations consistently underinvest in: the gap between stated inclusion values and the actual behavioural competencies required to make them real. Most people, even experienced leaders, struggle to give honest feedback, speak up under pressure, or navigate difficult conversations without defensiveness. Kaye’s Emotional Audacity™ framework names this gap explicitly: combining empathy, self-regulation, and courageous communication into a single, teachable practice. Her two books and a TEDx talk on workplace empathy establish the intellectual architecture behind the keynotes. Her contributors to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management position her as a credible voice in the professional management conversation, not only on the conference circuit. Clients including The United Nations, Deloitte, HSBC, Google, and IBM have rebooked or extended her programmes into training formats, evidence that the content holds beyond a single session. What makes Kaye distinctive in a crowded DEI and communication space is the precise nature of her argument: that empathy, done seriously, is not a softening of leadership but a structural condition for high performance. For organisations navigating transformation, hybrid work, or underrepresentation challenges, that reframe tends to land where other approaches have not. Key speaking topics Empathy at work Inclusive leadership Psychological safety and communication Emotional intelligence Courageous workplace communication Diversity, equity and belonging People-first culture Feedback and difficult conversations Ideal for CHROs and People Directors building cultures where psychological safety is a practical reality, not an aspiration Leadership development programmes targeting mid-to-senior leaders managing diverse, distributed, or technically-oriented teams Organisations running DEI initiatives that need to move beyond awareness into behavioural change International Women’s Day and women’s leadership events where communication confidence and visibility are the focus Audience outcomes A named framework (Emotional Audacity™) for integrating empathy, courageous communication, and inclusive behaviour into daily leadership practice Practical tools for navigating difficult conversations, delivering constructive feedback, and creating environments where people feel safe to speak up Greater understanding of the structural conditions – not just the personal attitudes – that determine whether inclusion is felt in practice Specific techniques for communicating with clarity and impact, particularly for those in technical, analytical, or STEM-rooted working environments Renewed understanding of how communication behaviours at the manager level directly affect team performance, retention, and innovation output

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 Steve Peters A clinical psychiatrist’s model of how the mind actually behaves under stress, not a coaching framework borrowed from adjacent fields. The Chimp Model has been pressure-tested with British Cycling, Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC and more than twenty Olympic and national sports programmes, where the cost of a wrong decision is immediate and public. Author of The Chimp Paradox, with over 1.4 million copies sold, plus three further books extending the model into resilience, child development and daily practice. Equips leaders with a shared vocabulary for emotional regulation that travels into the executive team and downward through the organisation, not a one-off motivational hit. Senior academic standing at Sheffield Medical School and Expert Advisor status with the World Anti-Doping Agency anchor the work in formal medicine and ethics, not pop psychology. Biography highlights Consultant psychiatrist and CEO of Chimp Management Ltd. Undergraduate Dean and Senior Clinical Lecturer, Sheffield University Medical School, since 1994. Former Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Rampton High Security Hospital. Author of The Chimp Paradox (Vermilion, 2012), My Hidden Chimp, The Silent Guides and A Path Through the Jungle. Consultant to British Cycling, Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC, GB Taekwondo, England Rugby, England Football, British Swimming and UK Track and Field. Expert Advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency; long-serving examination panellist for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Biography The most expensive moments in a leader’s career are the ones where the emotional brain takes over and the rational mind catches up too late. The reaction in the meeting, the email sent at midnight, the call made under fatigue. These are not character flaws. They are predictable outputs of how the human mind is structured. Steve Peters spent more than two decades as a consultant psychiatrist before that observation became a model. His Chimp Model, set out in The Chimp Paradox, separates the emotional system of the brain from the rational one and gives people a working vocabulary for managing the gap between them. The book has sold more than 1.4 million copies and remains a fixture on UK self-development lists more than a decade after publication. The model earned its reputation in elite sport. Peters worked with British Cycling through its dominant Olympic period, with Sky ProCycling at the top of professional road racing, and with Liverpool FC, GB Taekwondo, England Rugby and England Football. Athletes including Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Adam Peaty have credited him by name. The point is not the celebrity roster. It is that the model has been used in environments where a single emotional misfire is captured on camera and replayed millions of times. His standing in the formal medical world gives the work a different weight from most performance content. Peters is Undergraduate Dean and Senior Clinical Lecturer at Sheffield University Medical School, was Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at Rampton High Security Hospital, and serves as an Expert Advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency. Leaders come away with something rare in this category: a clinically anchored model of their own mind that they can still use the morning after the keynote. Key speaking topics Mind management and the Chimp Model Emotional regulation under pressure Resilience and psychological robustness High performance under scrutiny Self-leadership for senior executives Mental health in the workplace Team dynamics and interpersonal conflict Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards facing high-stakes decision-making cycles CHROs and Heads of Talent commissioning substantive wellbeing and resilience programmes Leadership development directors building executive presence in newly senior leaders Sales, trading and operating teams whose performance is shaped by composure under pressure Audience outcomes A working model of how the emotional mind behaves under pressure, in a vocabulary that survives Monday morning A method for separating impulsive reactions from considered decisions in the moment Specific tools for managing fear, conflict, fatigue and post-event recovery A shared organisational language that makes mental performance discussable rather than private Confidence that the content is grounded in clinical psychiatry, not motivational reframing

Why organisations work with Susan David She is the named originator of Emotional Agility, a peer-reviewed psychological framework that Harvard Business Review designated a Management Idea of the Year and Thinkers50 awarded its Breakthrough Idea Award. Her authority sits at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, which means leadership teams get clinical psychology, not motivational content dressed as science. She gives senior leaders a usable method for operating under pressure: working with hard emotions as signal rather than noise, and translating values into decisions when stakes are high. Her research base spans more than two decades of work on emotion, resilience and change, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal puts her in front of the same readership a board does. She is South African, trained at Yale, and brings a register that travels across global executive audiences without the wellness-industry tone that often blunts this material. Biography highlights Faculty psychologist, Harvard Medical School. Cofounder and co-director, Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. CEO, Evidence Based Psychology. Author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility, translated into more than 30 languages. Winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award; named to the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers. TED Talk “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage” delivered at TEDWomen 2017, with more than 11 million views on TED.com. Biography Most leadership advice asks senior people to stay positive under pressure. The clinical evidence says the opposite. Suppressing difficult emotion narrows judgement, erodes decision quality and corrodes trust over time. That gap, between the slogan and the science, is where Susan David built her work. She is a faculty psychologist at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. Her framework, Emotional Agility, was named a Management Idea of the Year by Harvard Business Review and won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. The book of the same title was a #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. The framework treats emotions as data on values, not as performance problems. It gives leaders a way to notice what they are feeling, label it accurately, separate the feeling from the impulse to act on it, and then make a values-based choice. It is a discipline, not a mood, and it scales from individual executive judgement to how cultures handle hard conversations, conflict and change. Her work has reached management readers through HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and a wider audience through her TEDWomen 2017 talk. The audiences that book her are usually executive teams under sustained pressure: leadership groups mid-restructure, partner cohorts in professional services, and senior teams trying to rebuild trust after shock. They leave with a method, not a mood-lift. Key speaking topics Emotional agility Self-leadership under pressure Resilience and change Decision-making under stress Values-based leadership Workplace mental health and wellbeing Culture and emotional honesty at work Ideal for CEOs, C-suite teams and boards leading through restructure, integration or sustained pressure. CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding engagement and trust after change. Partner groups and senior cohorts in professional services, finance and law. Executive development and high-potential leadership programmes. Audience outcomes A working definition of emotional agility, with the four steps that turn it from idea into practice. A way to read difficult emotions as data on values rather than as problems to suppress. Language to lead hard conversations without retreating into positivity or performance. A method for staying decisive under pressure, including in moments of public scrutiny or internal conflict. A clearer link between personal values and the day-to-day choices a leadership role demands.