Resilience & Stress Management

Why organisations work with Mike Robbins He treats appreciation, vulnerability, and psychological safety as operational levers, not soft values, and gives leaders a vocabulary their teams can act on the next morning. He has spent twenty years inside the cultures of Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, eBay, Gap, Schwab, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar. The frame is tested against how high-stakes teams actually behave. His book Bring Your Whole Self to Work and the related TEDxBerkeley talk gave senior leaders a usable language for authenticity that does not collapse into oversharing or performance. He holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association, the top earned credential in his profession, and is one of fewer than ten percent of speakers worldwide to hold it. His perspective sits on an unusual seam: elite-level baseball at Stanford and in the Kansas City Royals system, then two decades of cultural work with serious operating companies. The room recognises the standard he is calling for. Biography highlights Author of five books published by Hay House, including Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together, translated into fifteen languages. Speaker at TEDxBerkeley, with three TEDx talks that have reached close to 2.3 million views. Featured in the New York Times, on ABC News, and in Harvard Business Review; hosts the weekly We’re All in This Together podcast. Stanford graduate (American Studies, specialisation in race and ethnicity); pitched for Stanford in the College World Series. Drafted by the New York Yankees out of high school; played three professional seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), National Speakers Association. Biography Most teams underperform their talent. Not because the people are wrong, but because the cultural conditions around them, trust, candour, appreciation, the willingness to be honest under pressure, are weaker than the work demands. That gap is the territory Mike Robbins has worked in for twenty-five years, across more than 2,000 programmes in 17 countries. His five books, published by Hay House and translated into fifteen languages, build a coherent argument about how authenticity and appreciation operate as performance variables inside teams. Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together are the most cited. Both have moved from leadership reading lists into the working language that companies like Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar use to describe their own culture work. The intellectual frame is sharpened by an unusual background. Robbins pitched for Stanford in the College World Series and spent three seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system before injuries ended his playing career. He understands what high-performance teams demand of the people inside them, and he understands what fails. That perspective sits alongside a Stanford degree in American Studies with a specialisation in race and ethnicity, and the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. His TEDxBerkeley talk on bringing your whole self to work has reached audiences far beyond corporate stages, and his Forbes column extends the same argument into how leaders practise appreciation, navigate change, and create psychological safety without slipping into performance. The throughline is consistent: culture is not climate, it is capability, and the leaders who treat it that way get more from their people. Key speaking topics Team culture and psychological safety Authenticity and vulnerability at work Appreciation as a performance practice Emotional intelligence for leaders Belonging and inclusion inside teams Leading through change and uncertainty Trust and high-performing teams Human connection in an AI-accelerating workplace Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement and team culture after restructure or hybrid transition Senior leadership teams who want a shared language for trust, candour, and appreciation Heads of talent and learning designing culture and leadership development programmes Sales, R&D, and operating leaders responsible for the performance of large, distributed teams Audience outcomes A practical model for psychological safety that leaders can apply inside their own teams the same week Specific behaviours that turn appreciation from a soft idea into a measurable team practice A clear distinction between authenticity that builds trust and disclosure that erodes it Tools for engaging conflict directly rather than routing around it A shared team vocabulary for the cultural conditions that high performance actually depends on

Why organisations work with Lucrezia Millarini Fifteen years of live anchoring at ITV News, including the ITV News at Ten and the network’s breaking news announcement of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, translates directly into composure on stage when a session goes off script. Background in law before journalism: a Bristol law degree and barrister training, useful when chairing panels on regulation, policy, or geopolitics, where the questioning needs to land precisely. Genuine breadth across hard news and softer territory. She has reported from the Grenfell inquiry coverage and co-hosted ITV’s Mental Health Special with Martin Lewis, so audiences trust her to handle difficult subject matter without slipping into either solemnity or gloss. Recognisable network face for UK audiences. Booking her signals to delegates that the event is serious enough to warrant a household-name anchor at the lectern. Biography highlights Anchor, ITV News: ITV Lunchtime News, ITV Evening News and ITV News at Ten. Presenter, ITV London evening bulletin; regular reporter for ITV’s documentary series On Assignment. Reported on the RTS award-winning ITV coverage of the Grenfell Tower Fire. Co-host, The Martin Lewis Money Show: Live Mental Health Special and Mortgage Crisis Special. Law graduate, Bristol University; barrister training; postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism, City University, London. Patron, Dogs on the Street and Support Dogs; supporter of Alzheimer’s Society campaigns. Biography Live news anchoring is the closest analogue in television to chairing a senior conference. The host has a fixed window, a moving brief, contributors who may go long or off-piste, and an audience that expects clarity without theatrics. Lucrezia Millarini has done that work on ITV News for more than fifteen years, across the Lunchtime News, the Evening News and the News at Ten. Her route in matters. She read law at Bristol and trained as a barrister before moving to journalism via a postgraduate diploma at City University. That legal grounding shows up in how she questions panellists on regulation, policy and geopolitics, where loose framing produces loose answers. The range of stories she has handled on air is proof of the point for sensitive corporate sessions. She fronted ITV’s RTS award-winning coverage of the Grenfell Tower Fire, broke the news of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in a special announcement in April 2021, and was part of ITV’s team at the Windsor wedding of Harry and Meghan. She has co-hosted ITV’s Mental Health Special with Martin Lewis, and reports for the network’s foreign affairs documentary strand, On Assignment. Corporate clients book her for conference chairing, panel moderation and award hosting. The recurring feedback is composure on stage, warmth with contributors, and a refusal to let a panel meander. For organisations putting a flagship event in front of customers, regulators or the board, those are the variables that actually decide whether the day lands. Key speaking topics Conference chairing and panel moderation Award ceremony and gala hosting Geopolitics and current affairs Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Media, journalism and the modern newsroom Women in leadership and career conversations Ideal for Boards and CEOs commissioning a flagship customer, investor or industry conference where the chair has to hold the room. CHROs and internal communications leads running town halls or all-hands sessions on sensitive topics, including mental health and restructuring. Awards organisers and gala hosts want a recognisable UK broadcast face at the lectern. Audience outcomes A conference agenda that lands as a coherent argument rather than a sequence of unrelated talks. Panels in which the senior contributors are pushed on the points that matter without the session losing pace. Sessions on sensitive subjects, mental health, restructuring, and geopolitical risk, are handled with the steadiness audiences associate with live news. A day that delegates remember for the substance of the conversation, not for the moments that went wrong.

Why organisations work with Matthias Schmitt He has scaled and exited the companies his audience is still inside. wealthpilot reached over 100,000 European customers under his co-founding, and Skigaudi became Germany’s leading student winter festival brand. His Expansion State Method is a named, proprietary coaching framework, not a borrowed model. It is designed specifically for founders navigating the gap between commercial success and personal meaning. He addresses burnout from inside the experience, having walked out of his own companies after hitting it. The credibility with senior operators is earned, not theoretical. He works in the territory most leadership programmes avoid: nervous system regulation, identity after exit, and the practical mechanics of sustaining decision quality under sustained pressure. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific named him to its Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024, which gives the work external editorial validation in a category usually short of it. Biography highlights Co-founder of wealthpilot, a Munich-based FinTech SaaS serving over 100,000 European customers Co-founder of Skigaudi, Germany’s leading winter festival brand for students Founder of the Expansion State Method, a proprietary coaching framework for post-exit founders Named to Entrepreneur Asia Pacific’s Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024 Trained in NLP, behavioural science, nervous system regulation, and meditation as applied to executive performance Works publicly under the title “Chief Fulfillment Officer,” focused on post-exit founders and conscious leaders Biography The exit is supposed to be the win. For many founders, it is also the moment the architecture they built their identity on disappears. The high-performance habits that scaled the company keep firing into an empty room. Matthias Schmitt co-founded wealthpilot, a Munich FinTech that scaled past 100,000 European customers, and Skigaudi, the leading German winter festival brand for students. He exited and hit burnout. The recovery became the work. Today he coaches post-exit entrepreneurs and senior leaders through that transition, using a proprietary framework he calls the Expansion State Method. The practical content draws on NLP, behavioural science, nervous system regulation, and meditation, applied to the specific problem of how senior operators sustain decision quality and meaning after the pressure that organised their lives lifts. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific named him to its Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024. The recognition matters because the category he works in, founder coaching, is crowded with generalists. The differentiator here is operational time served at the level his clients are leaving. Key speaking topics Burnout recovery for founders and senior operators Post-exit identity and purpose Peak performance without collapse Nervous system regulation for high-pressure leadership Sales leadership and revenue performance Purpose-led business building Ideal for Founder communities, scale-up CEO peer groups, and post-exit networks Sales leadership offsites where revenue performance and team wellbeing are both on the table Private wealth and family office audiences working with HNW and UHNW founders Executive development programmes addressing sustained performance and burnout risk at senior levels Audience outcomes A clearer read on where current performance habits are producing diminishing returns Specific practices for nervous system regulation under sustained executive pressure A language for the post-exit transition that senior operators rarely have available Permission to treat fulfilment as a performance variable, not a soft topic

Why organisations work with Nadine Chammas A working background in theatre direction, stage performance and hypnotherapy, applied to the workplace behaviours that leadership programmes usually skip: voice, presence, composure on the floor. Creator of the trademarked TLD Method, delivered as a book, certified course and retreat, which gives clients a defined system rather than a one-off keynote. Two decades operating across the GCC, with audiences in Arabic and English, and a track record of running corporate sessions on emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and executive presence. Author of The Stage is Yours, an Amazon bestseller that frames professional and personal communication through a theatre-director lens. A profile that travels in regional media: weekly counselling sessions on Al Arabiya, and a music output that gives her unusual cultural reach for a corporate trainer. Biography highlights Founder of The Life Director consultancy and creator of the TLD Method, delivered through book, certification course and retreat. BA in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, Lebanese University. Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy; certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy; certified stage hypnotist trained in Las Vegas. Founded Scenez Group Production Company (Dubai, 2000) and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy. Author of The Stage is Yours (Amazon bestseller); subsequent title The Life Director: Presence over Performance. Weekly counselling segments on Al Arabiya; 11 released songs, with two pandemic-era Arabic releases passing 1.2 million YouTube views combined. Biography Presence is a workplace skill, and most professionals are never taught it. Senior leaders are expected to hold a room, settle a difficult conversation, and stay composed under scrutiny, but the training they receive treats those behaviours as personality, not craft. Theatre treats them as craft, and that is where Nadine Chammas comes from. Trained at Lebanese University in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, she built her early career in Dubai through Scenez Group Production Company and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy, running productions across the region and teaching performance to children and adults. Alongside the theatre work she trained as a Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy, completed certification with the American Board of Hypnotherapy, and qualified as a stage hypnotist in Las Vegas. The combination is unusual: stagecraft and behavioural method, applied to how people show up at work. The Life Director is the consultancy that consolidates that work. Her TLD Method is delivered as a book, a certified practitioner course and a retreat, and is positioned for individuals, corporate audiences and educational institutions. The corporate framing is direct: communication and leadership, emotional intelligence and resilience, conflict resolution and team behaviour, executive presence, decision-making under pressure. The Stage is Yours, her Amazon bestseller, sets out the underlying argument that a working life can be approached the same way a director approaches a production. She operates across the GCC and the US, in Arabic and English, with regional media reach through weekly Al Arabiya counselling segments and a music career that runs in parallel to the corporate work. The composite makes her suited to audiences where personal credibility, communication and cultural fluency are part of the brief, not separate from it. Key speaking topics Executive presence and personal branding Communication and influence Emotional intelligence and resilience Conflict resolution and team behaviour Storytelling for leaders Women in leadership Workplace culture and engagement Ideal for HR and L&D leaders commissioning communication, presence and behavioural skills programmes. Corporate audiences across the GCC where Arabic-English fluency and regional cultural read are part of the brief. Women’s leadership networks and conferences. Professional services and client-facing teams whose work depends on how they show up in the room. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for executive presence drawn from theatre and behavioural method, not personality traits. Specific techniques for voice, composure and physical presence under pressure. A clearer sense of how to use storytelling to make a message land with a corporate audience. An honest read on the behaviours that cost senior professionals credibility, and what to do about them.

Why organisations work with Maria Conceicao A first-person account of running a registered charity in Bangladesh for twenty years while financing it through endurance feats few professional athletes attempt. A specific lens on resilience as a long horizon discipline, drawn from summiting Everest and K2, completing the Explorers Grand Slam, and running ultramarathons across seven continents. Concrete material on starting with nothing: from working as a cleaner in Portugal to building an education programme that has served more than 600 children in Dhaka’s slums. A voice that lands with mixed corporate audiences, with keynote appearances at Harvard Alumni events, Mindvalley, and the John C. Maxwell annual event. A founder’s perspective on social impact that is operational, not aspirational. The Maria Cristina Foundation is registered in three jurisdictions and supports active enrolment in Dhaka schools. Biography highlights First Portuguese woman to summit Mount Everest (2013) and K2 (2024). First Portuguese person and 17th woman globally to complete the Explorers Grand Slam (2024). Ten Guinness World Records across ultramarathon, Ironman and endurance disciplines (2014 to 2023). Founder of the Maria Cristina Foundation, established 2005, registered in the UK, USA and Portugal. Author of A Woman on Top of the World (2022), Butterfly Stories Vol 1 and 2 (2023), Altered Path (2023) and The World Needs Superheroes (2024). Keynote speaker for Harvard Alumni events, Mindvalley summits and the John C. Maxwell annual event. Biography A routine layover in Dhaka in the early 2000s set the trajectory. Maria Conceicao was working as an Emirates flight attendant when she walked into the slums of Bangladesh. Within months she had sold her belongings, cancelled a planned trip and returned to set up a school. The Maria Cristina Foundation followed in 2005 and has supported more than 600 children since. Funding a registered charity from a flight attendant’s salary was never going to scale, so the endurance work began. She had no athletic background. She learned to climb, run and swim well enough to set ten Guinness World Records, summit Everest and K2, ski to both poles, and complete the Explorers Grand Slam as the first Portuguese person and the seventeenth woman in the world to finish it. The commercial proposition for corporate audiences is the discipline underneath those numbers. Twenty years of running a foundation in Dhaka through every cycle of regional disruption. Ten records earned without sponsorship infrastructure most professional athletes rely on. Four published books, all written while training and fundraising. Keynote appearances at Harvard Alumni events, Mindvalley and the John C. Maxwell annual event. Her early life is part of the credibility, not a footnote. She lost her adoptive mother Cristina at nine, worked as a cleaner in Portugal as a young woman, and built every credential from there. The foundation is named for Cristina. Key speaking topics Resilience under sustained pressure Self-leadership and composure Purpose-driven leadership Humanitarian entrepreneurship Endurance and goal setting Founder-led social impact Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding engagement after periods of fatigue or restructure Senior leadership offsites focused on resilience and self-leadership Conferences for purpose-led organisations, foundations and ESG functions Female leadership networks and emerging leader programmes Audience outcomes A first-hand account of decision-making at altitude, where margins are physiological and consequences are immediate. A working definition of resilience as a twenty-year practice, not a coping technique. Specific examples of operating a registered charity across three jurisdictions while funding it through personal endurance challenges. A reframing of what is possible from a starting point of no resources, no network and no formal training.

Why organisations work with Tye Caldwell He built a venture-backed marketplace inside an industry with almost no tech infrastructure, took it to more than 1,000 cities, and exited it. The arc is rare and instructive. He pairs 26 years as a working salon operator with the founder seat, giving him operator credibility that pure tech founders cannot replicate. He has been through the full investor cycle, accelerators including Google for Startups, the EY Entrepreneurs Access Network, accelerator wins, growth pressure, and an acquisition under strain. The lessons are first-hand. He addresses economic mobility and the practical mechanics of creating earning opportunities in underserved markets, drawn from a marketplace that did exactly that for independent stylists and barbers. He is comfortable in front of corporate audiences and small business audiences, having spoken at Google, on Rolling Stone Culture Council panels, and at continuing education events where his book is part of the curriculum. Biography highlights Cofounder and former Chief Strategy Officer, ShearShare, acquired November 2024 Winner, Judges’ Favorite, Google Demo Day 2018 (first Texas startup to win) 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort member Pitchbook Black Founder to Watch 2023; Power 100 Business Leaders of Color 2023 Author, “Mentored by Failure: A 5-Point Guide to Long-Term Success in the Beauty & Style Industry,” used in continuing education curricula 26 years as a master barber-stylist and former owner of an award-winning Dallas salon Biography ShearShare started not as an app but as a workaround. Caldwell, running an award-winning Dallas salon, noticed that stylists and barbers wanted day leases rather than long contracts. He spent three years manually matching cosmetologists to empty chairs before building the platform. By the time the company won Judges’ Favorite at Google Demo Day 2018, the operating model had already been pressure-tested by a working salon owner. The company went on to reach more than 1,000 cities, secured a corporate partnership with JC Penney’s salon network, and was selected for the 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort. In November 2024, ShearShare was acquired by a strategic buyer in the industry and the Caldwells exited. The full arc, identification of an underserved category, accelerator traction, growth capital, partnership wins, and an acquisition under financial strain, gives Caldwell unusual range as a commentator on what scale actually costs. He pairs that founder track with 26 years inside the industry he disrupted. He is a master barber-stylist, an educator, an advisory board member for beauty schools, and the author of “Mentored by Failure,” a #1 bestselling guide used in continuing education curricula. Operator credibility runs through the work, not as a marketing line but as the source of the thesis. His most cited talks address how to lead a startup when the seat is peerless, how to translate operator expertise into a tech founder’s commercial vocabulary, and how marketplaces can be designed to move earnings into underserved communities. He has been recognised as a Pitchbook Black Founder to Watch and a Power 100 Business Leader of Color, and his work has been profiled in Fast Company, the New York Times, Forbes and TechCrunch. Key speaking topics B2B marketplace founding and scaling Operator-to-tech-founder transition Economic mobility through platform design Startup CEO resilience and decision-making Co-founder partnerships and founder relationships Accelerator and venture capital experience Small business growth in the beauty and services industry Ideal for Founders, scale-up CEOs, and venture-backed leadership teams Corporate innovation, marketplace and platform business unit leads Diversity and supplier development teams sourcing operator-credible voices Industry associations and continuing education programmes in beauty, barbering and services Audience outcomes A founder account of building a marketplace inside a low-tech, fragmented industry The operational reality of moving from owner-operator to venture-backed CEO Specifics on how accelerators, corporate partnerships and capital cycles played out across one company’s arc A practitioner view of how marketplace design can create earnings access in underserved markets Direct lessons from an acquisition under financial pressure, not a polished exit narrative

Why organisations work with Britteny Floyd-Mayo She built a recognised consumer wellness brand, Trap Yoga Bae®, that reaches audiences who feel ostracised by standard wellness content. That gives her credibility with employees who tune out the corporate version. Her work sits at the intersection of wellbeing and inclusion, two budgets that increasingly need to be defended together. She speaks to both without separating them. She delivers in formats most wellness speakers cannot: a 45-minute movement and music-led experience as comfortably as a keynote or workshop. That makes her useful for offsites, conferences, and ERG events where a talk alone would not move the room. She has been programmed alongside mainstream consumer brands (Lululemon, Eventbrite, Essence Festival), which signals she can hold a corporate stage without softening the cultural specificity that makes the work distinctive. Biography highlights Founder of Trap Yoga Bae®, a trademarked inclusive wellness brand combining yoga, hip-hop culture, and self-care. Studied Positive Psychology and Social Behavioral Studies at Dillard University and Holy Names University. Certified in Vinyasa yoga in India. Named in Forbes among the top 8 Black Wellness experts to watch. Featured in Issa Rae’s HBO Max series Sweet Life. Speaker and featured artist for Lululemon, Eventbrite, Brit + Co, Black Girls Code, Black Joy Parade, and the 25th Annual Essence Festival. Biography Most corporate wellness and inclusion programming is built for a default employee. The people it most needs to reach, those who already feel like outsiders in the room, are the ones who quietly opt out. Britteny Floyd-Mayo built her brand inside that gap. Trap Yoga Bae® started as a response to feeling unwelcome in standard yoga studios. It grew into a trademarked wellness movement that pairs yoga and meditation with hip-hop, cultural specificity, and direct language. The work is taken seriously enough that Forbes has named her among the top Black wellness experts to watch, and that Issa Rae cast her in the HBO Max series Sweet Life. The educational backbone is real. She studied Positive Psychology and Social Behavioral Studies at Dillard University and Holy Names University, and trained for Vinyasa certification in India. That foundation is why the talks travel beyond the yoga mat into burnout, boundary-setting, and the working conditions that shape mental health for women and employees of colour. For organisations, the practical question she answers is uncomfortable but useful. Why are the people your wellbeing and inclusion programmes were designed for the ones most likely to disengage from them, and what does a version look like that they would actually choose? She has built a partnership list (Lululemon, Eventbrite, Black Girls Code, Essence Festival) that suggests the answer travels. Key speaking topics Inclusive wellbeing and self-care Burnout prevention for women founders and leaders Boundary-setting at work Mental health and resilience Cultural relevance in DEI and wellness programming Entrepreneurship and personal brand-building Employee Resource Group (ERG) keynotes and experiences Ideal for Heads of DEI, ERG leads, and culture teams running inclusion or wellbeing programming for Black employees and other under-served groups. CHROs and benefits leaders looking to refresh wellbeing offerings that have stopped landing. Women’s leadership networks and founder communities focused on burnout and boundary-setting. Conference and offsite programmers needing an experiential keynote rather than a panel discussion. Audience outcomes Practical language for setting boundaries without apology, drawn from her No Is A Full Sentence framework. A different reference point for what inclusive wellbeing looks like in practice, not in policy. Specific tools from the From Pain to Paradise method for processing setback and burnout. An experience employees describe afterwards as theirs, not the company’s, which is the test most wellbeing programmes fail.

Why organisations work with Sir Gareth Southgate His England management tenure is the subject of a published case study at Harvard Business School – one of the few occasions in sport where a coaching approach has been formally codified as an executive leadership model. He rebuilt a national team culture from a position of public failure and sustained performance across four consecutive major tournaments. That track record gives his thinking on culture change and sustained delivery a foundation most leadership authors lack. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Sunday Times instant bestseller, 2025) sets out the specific reasoning behind his decisions under pressure – on accountability, psychological safety, selection, and standing behind unpopular choices – in a form directly applicable to organisational leadership. He led through personal, very public failure – the Euro ’96 penalty miss that defined a decade of his public identity – and through two consecutive tournament final defeats. His account of resilience starts from having lived the worst-case scenario, not from having studied it. During intense national debates on race, identity, and protest, he articulated a values position publicly and held a diverse squad together through that pressure. Organisations navigating social or political tension inside teams get a practitioner account of what that demands in practice. Biography highlights England men’s senior manager 2016-2024; 102 matches, 61 wins – more major tournament games won than any other England manager in history Only the second England manager to reach a major tournament final, after Sir Alf Ramsey in 1966; reached consecutive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 Knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025; previously appointed OBE in 2019 Visiting lecturer at Harvard Business School; his England tenure is the subject of a published HBS leadership case study Author of Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Cornerstone, 2025) – an instant Sunday Times bestseller; delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as past speakers in the series Two-time BBC Sports Personality of the Year Coach Award (2018 and 2021); playing career spanning over 500 appearances for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, and Middlesbrough, with 57 England caps Biography When Gareth Southgate took charge of England in 2016, the national team had just been knocked out of the Euros by Iceland. Public confidence was at a low. Over eight years and four major tournaments, he rebuilt the team’s culture entirely. The result was consecutive European Championship finals and a record for the most major tournament games won by any England manager. His approach is now the subject of a case study taught at Harvard Business School. The method was deliberate cultural architecture rather than tactical adjustment. Southgate prioritised psychological safety, shared values, and a team identity that held under pressure. His open letter to England fans during COVID-19 inspired the award-winning West End play Dear England. It demonstrated how he treated transparency and personal vulnerability as leadership tools, not liabilities. Southgate delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as previous speakers in the series. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership became an instant Sunday Times bestseller; the Guardian described it as articulating a moral vision that went beyond the reach of contemporary British politics. He was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025 for services to association football. The fractured starting point, intense public accountability, and need to build individual and collective performance simultaneously – these are not challenges unique to sport. His insights are drawn from eight consecutive years at the sharp end of that problem, not from theory. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained public scrutiny Culture transformation and team identity Values-based accountability Resilience and performance through failure Psychological safety and trust in high-stakes teams Inclusive leadership and diversity of thought Decision-making in high-pressure environments Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural or strategic transformation CHROs and people leaders working on team culture, inclusion, and performance under pressure Board-level and executive leadership development programmes Organisations in high-scrutiny sectors – financial services, public institutions, large consumer-facing businesses – where leadership decisions carry public accountability Audience outcomes A concrete model for building values-led culture that outlasts individual results cycles First-hand perspective on decision-making under public pressure: how values, not tactics, determine outcomes over time Practical insight into what psychological safety looks like in a high-accountability, high-visibility environment A framework for holding team identity together through failure, scrutiny, and competing stakeholder demands An honest account of how personal and public setback can become the foundation of leadership credibility rather than a liability

Why organisations work with Otmar Szafnauer He has run a Formula 1 constructor through administration and out the other side with the workforce intact, a credential almost no other operational leader on the speaking circuit can claim. He led the same team across three brand identities, Force India, Racing Point and Aston Martin, which gives him direct experience of the gap between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand in the engineering hall. His technical grounding, an engineering degree paired with operational roles at Ford, BAR, Honda and Force India, means board audiences get specifics on how decisions actually move through a complex organisation, not motivational abstractions. He has worked under three very different ownership cultures, from Vijay Mallya at Force India to Lawrence Stroll at Racing Point and Renault Group at Alpine, and can speak credibly about leading inside contested governance structures. Biography highlights Team Principal and CEO, Racing Point F1 and Aston Martin F1, 2018 to January 2022. Team Principal, BWT Alpine F1 Team, February 2022 to July 2023. Senior leadership at Force India from October 2009, including the team’s 2016 and 2017 fourth-place Constructors’ Championship finishes. Former Vice President, Honda Racing Developments, after entering F1 as Operations Director at British American Racing in 1998. Founder and Chairman, Soft Pauer, publisher of the official Formula 1 Timing iPhone app launched in 2009. BSc Electrical Engineering, Wayne State University; master’s in Business and Finance, University of Detroit Mercy. Biography Force India was placed in administration in mid-2018 after Vijay Mallya’s financial collapse. The garage was full of staff who had been approached by other teams, and a technical director the rivals very much wanted. The team came out of that summer with most of its people still in their seats. Otmar Szafnauer was the operational leader who kept them there. That period is the centre of his value to a serious audience. Across more than a decade running the same Silverstone constructor under three brands, Force India, Racing Point and finally Aston Martin, he saw what holds a high-performance organisation together when ownership, identity and strategy all change at once. The answer turned out to be unglamorous: honesty in front of the workforce, continuity of technical leadership, and a refusal to let the rebrand outrun the operating reality. His route into that role was deliberate. An electrical engineering degree from Wayne State, an MBA in finance from Detroit Mercy, then Ford, then Formula 1 from 1998 onwards, including a Vice President role at Honda Racing Developments. The result is a leader who can speak to engineers and to a board, and who treats culture as something built on calendar-blocked decisions about hiring, accountability and recognition rather than slogans. His later move to Alpine, where he served as Team Principal from 2022 until July 2023, gives the picture its second half. Running an OEM-owned team under Renault Group meant operating inside a corporate governance structure, with all of the political weight that implies. Few operators have led both an independent privateer and a manufacturer-owned team at the same level, and the contrast is the substance of what he can say to leaders managing similar shifts of their own. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership Leadership through restructure and ownership change Culture, accountability and psychological safety in elite environments Operational decision-making under time and resource pressure Lessons from three decades inside Formula 1 leadership Building and retaining technical talent in competitive markets Ideal for Boards and executive teams navigating ownership change, M&A integration or a corporate rebrand CHROs and people leaders responsible for retaining critical talent through periods of uncertainty Senior operators in technical and engineering-led organisations Leadership development audiences focused on composure and decision quality under pressure Audience outcomes A working sense of what leadership actually does for a workforce when ownership and strategy are in flux Specific examples of how culture, retention and accountability hold up in genuinely high-stakes environments A practical view of the difference between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand inside the operating organisation Confidence that the lessons translate, drawn from a domain where the consequences of poor decisions are visible every fortnight

Why organisations work with Bradley Scanes Five seasons inside the Red Bull Racing operation during four consecutive Verstappen world titles, with direct ownership of preparation, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and rehabilitation. The reference point is operational, not anecdotal. A career that crosses Olympic gymnastics, Olympic basketball, Premier League football medical leadership, and motorsport, which means his framing of high performance is not tied to one sport’s culture. Clinical foundations through the NHS plus two postgraduate physiotherapy degrees, which gives him a physiological grounding most performance speakers in this category do not have. Active current practice with endurance racing teams at Le Mans and Daytona and with Ironman World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay, so the examples are current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Five-year tenure as Human Performance Consultant and Physiotherapist at Red Bull Racing, working directly with Max Verstappen, 2019 to 2024 Four-year Olympic cycle as performance coach with British Gymnastics, including work with Max Whitlock Four years with Team GB Olympic Basketball Former Head of Medical at Southend United FC; clinical foundation in the NHS BSc Sport and Exercise Science (Loughborough); MSc Physiotherapy; MSc Advanced Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy and Research (distinction) Founder and Director of Elite Formula PT; creator of the Complete Sports Practitioner mentorship programme and the Formula 1 Series Course Biography Formula 1 has the shortest feedback loop in elite performance. Decisions made on Thursday show up in a stopwatch on Sunday, and the operating environment inside a top team is built around removing every variable that could cost a tenth of a second. For five seasons, that environment was Bradley Scanes’ workplace. As Human Performance Consultant and Physiotherapist at Red Bull Racing from 2019 to 2024, he was responsible for Max Verstappen’s physical preparation, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and rehabilitation across the four world championship campaigns that defined the team’s modern era. The work sat inside an organisation of more than 1,800 staff where a pit stop is measured in tenths and a tyre temperature is a strategic input. The route in was unusual. Loughborough sport science, then a Masters in physiotherapy, then a second Masters in advanced musculoskeletal physiotherapy with distinction. NHS clinical work. Head of Medical at Southend United FC. Four years with Team GB Olympic Basketball and a full Olympic cycle with British Gymnastics, including campaigns with Max Whitlock. By the time he reached Red Bull, the question of how athletes perform under pressure had been examined from five different sports and two clinical settings. He now runs Elite Formula PT, coaches Ironman World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay, and works across endurance racing teams competing at Le Mans and Daytona. The training programmes he has written for the next generation of sports practitioners, including the Formula 1 Series Course, are taught from inside that current practice, which is why senior corporate audiences come away with operating language they can actually use the following Monday. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Recovery and sleep as performance variables Team execution under pressure Marginal gains and continuous improvement Safety, risk and learning culture in elite sport Leadership lessons from Formula 1 Composure and decision-making under load Ideal for Executive leadership teams stress-testing how they perform under sustained pressure Operations and transformation leaders looking at cycle time, error rate, and team execution Sales and commercial leadership teams preparing for high-stakes quarters People and talent leaders rebuilding cultures around recovery, focus and sustained output Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for recovery, sleep, and composure as measurable inputs to senior performance A concrete picture of how a top F1 team reduces error and increases cycle precision under time pressure Reference points from Olympic and motorsport environments that translate to corporate execution A sharper sense of how elite teams treat safety, risk and learning culture as performance levers rather than compliance

Why organisations work with Tom Coleman He brings clinical sleep science into operational contexts where it actually changes behaviour, including shift-working teams, elite sport and high-pressure corporate environments. His client base spans nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies along with Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Roche, Deloitte and Samsung, demonstrating that the content lands across regulated, industrial and consumer-facing workforces. He works with institutional partners that most wellbeing speakers do not, including An Garda Siochana on officer resilience and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on shift-working nurses. His framing treats burnout and recovery as biology, not motivation, which gives senior leaders a defensible language for investment decisions on workforce health. Biography highlights Honours Degree in Public Health and qualified health scientist. Resident sleep expert for Bauer Media, with regular contributions to Newstalk and Today FM. Consultant to An Garda Siochana on health and resilience strategy for serving officers. Collaborator with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on educational material for shift-working healthcare staff. Corporate clients include Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Roche, Deloitte, Samsung, eBay, PayPal, AIB, Dropbox, DHL and Irish Rail. Has worked with Olympic and elite athletes on sleep analytics and recovery. Biography Most wellbeing programmes treat sleep as a personal problem. Coleman treats it as an operating risk. His work translates clinical sleep science into inputs that organisations can actually manage, including shift schedules, recovery protocols and executive workload. The grounding is academic and applied. An Honours Degree in Public Health, qualification as a health scientist, and over a decade of consulting with corporate and elite-sport clients give him a base most wellness speakers cannot match. He has worked with Olympic athletes on recovery analytics, with An Garda Siochana on officer resilience, and with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on educational content for shift-working nurses. The corporate footprint is substantial. Nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies have used his programmes, alongside Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Roche, Deloitte, Samsung, eBay, PayPal, AIB, Dropbox and Irish Rail. The work is consistent across very different operating models, which is what gives senior buyers confidence that this is a scalable intervention rather than a single-keynote topic. As Bauer Media’s resident sleep expert in Ireland, he is the voice most regularly consulted by Newstalk and Today FM on sleep and recovery. That media role keeps the content sharp, current and accessible to non-specialist audiences, which matters when the brief is a board offsite or an all-hands rather than a clinical seminar. Key speaking topics Sleep science in the workplace Burnout prevention and recovery Shift work and circadian performance Recovery for high-pressure roles Stress, fatigue and decision quality Health and longevity for executives Ideal for CHROs and heads of wellbeing redesigning health and resilience strategy Operations leaders accountable for shift-working populations in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics or emergency services Executive teams under sustained workload pressure where recovery is the bottleneck Talent and engagement leaders looking to move beyond mindfulness app procurement Audience outcomes A clear separation between fatigue, stress and burnout, with different organisational responses for each Specific behavioural inputs that improve sleep quality, applicable to executives and shift workers alike A defensible business case for recovery as a performance variable rather than a benefits line item Practical structures for managers responsible for high-pressure or round-the-clock teams

Why organisations work with Thomas Kolditz A research base built where it counts. His framework on in extremis leadership draws on more than 175 field interviews conducted during combat operations in Iraq, giving senior teams something more rigorous than borrowed military metaphors. A command record at scale. Twelve years leading the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point, plus a flag officer career, give him a standing few academic speakers can match when addressing CEOs and boards on decision-making under pressure. A measurable model for leader development. As founding director of Rice University’s Doerr Institute, he built a programme recognised in 2019 as the top university leader development effort by the Association of Leadership Educators, with methods documented in Leadership Reckoning. Direct relevance to crisis governance. His work on dodging crisis, leading through tragedy, and building leadership capability in legacy organisations speaks to boards under live operational and reputational stress, not abstract resilience theory. A bridge between military, academic, and corporate audiences. Yale School of Management appointed him to run its Leadership Development Program; Rice trusted him to design theirs from a blank page. Both translate cleanly into how he works with executive teams. Biography highlights Founding Director, Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University. Retired Brigadier General, U.S. Army; former head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point for twelve years. Former Professor in the Practice of Leadership and Director of the Leadership Development Program, Yale School of Management. Author, In Extremis Leadership: Leading As If Your Life Depended On It, Jossey-Bass, in the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum series. Co-author, Leadership Reckoning: Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need?, with Libby Gill and Ryan P. Brown. Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership; Fellow of the American Psychological Association; U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal. Biography The leaders most worth studying are not those who perform well in stable conditions. They are the ones whose followers believe their lives, careers, or institutions are genuinely at risk. That observation became the basis for one of the more rigorous bodies of research on extreme leadership, drawn from more than 175 field interviews during combat operations in Iraq and published as In Extremis Leadership. The author of that work spent twelve years running the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point and retired as a Brigadier General. Yale School of Management then appointed him to lead its Leadership Development Program. Rice University asked him to build the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders from scratch, with the brief of creating the most evidence-based university leader development programme in the world. The Doerr Institute did not stay theoretical. By 2019, the Association of Leadership Educators named it the top university leader development programme in the country, and Global Gurus ranked it fourth in the world. The methodology behind that result is documented in Leadership Reckoning, co-authored with Libby Gill and Ryan P. Brown, which makes the case that most leader development efforts cannot prove they work and shows what a defensible alternative looks like. That combination of fieldwork in lethal environments, command authority, and measurable institution building is why he is invited into boardrooms where the question is not what leadership means in the abstract but what it produces under pressure. Recognition includes the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership, fellowship of the American Psychological Association, and the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal. Key speaking topics In extremis, leadership and decision-making under threat Crisis leadership and avoiding institutional crisis Leader development as a measurable discipline Composure and judgement at a senior level Innovation leadership inside legacy organisations Building leadership capability across an enterprise Ideal for CEOs, boards, and executive committees facing operational, reputational, or regulatory crisis exposure Chief Human Resources Officers and Chief Learning Officers are responsible for senior leader development Military, public sector, and high-hazard industry leadership audiences University presidents, provosts, and trustees are rebuilding leadership formation on campus Audience outcomes A working model for what changes in leader behaviour when the stakes shift from comfortable to consequential A clearer view of why most leader development programmes cannot demonstrate impact, and what to require instead Specific reference points from combat, aviation, and skydiving environments were translated for commercial decision-making A framework for treating composure, presence, and judgement as trainable senior-leader capabilities Practical guidance on leading through tragedy, restructuring, or reputational shock without losing organisational coherence