Chris Roebuck Speaking Topics

• Flying Start 2026

  One of the major challenges which organizations face is the clear drop in energy and focus on delivery into the end of the year and, in particular, when the New Year starts.

  Chris Roebuck's Flying Start keynote uses his proven Accelerate Your Success six-step roadmap to create a six-month plan to continuously build momentum from the beginning of the year.

  Even before the keynote is over, everyone in the audience gets real return on investment by having that roadmap, finding half a day a week more time to be more successful, and having an action they will immediately take to start the journey.

• Accelerate Your Success: High Performance Leadership

  The reality: most leaders are under performing by at least 10% on what’s possible but they can’t because they haven’t been given the knowledge they need. That locks them in a “too much work” and “not enough time” vicious circle. The impact is significant:

  • Less than 15% of employees giving their best
  • Organizational performance 24% under potential
  • Profitability 10% + under potential

  Accelerate Your Success gives leaders a road map to become high performing and recover this lost 10%+ in 3 powerful steps.

  Chris Roebuck is an expert on high performance leadership and has personal experience of both delivering this himself and developing high performing leaders in the military, business, and government. In business he has worked organizations as diverse as BASF, BD Pharmaceutical, UBS and the Chinese Space Programme on this topic.

  How will your leaders perform better?

  They will be able to:

  • Optimize task delivery – e.g. prioritize, plan, delegate, communicate and give feedback more effectively.
  • Get the best from people – taking critical day to day actions proven to maximize effort at no cost.
  • Better align team activity to deliver strategic objectives – eg 20% greater strategic impact The imact of these could potentially add 10% onto bottom line for free.

• Getting the Best from Everyone to Accelerate Success

  At present, less than 20% of employees in organizations are giving their best from Gallup data. So 80% aren’t. In the UK, its 10%, costing the country £260bn.

  That has massive implications for all areas of organizational activity – team performance, customer service, cost efficiency, risk management, strategy implementation, profitability.

  Organizationally, it potentially means:

  • 10% lower customer loyalty
  • 78% greater absenteeism
  • 14% less productivity

  Beating the problem is built into the Accelerate Your Success system – Chris Roebuck has studied employee engagement, written articles on it, featured it in his books, and shown leaders how to improve it for many organizations such as KPMG, Tata Communications and HSBC.

  What will better employee engagement deiver for you?

  Accelerate Your Success has been proven to enable leaders to significantly boost employee engagement, e.g. in a UK house construction company where in two years, the engagement score for “I would recommend this as a great place to work for friends or family” went from 40% to 82%.

  Also error rates down, quality assessments up, profits up.

  Chris shows your leaders how to take action which will grow engagement to deliver:

  • 23% higher profitability
  • 70% greater employee well being
  • 87% less talent loss

• Thriving in Uncertainty: Successful Culture & Change

  The often quoted line that 80% of change initiatives fail is actually a misquote. It’s that 70% fail to deliver the benefits expected.

  To be able to move from “business as usual” to “business of the future” requires a positive culture for effective change, but the problem is that in most organizations, the demographics are against that happening:

  • Only 15% of people will want to implement initially
  • About 70% will be sitting on the fence watching how it goes
  • And 15% won’t want to make the change.

  That’s a problem. Only having 15% who want to implement is not a critical mass to deliver success. More are needed because 4 undecided for every 1 happy is not enough to get everyone to adopt.

  Chris Roebuck has led work on several successful major transformations in organizations as diverse as London Underground, UBS, UK National Health Service. The transformation at UBS is now a Harvard case study on successful change in uncertainty. Chris was Hon Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School 2009-22.

  How can Accelerate Your Success make change and transformation work?

  Effective leaders who engage people create a culture where increased effort, up to 30% from 60% of people, can be aligned onto your transformation. This can then move the demographics of your employee population to:

  • 30% willing to implement
  • 55% watching to see what happens
  • 15% won’t want to make the change.

  This now gives you only 2 undecided for every 1 happy to implement. This is now likely to enable success.

• Implementing AI in the Real World With Real People: Human Centric Leadership for AI

  AI is being implemented with varying degrees of success. Harvard Business Review suggests a current 80% failure rate.

  Where a valid use case exists, the potential is there for AI achieve significant benefits. But two critical problems are appearing – failure to accurately identify good use cases and then failure to implement.

  AI will never be implemented effectively without HI (Human Intelligence). Leaders need to be able to :

  • Identify use cases – business focused outcomes
  • Build employee capability to use AI
  • Engage employees to want to use AI
  • Deal with ethical concerns
  • Implement effectively

  How can Accelerate Your Success help with AI implementation?

  By equipping leaders with the skills to create an environment where:

  • New skills and knowledge can be quickly developed
  • People are open to change to build a business of the future
  • Leaders can identify use cases more effectively
  • A collaborative culture exists between technical experts, leaders and employees. Leaders need to take a Human Centric approach to AI to be successful.

  Chris has spoken on the human challenges of AI implmentation to audiences such as HR leaders and Chief Digital Officers.

Read More +