Rob is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and management consultant with 20 years’ consulting experience in both public and private sectors. He has a solid track record of setting up and growing successful business consultancies.
Specialising in culture and behaviour change, training, coaching, leadership development and assessment, Rob has extensive experience of consulting to world class FTSE 100 companies , public sector organisations and social enterprises. He has also worked abroad, most recently in senior leadership development within the UAE.
Rob’s main area of expertise is in applying contextual behavioural science to the workplace. He has worked with a host of blue-chip clients from 3M, BP, PWC, Bain & Co, Mars, Royal Bank of Canada, Schroders, Allen & Overy and Linklaters, as well as with elite sporting teams.
Rob has just led the world’s largest randomised control trial of ACT-based resilience training in the workplace.
Prior to becoming a psychologist, Rob was a management consultant with two world-class consultancies, where he worked on large-scale organisational development and change projects.
He was part of the team which established Serco Consulting, now a leading UK management consultancy. At PA Consulting, he was part of the team which won a Management Consultancy Award for Best Strategy and Business Transformation project.
Rob is currently involved in building three businesses:
- The Career Psychologist. This coaching business offers help to those who are stuck in terms of career direction. Through a combination of applied psychology, decision sciences, psychometric tests and 1 to 1 sessions, The Career Psychologist helps get people unstuck and moving through their career change with purpose.
- Cognacity. Rob is a Director at this fast growing performance consultancy, where his main areas of focus are in culture and behaviour change, employee engagement and resilience.
- Working with ACT. Working with ACT is pioneering the use of Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) in the workplace. ACT is an evidence-based intervention which has been shown to build resilience, performance and wellbeing in the workplace. Along with Rachel Collis, we offer training courses and consultancy which use the latest in applied behavioural science to solve common business problems and build sustainable performance.
Rob writes regularly on the psychology of career change on his blogs, Headstuck! and Working with ACT.
He is a keen but deteriorating sportsman, and once appeared on Channel 4’s Faking It, where he taught a dog to dance in a field.
For more information, here’s Rob’s LinkedIn profile.
Working with ACT 
Dear Rachel and Bob, my name is Juan Jacobo Sarmiento, I am an organizational consultant and a certified coach, I am a Colombian citizen and a i live in Bogotá. Since I attended a conference with Kelly G. Wilson in the Los Andes University, in January of this year, I have been investigating and enriching my knowledge about Psychological Flexibility. I really like “ACT at the workplace” methodology, it appears powerful to me. I am convinced that it can produce strong systemic and evolutionary changes in people and organizations. It can also make people´s lifes healthier and more satisfactory, and definitively happier.
I have become a regular reader of your publications. I really appreciate the work you do and I want to thank you both for getting all this valuable information available to the public.
Sorry is Rob !!!
Dear Juan,
I quite like the name Bob and might stick with it! Thank you for getting in touch. Our blog exists for people like you. Our aim is to take contextual behavioural science into the workplace, to make organisations work better – for themselves, for the staff, stakeholders and for the planet. We are convinced, like you, that we can produce “strong systemic and evolutionary changes in people and organizations” and we think that psychological flexibility is key to this.
So let me end with a request and a challenge. My request is that you keep reading, keep commenting and keep thinking about how these ideas apply to your work. The challenge is to help us develop by questioning us, asking for information about particular topics important to you and contributing to the site with your own blog posts.
Could you be willing to extend our reach still further? Could your voice help bring ACT to the workplace in Colombia?
with warm regards,
Rob