Debra Sabatini Hennelly helps organizations create cultures of candor, wellbeing, and integrity, which are essential to team effectiveness, innovation, and organizational resilience. She helps leaders and teams address obstacles to ethical decision-making and psychological safety, increasing collaboration, wellbeing, and productivity. She also advises and coaches compliance and legal professionals, helping them lead effectively and develop strategies for personal resilience.  

Professor Hennelly is the founder and president of Resiliti (originally, as “Compliance & Ethics Solutions” in 2004), providing advisory services and experiential learning, focusing on culture, ethical leadership, and holistic risk management. She is also a certified “Elephant Rider” Practitioner, using Riders & Elephants’ Emotional Culture facilitation techniques to help inspire emotional awareness, candor, and connection with leaders and teams. She also holds a Certificate in Wellness Counseling from Cornell University.  

Professor Hennelly has served as adjunct faculty for BP and other organizations, facilitating small-group workshops and interactive learning for their employees, managers, senior executives and board directors in ethical leadership, creating psychological safety and cultures of integrity, multigenerational collaboration, resilience and burnout prevention.

Professor Hennelly frequently speaks at conferences, has been interviewed on several podcasts, and writes on several platforms. She has co-authored three articles for Harvard Business Review: “Resilient Organizations Make Psychological Safety a Strategic Priority,”  “Bridging Generational Divides in Your Workplace,” and “How ‘Carewashing’ Alienates Employees.”  She is also the author of the book, Presence in Chaos – 365 Mindful Moments.

For more than 30 years, Professor Hennelly has been creating innovative approaches to fostering ethical leadership—from boardrooms to break rooms—with organizations ranging from small entities to some of the largest multinationals. Her pragmatic approach is informed by her engineering and legal background and decades of corporate leadership, C-suite, and advisory roles in compliance and ethics, legal, environment and safety, and strategic management—including serving as general counsel and chief compliance officer for two chemical companies, reporting to their CEOs and their Boards of Directors. Her experience holding senior in-house roles in public and private companies, and working in two ethics and compliance service providers, has enabled her to acquire an uncommon perspective from both sides of the client/vendor relationship.

Prior to her corporate experience, Professor Hennelly practiced environmental law with firms in Washington, DC, and New Jersey. Before practicing law, she was a civil/environmental engineer and supervised construction in the oil and gas industry.

Professor Hennelly earned her B.S.E. In Civil/Environmental Engineering from Duke University and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

Prior to her corporate experience, Professor Hennelly practiced law with two major law firms in Washington, DC, and New Jersey. Before practicing law, she was a civil and environmental engineer, supervising construction for Exxon. 

Professor Hennelly is a member of the Society of Human Resource Management and the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics. She frequently speaks at conferences (SCCE, ECI, NSCP, PLI, NACD, others) and writes on several platforms.

Professor Hennelly earned her B.S.E. in Civil/Environmental Engineering from Duke University and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

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