Debra Sabatini Hennelly

Debra Sabatini Hennelly helps organizations create cultures of candor, inclusion, 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. Debbie also advises and coaches ethics and compliance professionals, helping them lead effectively and develop strategies for personal resilience. She holds a Certificate in Wellness Counseling from Cornell University. Debbie is the founder and president of Resiliti (resiliti.com), providing advisory services and experiential learning that focus on ethical leadership, ESG (environment/social/ governance), holistic risk management, and resilience—and incorporating those insights into operations and culture. She is also an adjunct professor in Fordham University Law School’s Program on Corporate Ethics & Compliance, a Master of Studies in Law (M.S.L.) program. For more than 25 years, Debbie 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 meeting quarterly with their Boards of Directors. Her experience holding senior in-house roles in public and private companies, as well as 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, Debbie 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. Debbie frequently speaks at conferences, has been interviewed on several podcasts, and writes on several platforms. Most recently, she 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." Debbie earned her B.S.E. In Civil/Environmental Engineering from Duke University and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.