Contact Paul Hughes
- Email: Paul.Hughes@cranfield.ac.uk
Background
Paul is a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management. In 2010 he joined Cranfield School of Management to move into the field of corporate education and leadership development, where he became the Head of the Praxis Centre for Leadership Development. Since leaving Cranfield in 2017, he has worked as a director for the Center for Creative Leadership, IE Business School, and latterly, Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning, where he was director for custom leadership development programmes in EMEA and APAC. He has returned to Cranfield as a Visiting Fellow in 2024 to focus on his love of working directly with organisations and their leaders in addressing their leadership challenges and spend more time focussing on his research interests.
He began his career in the legal profession, but decided on a commercial career instead, taking on ever more senior leadership positions until he was leading multi-million-pound businesses. After a switch to management consultancy, where he rose to the position of international director.
Current activities
He balances a strategic perspective with a highly practical approach. He enjoys connecting the client’s context, organisational and underlying challenges with real world leader actions and impact. He combines real-world hands-on experience as a senior director leader in a range of roles with his experience in the leadership development space. And he retains a strong drive for honing his own skills, research interests and qualifications. As such, he describes himself as a 'pracademic': practical, but with academic credentials.
He holds a Law degree (Aberdeen University, 1992), an MBA (University of Ulster, 2003) and a Doctorate in Business Administration focusing on the relationship between leadership and performance (Cranfield School of Management, 2017). He is a Fellow of the Centre for Evidence Based Management, a member of the British Psychological Society and holds certification in a multitude of psychometrics, profiling instruments and business simulations.
Despite his academic accomplishments and ‘business’ focus, Paul has a human centred, practical and often fun approach to helping leaders grow and develop. He specialises in helping leaders challenge themselves to find and close their gaps in focused and pragmatic ways; often addressing underlying themes. He has a strong track record in producing practical insights and actionable steps, often identifying wider organisational themes as he does so.