Michael Hardy

Mike Hardy is Professor of Intercultural Relations at Coventry University and Adjunct Professor of Leadership at ICB, LSPR Indonesia where his research asks how public institutions lead when crises arrive together rather than in sequence.

Trained as a development economist, he spent sixteen years as a diplomat with British Council, finishing on its Global Leadership Team, with postings in Cairo, East Jerusalem and Jakarta. That practice — negotiating between communities in the Levant, co-leading a $25m World Bank programme in Gaza and the West Bank, designing dialogue processes across Europe and the Middle East — supplies the evidence base for the research rather than sitting apart from it.

Moving back to Higher Education in 2011, he founded Coventry’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations in 2013 (now the Centre for Peace and Security) and directed it until 2020, building it to eighty+ staff working in more than forty countries, securing £20m in core investment and transforming Coventry's research profile in Politcics and International Relations. His current home at 0.6 FTE is the Centre for Resilient Business and Society alongside the Public Leadership Lab. He was Board Chair of the International Leadership Association (ILA, from 2018-2025.

His recent work centres on navigational leadership: how leaders act when conditions change faster than strategy can be revised. A forthcoming Cambridge Elements volume, Navigational Leadership for Complex Times: Steering Through Polycrisis, sets out the framework. Related work with the Center for Creative Leadership and the International Leadership Association examines what global leadership requires next.

He works extensively in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, holds an adjunct chair at LSPR Jakarta and retains working Bahasa Indonesia. He was a visiting scholar at the International Leadership Center at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and sits on ICESCO’s International Advisory Board.

He supervises doctoral candidates working on leadership, faith and intercultural relations, and security.

•          Public leadership; adaptive and navigational leadership in conditions of polycrisis

•          Leadership in and of crisis

•          Social cohesion and cohesive societies

•          Intercultural and interfaith dialogue; pluralism and multiculturalism

•          Peace, human security and protective security

•          Cultural heritage and peace (Peace4Culture)