Robb Ellis

Robb Ellis is a technical educator, troubleshooter, and author whose working life spans more than forty-five years across retail management, law enforcement, plumbing and heating, and professional education. Along the way, he has trained police officers, helped technicians work through difficult service calls, taught high school students, and worked with young people through Scouting and community programs.

Today, Robb develops and delivers technical training throughout New England through his work at FIA, Inc. His teaching helps people understand how systems work and become more confident figuring out what happens when they don’t. He also serves on the Select Board in Barnstead, New Hampshire, where troubleshooting occasionally involves fewer tools and considerably longer meetings.

His first book, Leadership Troubleshooting: Lessons Hidden Inside the Experiences We Thought We Understood, brings together stories from those different parts of his life. Some involve good mentors and unexpected successes. Others involve mistakes, assumptions, and lessons he needed considerably more time to understand. Through them, Robb explores how leaders create the relationships, environments, and opportunities that help people grow—and how often that work begins with reconsidering their own diagnosis.

Robb writes with the same conversational approach he brings to the classroom, including a willingness to acknowledge when he was part of the problem. His perspective has been shaped as much by the people he has taught as by those who taught him.

He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, Kristen. They have three sons, three grandchildren, and a dog named Bear, whose enthusiasm for Robb’s work remains largely dependent on whether it interrupts dinner.