Principal Consultant 

Nick has been with Bath Consultancy Group for twelve years and is a Director of the company.  He worked as a manager and management developer for a number of years in the public sector.  The current focus of his work is in helping organisations that wish to develop new strategic directions and deliver new and challenging goals, to implement the culture and leadership changes that will sustain such activity.

Nick has been involved for many years on a variety of change consultancy projects, senior leadership programmes and business-based leadership development with Bath Consultancy Group's private, public and third sector clients.  He has worked in various parts of Europe, Asia, Middle East, the US and South Africa with a range of global private sector organisations including Ernst & Young, Pcubed, PwC and Mayer Brown.  He is currently also working with a variety of local authorities, healthcare services, universities, police, fire services, social housing companies, national advisory groups and charities. 

Post-merger work:
Nick has worked on post merger integration across public, private and not for profit sectors.

In Public sector, he worked with a newly formed Children and Families Department of a Local Authority that was a merger of two separate departments (Education and the Children and Families part of Social Services).  The work focused upon helping to secure two critical shifts: firstly to make sure that there was proper connectivity between Exec Team and the front line, which at least in one legacy department had been an issue before; and secondly the creation of a ‘new' culture from two very different legacy cultures. A critical part of creating the culture shift focused upon developing a mission statement for the new Department, that both ‘sides' could buy into, and begin the cross boundary integration, when their day-to-day activity encouraged silo working.

In the Private Sector, Nick worked on the integration of a global function within a new joint venture, which merged teams from the two legacy companies.  The companies were based in different parts of Europe, although focusing upon the same sector. The cultural differences were significant, but the critical activity post-merger was getting clear and owned communication between the layers of the function.  People were passing problems on, rather than accepting responsibility for making sure that issues were tackled and sorted by the team.  The levels of personal support and challenge were low and needed to be increased as part of this.  We also found a high level of assumption-making about what people meant or wanted, rather than checking back and clarifying and getting agreement to the outcomes that were needed in advance.

In the Not-for-Profit sector, he worked with a National Charity/NGO that was created out of the amalgamation of various organisations in the sector.  The Exec team were a mix of people from the previous organisations.  In this case the focus of the work was on the top team, and how they could work more sharply together, at a time when Government wanted them to play a more significant role nationally. Some of the lack of focus was caused by differing legacy priorities, some by personal differences in the way people interacted with each other, and some were caused by the differing cultures they brought with them. 

Nick is a qualified systems psychotherapist, and a registered Myers Briggs Step 1 practitioner, as well as a certified facilitator of Oshry Organisational Workshops and has been a member of the Oshry Power Lab staff team at Craigsville, US. He is an experienced coach and supervisor of executive coaching and has co-written a book with Dr Peter Hawkins, "Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision and Development" (McGraw-Hill/Open University Press, 2006), and co-authored a chapter on Transformational Coaching, in the "Complete Handbook of Coaching", Sage, London 2010.

Nick is also an accredited executive coach with APECS.