Nik Kinley

Consultant, Assessor, Coach.

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Nik is a leadership assessor, consultant and coach who helps businesses and their leaders manage uncertainty, reduce drift, and keep people focused on what matters most. His work is built around three core pillars: how leaders are shaped by their past, how power affects leaders’ judgement and behaviour, and how leaders affect the responses, culture and performance of the people they lead.

A psychologist and psychotherapist by training, Nik has over 35 years’ experience working with senior leaders across sectors and geographies. His unusually broad background spans senior corporate roles, global consulting, and more than a decade working as a forensic psychotherapist in the prison system. He thus has the unique experience of having worked with royalty, criminals, CEOs, politicians, and children. And this has led him to work with a huge range of leaders, from the CEOs of national banks, heads of national security, hedge-fund bosses, senior civil servants, and the managers of children’s care homes.

As a consultant, he has worked with over half the top 20 FTSE companies, spent nearly 20 years working across Europe, the Middle East & Asia, and led culture change & integration programmes in some of the world’s biggest organisations. As an assessor, he has personally interviewed and evaluated more than 1,200 senior executives globally, primarily for CEO and C-suite roles. As a coach, he has supported CEOs and executive teams across industries and regions to deliver their strategy under sustained pressure.

He has published a highly successful series of books on leadership, many of which have been translated into multiple languages, and is a prize-winning author of hundreds of articles. He has appeared as a leadership expert on major television networks including the BBC and France 24, been featured in leading media outlets such as The Economist, Forbes, and The Times, and regularly lectures at some of the world’s most prestigious business schools, including IMD in Switzerland.

Clients typically engage Nik in three contexts: to reduce the risk of critical leadership selection decisions; to support senior leaders operating under sustained pressure and uncertainty; and to deliver change when success depends on shifting ingrained behaviour rather than just redesigning structures or strategy.

New book coming soon!

Out August 2025

We have an entirely messed-up relationship with power. It is something that almost everyone wants, that promises much and can help us achieve great things. Yet power isn't something we openly talk about or understand, and that’s a problem. While power is an essential part of every leadership role, it is also a difficult and sometimes toxic partner that changes everyone who holds it. And often, in ways that make being a good leader much harder.

Approached carefully, however, the worst of power's negative effects can be avoided and balanced by its positives. This book shows you how.

It reveals what power does to people, and how it both affects them as leaders and the people they lead. And it shows how, in turn, leaders can affect the positions of power they hold, too.

Incorporating the latest neuroscience, the book offers clear lessons for how to successfully manage power. For leaders, it provides practical advice on how to survive having power, avoiding its worst effects. For organisations and institutions, it is about how to ensure that the people who have power are equipped and supported to thrive with it. And for us all, as people who choose and follow leaders, it is about how we can identify those most at risk of falling to power's dark side.

It thus provides a plan for how we can have a healthier relationship with power, so that as individuals we can be better leaders, and as organisations and societies we can be better led.