Nik Kinley

Consultant, Assessor, Coach.

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Psychologist and psychotherapist Nik Kinley is a leadership assessor, consultant, and coach who helps businesses and leaders manage uncertainty, create strategic clarity, and reduce organisational drift.

His work sits at the point where psychology meets organisational reality: why capable leaders get stuck, why good decisions go wrong under pressure, and what it actually takes to shift ingrained patterns of behaviour. It focuses on three core themes: how leaders are shaped by their experience; how power affects judgment and behaviour; and how leaders shape the responses, culture, and performance of their people.

His work draws on an unusually wide range of experience, having worked with royalty, politicians, criminals, CEOs, and children. The leaders he has coached and assessed range from the CEOs of national banks and $90b businesses, to heads of national security, hedge-fund bosses, and Formula 1 engineering leads.

His background spans senior corporate roles, global consulting, and more than a decade as a forensic psychotherapist. With over 35 years’ experience working across sectors and geographies, he has worked with more than half of the FTSE-20, and specialises in supporting private equity and their portfolio companies. As an assessor, he has personally evaluated more than 1,500 senior executives globally, primarily for C-suite roles.

He is the author of a series of books on leadership, many of which have been translated into multiple languages, and is a prize-winning author of over a hundred articles. He has appeared as an expert on major television networks including the BBC and France 24, been featured in outlets such as The Economist, Forbes, and The Times, and regularly lectures at institutions such as 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 deep-seated behaviours.

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.