Nik Kinley

Nik Kinley learned to read people and change behaviour in prisons before he ever worked in a boardroom.

A psychologist and psychotherapist by training, he spent more than a decade as a forensic psychotherapist working with offenders, before going into consultancy, then moving into senior global HR roles at BP and Barclays, and from there into leadership assessment, coaching and advisory work.

Over 30 years his work has taken him from children, prisoners and politicians to royalty, and from the CEOs of national banks and $90 billion businesses to national-security chiefs, hedge-fund bosses and Formula 1 engineering leads. The settings changed, but the work stayed the same: understanding how people behave, predicting what they'll do next, and helping them change.

Alongside this, he has led a 15-year research collaboration with colleagues at IMD Business School exploring how experience shapes leaders, how power changes their judgment, and how they in turn shape the people and culture around them. He has written eight books on leadership — most recently The Power Trap — and more than a hundred articles, translated into multiple languages. He appears as an expert on the BBC and France 24, and lectures regularly at IMD in Switzerland.

Clients tend to call him for support with one of three things. A big appointment where getting it wrong is expensive. A leader in a job that's suddenly much bigger of challenged. Or an organisation where decisions keep dying between the top and the front line.