Nik Kinley

Consultant, Assessor, Coach.

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Nik Kinley learned to read people 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, then moved into senior global roles at BP and Barclays, and from there into leadership assessment, coaching and advisory work. Over 35 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.

He has assessed more than 1,500 senior executives worldwide, mostly for C-suite roles, and has worked with over half the FTSE-20 and extensively with private equity firms and their portfolio companies.

Alongside his client work, he has led a 15-year research collaboration with IMD Business School built around three questions: how experience shapes leaders, how power changes their judgment and behaviour, and how they in turn shape the culture and performance of the people around them. He has written seven books on leadership, most recently The Power Trap, and more than a hundred articles, with his books translated into multiple languages.

He appears as an expert on the BBC and France 24, has been featured in The Economist, HBR Online, Forbes and The Times, and regularly lectures at IMD in Switzerland.

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.