Michael Nicholas Email & Phone Number

To date I've written three books, all with central theme around some aspect of emotional intelligence. The latest one, "The Little Black Book of Decision Making: Making Complex Decisions with Confidence in a Fast-Moving World", was published by Capstone Publishing (a division of John Wiley & Sons) in July 2017.As always, I have challenged conventional wisdom and offered a framework to help others to make real changes in their performance, whether this be at home or work.

United Kingdom

One of my main areas of work is as a leadership development coach and personal performance advisor. I work with leaders and teams from organisations ranging from medium size, entrepreneurial businesses up to leading FTSE companies, specialising in helping them to improve their business performance and release more of every individual’s potential.I have a proven track record over many years of helping people to transform their results. Most of my work as a coach is with executives, business leaders and decision makers, and senior managers, as this is where my unique combination of knowledge, skills and experience integrate most effectively to offer maximum value to my clients.The experience and knowledge that I bring to this role comes from a combination of over 25 years of hands-on experience and real-world, profit-orientated, business know-how. After gaining a degree in engineering from Durham University, I qualified as a Chartered Engineer, did 7 years as an officer in the military, and have gained extensive and varied leadership and business experience from having held several senior level corporate positions, including having been a Director in the strategy consulting practice at Deloitte, running Nortel’s professional services business in Europe and having a $342m sales target.I left this career for the simple reason that I get much more satisfaction from bringing my expertise in leadership and personal development to others. I love it when I’m able to help individuals to unlock more of their natural abilities so that they can maximise their personal growth and effectiveness.

I have a message which will get right to the heart of the drivers of performance in your organisation. It is one of empowerment and personal responsibility, of unlocking creativity and increasing fulfillment at work – all delivered in a unique and engaging style.As a regular speaker for Vistage, an organisation that helps CEOs, MDs and business leaders grow and improve their businesses and develop their leadership skills, I was delighted to win two awards for 2015. These were their best newcomer award, and the 'Outperformer' award given to speakers who consistently receive scores higher than 90% for both content and delivery.I share practical, proven ideas and tools to inspire you or your organisation to shift gears to new levels of performance, both personally and professionally. I can help you to:► Establish a high performance culture.► Improve your decision-making.► Meet challenges and overcome obstacles.► Adapt to change, increase creativity and accelerate progress towards your goals.► Shift attitudes, such as the crippling “I know that,” to “what can I learn here?”► Achieve much greater personal fulfilment.► And much more...My presentations are for people and companies who recognise the possibility that developing themselves and other people has to create competitive advantage and stimulate business growth.I invite you to talk to me to find out why my ideas are big, challenging, and deeply relevant, causing people to reconsider the way they have perceived the world around them to date. Moving the audience to change the way they think is the key to effective behavioural change.

At the heart of each individual’s effectiveness in business is their impact on others. There is increasing evidence that the degree to which we have the capacity to capture other people’s attention and to influence them in authentic and ethical ways for the creation of maximum value is possibly the most powerful determinant of who thrives. This is the essence of emotional intelligence and of leadership, and developing it is the primary purpose of my 3-month emotional intelligence course entitled “Your Impact on Other People.”To improve the impact of any leader it is essential to look more deeply at how human beings communicate, particularly at the reactive and largely unconscious elements which underlie virtually all interpersonal problems. Reducing our natural tendency to behave reactively can deliver many rapid benefits, such as to empathy and self-leadership, which result directly in improved interactions with others.The type of learning and change necessary of this type of development is unlikely to be achieved in a significant way with a 1-day workshop. Therefore, this course is delivered in 3 phases (preparation, workshop and follow-up) over approximately 3 months, with the follow-up consisting of a series of online lessons, with specific actions and practices for each, and trainee-directed accountability calls.This course, which is designed for mid-level managers and leaders upwards, enables participants to learn to understand themselves and the world from a higher level of mental complexity. This is the most effective way to rapidly become more effective in difficult situations. As they develop better awareness of self and others, their self-leadership capabilities also improve, as does their ability to handle the complexity of human interactions that we all face.

Professional judgement is possibly the most important capability of any leader. Why do some organisations consistently win in the marketplace, while others struggle from crisis to crisis? A vital part of the answer is leadership. Leaders have the power to build spectacular success stories or drag their companies or departments into decline. Which way they go is largely determined by the quality of their decisions.The challenge is that making decisions, whether relating to strategy, operational crises or people, cannot reliably be boiled down to pure reasoning in a process that will provide all the answers. In this rapidly changing and highly complex world, the numerous intangibles, complexities, unknowns and variables does not allow every option to be identified, fully analysed and understood. Hence intuition is also required.The solution requires a combination of understanding in two areas which are rarely taught. The first is to recognise that context is critical – in this case specifically the relative levels of order and complexity that exist. The second is the complexity of the mental processes involved because few people are aware of how the inherent biases and traps in these processes can affect decisions.My decision making workshop, which is aimed at anyone in any sort of leadership role, addresses both areas by:► Heightening awareness of what judgement actually is and of its importance.► Demonstrating the importance of context in determining how issues of judgement should be approached and describe a model to allow easy application of this concept.► Enabling participants to understand the cognitive processes that underlie judgement.► Examining and raising awareness of the barriers to good judgement.► Providing practical experience of applying principles learnt.It provides a set of simple and easily applicable tools and techniques for achieving both immediate and long-term improvements in judgement capabilities.

There is widespread agreement that less than 50% of executives transitioning between roles meet the expectations of their employer in their new position. This is costing businesses huge amounts of money, and is a problem with which fine-tuning or enhancing recruitment processes has largely failed to deal.I've developed a highly cost effective way to limit the number of failures and accelerate transition, particularly of new hires, which directly addresses the root cause of the challenges faced in the first 3 to 6 months of a new role. The problem is not that people with a great track record suddenly can't cope - it is simply that they don't know how to be successful in this critical period, during which small differences in actions create a disproportionate effect on later results.Whether people succeed or fail can usually be traced to the cycles, virtuous or vicious, that become established during their first few months in role. While it's not possible to define a one-size-fits-all approach to leadership transition, since every situation and every person's needs are different, the main traps are identifiable and can be avoided simply by increasing awareness of them. Thus, the development of a road map for success is possible.I work closely with leaders during their first 90 days to ensure that their transition is effective by helping them to rapidly become productive, secure quick wins, and build the foundation necessary for long-term success.

Leading sales of telecommunications through partnerships with major systems integrators and outsourcers.

Leading relationships with alliance partners for selling enterprise equipment into the corporate marketplace.

Cross-portfolio responsibility (carrier and enterprise products) for business development initiatives. Led eBusiness software sales activities. Delivered all marketing initiatives: account marketing campaigns, channel creation and development activities, and end user programmes.

Ran sales and sales support for all Nortel services. Led creation of Professional Services in EMEA, and ran Business Consulting sales and delivery team.

Specialised in communications sector, but also gained valuable insights and experience from assignments in other industries. Responsibility for client relationships, business development, project delivery and member of the Leadership Team responsible for coaching and development of staff members.

Established new central management organisation for the NHS and DoH, with responsibility for all aspects of NHS mobile communications. Developed strategy to allow the NHS to meet future mobile communications needs (focus on ambulance services).

Communications Manager - Responsible for readiness and training of the RAF's only specialist mobile communications organisation.Operations Manager - Managed highly mobile, quick reaction communications unit of 40 staff with world-wide area of operation. Selected as communications expert on 5-man advance reconnaissance team that deployed to Saudi Arabia at start of the Gulf War, then ran communications detachment of 50 RAF and Army staff

Bsc, Engineering Science

Education record