Nick Holley - U.K.

Areas of Expertise
Nick Holley’s expertise is in creating and managing large-scale organizational change, leadership and people development programs, and performance and talent management processes and systems and in embedding them in day to day operations. Nick combines understanding of the theory behind strategy with a proven ability to deliver and sustain them in highly complex organizations. He has recently carried out research on employee engagement, HR in the recession, HR leadership, HR organizational models, and talent management.

Background
Nick’s background combines experience as an army officer, ten years as a successful futures and foreign exchange broker with Merrill Lynch, and sixteen years in senior organizational, leadership, and people development roles in large global organizations. In his last two roles, Nick was partner in charge of learning for Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa for Arthur Andersen and director of global people development for Vodafone.  His work on leadership development at Vodafone was externally benchmarked amongst the top five in Europe.

Nick has worked with a number of major global businesses, including Barclays Capital, BAT, Celtel/Zain, Centrica, DP/DHL, Draka, Ericsson, Governments of Dubai and the UAE, Honeywell, ING, Liverpool Victoria, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Nationwide, NetJets, Rosneft, Royal Mail, Safaricom, Sony Ericsson, StatoilHydro, Truphone, Virgin Nigeria, and Yahoo in the UK, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, UAE, and the US. He has focused on a number of projects looking at change management, HR strategy and capability, leadership development, performance management, and strategy implementation, as well as providing one to one coaching for a number of senior line and HR leaders.

Nick is Director of Henley Business School’s HR Centre of Excellence where he has worked with companies including Barclays, Bestseller, BT, Cadbury Schweppes, Canon, Centrica, GSK, M&S, Microsoft, Ministry of Justice, Nestle, NHS, Oracle, Oxfam, Panasonic, RBS, Royal Mail, Sainsburys, Shell, Siemens, Travelport, Unilever, and Vodafone to advance current thinking around HR. Nick is also a member of the editorial advisory panel of Personnel Today for whom he judged their HR Awards in 2007/8/9.  He was voted the 12th most influential thinker in HR by Human Resource Magazine in 2009.

Nick holds an M.A. from Cambridge University and an MBA from London Business School.