Principal Consultant
Nigel Watson
Executive Leadership and Coaching,
Organisational Performance Specialist
Practices
Nigel is one of the leading lights in the field of personal and organisational performance.
He has a reputation for simplification, providing a ‘formulaic-type’ approach, using powerful anecdotes, and sharing pragmatic 'how to's.’ His entrepreneurial flare helps him design elegant yet practical solutions that deliver significant and lasting results.
Nigel leads high calibre performance specialists and master coaches in large, organisation-wide, programmes of change and performance. Nigel himself is highly intuitive and very quickly able to identify the root cause of performance constraint. He then seeks to incorporate and utilise the client’s existing expertise as part of the overall solution. He is a firm believer in cost-effective solutions that can be owned and sustained by the client.
Nigel is committed to working with key stakeholders and is highly skilled at drawing disparate views and behaviours towards a single common purpose. He operates from a position of complete openness and integrity, which enables him to quickly establish strong and lasting partnerships which in turn leads to immediate results for his clients.
Professional affiliations
Nigel Watson is a member of the Institute of Directors and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and works closely with MHS on their Emotional Intelligence tools and Glowinkowski with their integrated framework for leadership and performance.
Nigel is a magnetic and passionate individual, and it’s this style and approach to change, coupled with his partnering skills, that have led him to the successes he has achieved to date. This approach has also helped Nigel develop an extensive and unique professional network that extends across industries and geographies.
Professional background
Nigel Watson’s whole career has been spent in the people, performance, process arena, which he lives and breathes with a passion!
Over the years he has worked with many prestigious clients, including: Alliance & Leicester, Augusta Westland, BP, BAE Systems, EDS, Flagship, KPMG, Logica CMG, Nationwide Building Society and Vodafone.
He was also part of the company responsible for: training the skippers and crew for the BT Global Challenge Yacht Race, creating a joint civilian leadership school at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and for working with Sir Clive Woodward in developing the shift in behaviours and performance for the England 2003 Rugby World Cup Squad.
As well as providing commercial leadership training for the Royal Navy, he is also setting up a joint Q4\RN Leadership and Performance Academy, that will reach a global audience, putting the United Kingdom firmly back on the map as the home of performance driven leadership.
Interests and Activities
In 2001 Nigel was lucky enough to live with the Masai deep in the Rift Valley in Kenya, where he was able to study their approach to leadership and culture in the face of challenge and adversity (The tribe he visited had not had rain for 4.5 years, and it was a further 1 year before the rains came) first-hand. He claims to have learnt more out there in this short time than he had in much of his life prior. Nigel helped clients and friends to experience the Masai and helped create a charity which went on to build a new school and pipe fresh water to the village in which he stayed.
Nigel co-founded and launched The Global Children's Trust to match effective resources (time, money, ideas, products, services, contacts, support, etc) to help organisations who are already working at a grass roots level to make a difference to children's lives across the globe, but don't have access to all of the support and resources they require to become more scale-able and sustainable.
Nigel has recently driven 2500km across Indian desert, through jungle and over the Western Ghat Mountains in 1950's style 37hp car later this year to raise money and awareness for the Global Children's Trust and support Unicef with aids relief for children along the route through which they drove. He returned again in April 2010 to spend more time in the slums and orphanages to continue the work that he and his co-founder started last year.