Overview
Nick Parfitt is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ London office and a member of Heidrick Consulting. He focuses on helping organizations enhance executive performance through best-in-class leadership assessment and development solutions. He has experience across a wide range of sectors and focuses on financial services, technology, energy, industrial, and pharmaceuticals.
Experience
Nick has more than 20 years of experience in talent and leadership advisory environments and has assessed hundreds of leaders for selection, development, and succession planning purposes. This includes working with organizational leadership to identify high-potential individuals, managing assignments to identify critical leadership talent in M&A contexts, and working with executive teams to enhance team dynamics. Clients often ask him to engage with leaders in a coaching capacity after initially working with them in an assessment context.
Nick is drawn to situations that demand an international perspective, and over the course of his career, he has gained significant cross-cultural experience. He has worked extensively across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. On several occasions, he has helped organizations evaluate their global leadership bench-strength by managing consultancy engagements spanning multiple countries and continents.
Before joining Heidrick & Struggles, Nick spent much of his career with the specialist talent assessment consultancy Cubiks, which spun out of PA Consulting Group. He established the company’s US operation in Chicago and then led the US business’s growth for the next 6 years before returning to Europe to support the delivery of international projects. He was a member of the executive team that managed the sale of the Cubiks business to PSI Services in 2019.
Nick is certified to use a broad range of assessment instruments. He has worked with many organizations to develop customized leadership frameworks and accompanying diagnostic tools. His passion for identifying trends in assessment data contributes to guiding future recruitment and leadership succession strategies. He has managed several assignments to identify the collective strengths and development areas of the client’s leadership cadre. Nick has appeared on BBC News and BBC Radio Five and has contributed to various radio business programs as well as The Times and the Financial Times newspapers.
Education
University of Swansea, First Class Honours Degree
Cardiff University, Postgraduate Diploma
Chartered Institute of Marketing, Postgraduate Diploma