Overview
Nick Parfitt is a partner in Heidrick & Struggle’s London office and a member of Heidrick Consulting. He focuses on helping organizations to enhance executive performance through the delivery of best-in-class leadership assessment and development solutions. He has experience across a wide range of sectors and concentrates primarily in the areas of 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 those with the highest potential, managing assignments to identify critical leadership talent in M&A contexts, and working with executive teams to enhance team dynamics. He is often asked 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 been able to gain 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.
Prior to 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 growth of the US business 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 a certified user of a broad range of assessment instruments. He has worked with many organizations to develop customized leadership frameworks and accompanying diagnostic tools. He is a passionate advocate of identifying trends in assessment data to guide future recruitment and leadership succession strategy and has managed several assignments to identify the collective strengths and development areas of the client’s leadership cadre. Nick has appeared on BBC News, BBC Radio Five and has contributed to various radio business programs as well the Times and Financial Times newspapers.
Education
University of Swansea, First Class Honours Degree
Cardiff University, Post-Graduate Diploma
Chartered Institute of Marketing, Post-Graduate Diploma