testimonials

Eithne Devine-Hynes,
CEO DeltaXignia

Our small company, an employee ownership trust, is pivoting with a change in our go-to-market strategy, introducing new offers and services.

To succeed during this growth period, significant development in our people is required. However, we didn’t have the budget or need for a full-time HR or Chief People Officer at this stage. What we required was a very experienced HR executive to engage, identify our needs in specific areas across the company, and put the right projects and engagement in place to drive us towards the desired outcomes.

We initially engaged Nicola on a fixed fee and deliverables basis. Her focus was on our Software Engineering organisation, where we needed several key outcomes:

Delivering a capability framework so that the team could be assessed and clear learning and development outcomes could be defined.
Setting out clear development timelines for our entry-level graduates to progress and achieve a baseline in their roles.
Outlining hybrid role opportunities to support the delivery of new capabilities and offers, identifying candidates, and creating development paths to establish them in these new roles.

The impact has been significant in helping us clearly outline how to achieve a major business pivot while utilising in-house resources. At the same time, we’ve been able to provide career growth paths and opportunities for our most talented and experienced team members.

What stands out about working with Nicola is her rich career experience and her ability to quickly understand the 'people' needs of a business. She is a talented Chief People Officer who can rapidly build trusting relationships within an organisation, allowing her to partner effectively and drive the growth and change we needed.

I believe Nicola’s support would be invaluable to small to medium-sized enterprises, especially where depth and breadth of experience is required but a full-time resource isn’t within budget.

She works quickly and packs a lot of value into short timeframes, so organisations can benefit from fixed fee projects and a few days per month.

Nicola also has a gift for understanding and reading people, which helps her determine the engagement required to build relationships and design development paths. She combines this with the rigour and structure gained through her extensive career in large enterprises.

Julian Momen, Former CEO Carlsberg UK

I’ve known Nicola since 2013 when she began working at Carlsberg UK where I was initially CFO and then directly working for me when I took up the CEO role in 2016. During the latter period, Nicola was instrumental in supporting me as we led a major transformation of the company.

Nicola contributed to my executive team first and foremost as the functional People lead, but also as a business leader with active commercial input. Nicola led her function with enthusiasm and energy, shaped the people strategy and delivered a tremendous amount of change. In particular, she led the cultural shift in the organisation which was key to underpinning our newly developed business strategy.

The cultural change programme was deeply connected to the business strategy and it successfully articulated and delivered on the behaviours and shifts that were necessary for the company to succeed. The programme enabled us to confront some challenging realities whilst empowering widespread action which was championed by a group of employee advocates. The organisation development approach was well thought out and well aligned. Nicola gave our employee advocates a very clear mandate and equipped them with the skills they needed to encourage change amongst their peers and the company.

Nicola also led the industrial relations and people change for a very significant business exit working with the operations teams, the Unions and our outsourced partner to ensure a successful outcome. She also was instrumental in helping us reposition building the trust and confidence of our people.

As a result our employee engagement and performance results improved significantly. This was against the backdrop of reductions in headcount, which I feel we achieved with a level of due sensitivity, respect and honesty.

Nicola’s major strength is that she understands how to engage people and she personally builds professional highly engaged teams of her own.

Nicola is extremely personable with a wonderful outlook on life, understanding the importance of the balance we all need between home and work. As I began my own journey as CEO, Nicola was a hugely trusted supporter providing me with much needed encouragement and advice, for which I owe her much thanks.

Kate Tinsley, CEO MKM Building Supplies

Nicola helped with a change programme in the business I led. The programme involved closing and mothballing factories and restructuring the commercial teams. She led the internal forums and worked with employee reps and trade unions. She equipped leaders, oversaw the operational HR activity and ensured delivery whilst maintaining engagement. She developed the strategic plan with ease but also remained grounded and comfortable working with all levels of staff. She will be frank when it’s helpful, is pragmatic and knows how to get stuff done.

Nicola also led the shaping of our corporate values and behaviours for the group. These were developed with a cross functional group of colleagues and the outcomes were simple, effective and really brought to life the rich heritage of the business whilst also laying out what was necessary for future success. They are used today and have been widely adopted by team members and leaders alike.

I would highly recommend Nicola.

Joe Hudson, Chief Executive Officer, Ibstock plc

Nicola worked in my Executive Team as Group HR Director. She transformed the HR function during her tenure building a high performing team and embedding a HR strategy that added value to the organisation. She was instrumental in ensuring that we successfully navigated the challenges of Covid from a people perspective whilst also moving forward our levels of engagement as an organisation, building a talent strategy and improving important aspects of our employee value proposition.

Nicola is a skilled leader who brings HR expertise combined with a commercial approach which means she is able to add value to any Executive team that she is a part of. I would highly recommend Nicola to any organisation.

Dave Pogson, Former Sales Director, Cadbury/ Kraft/ Mondelez

As Sales Director, I worked with Nicola at Cadbury/ Kraft/ Mondelez, and again briefly at Carlsberg, during times when the scale of change and transformation that was being undertaken in all these organisations was significant.

At all times, Nicola’s diligence, integrity and intuition played a pivotal role in enabling business performance whilst delivering against our change agenda.

By way of example, and arguably most significantly for me, was the integration of the Cadbury and Kraft Sales teams in the UK which impacted close to 1,000 people, ways of working and culture whilst ensuring we kept focussed on day to day performance. Nicola partnered with myself and the Leadership Team to design and populate a new high talent organisation, build product & category knowledge, develop new processes and create a winning culture, all whilst coaching and supporting the Leadership Team throughout the change process.

As such, I would highly recommend Nicola to help create positive change, whether to organisation design, people development & the talent profile, or to company culture and complex integration projects.

Paul Armstrong, Former VP Supply Chain Carlsberg UK