Guildhall School of Business and Law staff profiles content store_hidden Nigel MacLennan Our staff

Nigel MacLennan has been successfully coaching senior leaders and innovating in the field of leadership for decades. At the time of writing he has created 58 publications in the field of leadership coaching. Approximately 71% of the leaders that Nigel coaches are promoted within 18 months of starting work with him and many are promoted twice in that period.

His works are at the cutting-edge of leadership and have made a significant improvement to the specific fields of leadership they cover. For instance, the models in Coaching and Mentoring (published by Gower, and its number one best seller in that year), were the world's first process models of coaching.

His work on culture management (in Awesome Purpose) made clear, for the first time, the relationship between the elements of corporate governance and culture.

In Opportunity Spotting he published the first model which allows any leader to systematically and reliably generate vast numbers of commercially relevant opportunities, and provides a structure leaders can use to generate ideas through staff.

In The 10 Commandments of Change he identified, for the first time, the immutable rules of successful organisational change. 

Skipping 50 or so publications, to one of his later works, for example, The Perfect Motivator, Nigel takes leaders to new levels of understanding of how to bring out the best performance and motivation in their staff.

Nigel founded and runs the annual Advances in Leadership conference, which brings together those who have made advances in the field of leadership to report on and make, through cooperation, even more advances in leadership. Find out more on the ResponseSource website.

After founding, growing and selling his first successful business, Nigel led the successful turnaround of several national scale businesses. He was a director of the Chartered Institute of Management, where he led the successful campaign to introduce best-practice corporate governance, and for nearly 10 years he was a visiting professor of management at the International University of Monaco, where he was consistently ranked the number one professor by the MBA students he taught. 

Nigel strongly believes that business services should be offered on a payment by results basis. His executive and leadership coaching is offered with payment being contingent upon successful delivery of his clients' objectives.

He has earned a degree in psychology and a doctorate in leadership coaching. Nigel offers these words to all aspiring leaders: "Great leadership, in popular myth, is thought to be about experiencing one success after another. In grounded reality, becoming an effective leader is about learning from experience: using 'not-to-plan outcomes' today to create 'more-to-plan outcomes' tomorrow."