Graham Nicol

Executive coach and mentor

I enjoy working with you to understand how you can pull together people to help move ideas along and, ultimately, that’s why I coach Managers, Leaders and people aspiring to these roles; to provide a sounding board, to help think through gnarly issues, transition to new roles, and to improve performance. 

While working in IT has helped me to deliver innovative solutions, the more experience I’ve gained the more I’ve realised that people make the difference and helping people unlock the potential they have is real value.

My background

I bring over 20 years of working as a consultant, mentor, and executive coach. I have a broad IT background that ranges from software development through architecture to operations and beyond. This breadth allows me to bring knowledge of building high performing teams through empowering their members to develop and stretch their skills.

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Often working in complex transformation to help organisations make a leap to digital I have experience in understanding challenging colleagues and organisations, identifying catalysts for change, and drawing out both motivations and motivators.

What does coaching mean to me?

Coaching is a conversation, or to be more specific, a coaching engagement is a series of structured conversations that are guided and informed by a framework to help gain a defined end state.

The sounds a bit cold, but the key part is that coaching is a conversation. As I've moved through my career the number of conversations that I've had in which I've helped people to work through their options when facing a challenge, or understrand what paths they might take when none are immediately apparent, have grown and grown. We all have these conversations, coaching provides them with tools, processes and frameworks to allow them to drive to conclusions.

Who am I?

I always say that I "escaped" the city in order to have a family. While I loved the range of things to do and the ability to (mostly) find what you needed at any time in a city, having a vista of grass, trees and hills was a bigger pull for me. That may, or may not, have been influenced by the rise of Internet shopping!

That was almost 20 years ago now, and since I moved I've got married, had a couple of children and shared our house with a succession of pets, both dogs and cats.

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As you can imagine, a lot of life revolves around the family, "Dad's taxi" is definitely a thing, and the "Bank of Mum and Dad" seems to be a growing influence as well!​

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This is at the heart of the quote, "Be more dog" is my philosophy on life. When I look at my dogs I can see how they life their life in the moment, how they seize opportunities but don't dwell on it when something doesn't go their way. As humans we learn from our experiences, but we should take a leaf from the dogs and not let those experiences overwhelm us.​