Nicola Cook

Nicola partners with CEOs, founders and leadership teams to drive performance, growth and organisational change. With over 25 years’ experience across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Europe, she has worked across FMCG, technology and private equity–backed education businesses in fast-paced, performance-driven environments. She spent a decade with Thomson Reuters, including as Head of HR for Poland, where she helped establish a greenfields data operations centre in Gdańsk, scaling to approximately 1,500 employees. She later spent 12 years with British American Tobacco in a complex, highly regulated, multi-national environment, maintaining employee engagement above 85%, before moving into scale and transformation roles as VP of People at ArchiPro and HR Director at UP Education, partnering with multiple CEOs across a portfolio of Australian businesses.

Nicola is known for helping leadership teams bring clarity to complex organisations. She works closely with CEOs and executives to align teams around clear roles, expectations, and performance outcomes. Her strength lies in building trusted relationships with leaders and creating the conditions for high-performing teams. She combines commercial thinking with a pragmatic approach, helping organisations navigate growth, restructuring and change while ensuring leaders have the confidence and capability to guide their teams through it.

Nicola is proud of a number of career achievements, including supporting new CEOs to grow their people leadership capability and lead their teams through both good and challenging times; establishing phenomenal organisational growth in the financial services sector in Europe; and consistently building high-performing cultures with strong employee engagement. For Nicola, the most rewarding outcomes are seeing leaders grow in confidence, lift their capability and truly believe in their people, which creates meaningful impact on both performance and culture.

Nicola believes that when organisations create the right environment, people engage and perform at their best. This leads to a healthy culture, a genuine sense of enjoyment at work, and better business results. She is motivated by helping leaders succeed and seeing teams build confidence, clarity and momentum. For Nicola, success is when leaders thrive, teams perform strongly together, and organisations move forward with purpose.

Nicola brings an honest and transparent relationship-driven style to her work. She focuses on building trust with leaders and creating space for open conversations about what is really happening in the business and where support is needed. Calm under pressure, she helps leaders work through difficult decisions and complex situations with clarity and confidence. Her focus is always on practical solutions that support both the direction of the business and the people within it.