CEO
Nick Smallman is the founder and CEO of Working Voices. Nick has been at the top of his profession for 20 years and is the coach of choice for politicians, CEOs and celebrities all over the world.
Over the last 20 years Nick has developed more than 50 Courses, Workshops and Seminars in areas such as Leadership, Presenting, Presence, Personal Impact, Influencing, and Ethics. He has addressed major conferences attended by some of the largest and most successful, corporations on earth. Amongst others, he has lectured at the London Business School and also works with charities, non-profit organisations and mentoring young entrepreneurs
One of the central premises of Nick’s work is that human beings are social animals who depend on one another. He says unless a person knows how to build strong connections to other people they cannot build the relationships that will have the greatest effects on life’s outcomes. He believes that these skills can be learned and lie within everyone.
Nick is sharply critical of the self-help industry, relying as it does on false optimism, magical thinking and unhelpful tropes like the “Law of Attraction”. Here in the West he finds we’re obsessed by positive thinking and a relentless quest “to be successful” (without really understanding what that looks like).
When presenting, Nick is inspirational, funny and insightful and believes in showing rather than telling. Not surprisingly, he’s often called upon to comment on current events in both the business and political spheres. Today his focus is on how to live in the Post-Truth Age and will be presenting new strategies and techniques to manage the communication flow in the 21st century.
Nick has advised key political players on both sides of the Atlantic and splits his time between London and New York.
The Board
Lara
Hedman
A career that started in the city, working with companies in the investment banking and insurance fields (Goldman Sachs, Prudential, etc), gave Lara early insights into what drives modern global businesses.
Lara then established and developed an events’ management operation serving major global clients such as Avon Cosmetics, Bear Stearns and Nike before joining Working Voices in 2010 to use her marketing and business development skills in a growing and exciting business.
Steve
Furner
Stephen is a qualified accountant with over 25 years experience as a Finance Director and Non-Executive Director within UK listed groups, venture capital backed MBOs and private companies. During that period he has raised more than £60 million of equity and debt finance including funding for an MBO and various acquisitions. In addition to acting as a corporate finance adviser, Stephen also serves as a board director of growth companies.
Robert
Pilkington
Robert has spearheaded the roll out of Working Voices eLearning and is abundantly qualified to do so. With a career spanning over 35 years, the last 25 years as a marketing professional, Robert has held many senior business development and client services positions. In joining Working Voices, Robert has rekindled his passion for human development.
Robert believes that in an ideal world, everyone in every organisation should be offered the opportunity to fulfil his or her potential. Now, with the arrival of Working Voices eLearning, that kind of company-wide training can actually be a financially viable option.
Heads of Departments
Jo
Herrington
Our Client Services team is the hub of Working Voices – they oversee everything from New Product Development to Logistics, liaising with clients and ensuring everything runs smoothly.
Jo came to us in 2012 from an operations background managing teams in healthcare, education, airline charter and the Royal Air Force. She brings to the table both a mature understanding of the business and exceptional organisational skills.
Dan
Parry
With 24 years’ experience in the media, Dan Parry is a professional content producer with a strong track record in film and television. He began as a broadcast journalist, spending eight years with the BBC where he was a duty editor on BBC News Online.
He later switched to television and spent eight years as Head of Research at indie Dangerous Films where he found stories and interviewees for international factual dramas. In this role he secured interviews with President George H. W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Ted Kennedy, Mohamed al Fayed, 9/11 survivors, D-Day veterans, and the bodyguards who were with Diana the night she died in Paris. For much of his time at Dangerous, Dan focused on space history, and was the only person in the world to secure a TV interview with Neil Armstrong in the last 10 years of his life.
Dan later freelanced as a story producer, working with – among others – David Yates and David Heyman (Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts) and Peter Kosminski (Wolf Hall, The State). With Yates and Heyman, he worked on a cinema film about refugees, spending a week in the Jungle refugee camp in Calais. With Kosminsky, he worked on war-crimes in the former Yugoslavia, tracking down special forces soldiers, CIA agents and Serb spies.
He has published three best-selling books and joined us from BBC Factual.
Karl
Brown
Karl’s a passionate, experienced, and engaging trainer. As a training innovator he is our Head of Innovation, as well as a coach and workshop facilitator. He plays a leading part in creating Working Voices’s new products, and helped to develop many of our most popular courses such as Perfecting Public Speaking, and Understanding Unconscious Bias.
Karl has a track record of working in change management. Leading initiatives that relied on research from psychology and behavioural economics, he’s been able to bring positive changes to organisations and teams through leadership training and ‘on the job’ coaching.
Logistics Team
Claire
Stevenson
Kate
McCulloch
Kate joined Working Voices in January 2015 from a background of administration in Higher Education. She manages our EMEA courses taking care of the whole process from initial enquiry, liaising on dates, confirming contracts and ensuring the session runs smoothly on the day.
