What does Five NZ do?

Five NZ is a management consulting firm that helps NZ executive teams align leadership, culture, people and technology to deliver strategy with certainty, speed and ROI.

Is Five NZ a WalkMe partner in New Zealand?

Yes. Five NZ is New Zealand's most experienced WalkMe delivery partner, specialising in digital adoption to maximise software ROI and transformation outcomes.

What services does Five NZ offer?

Five NZ offers consulting in Strategy & Leadership, Performance, Culture, People development, and Technology including WalkMe digital adoption and AI Compass.

Nick Mackeson-Smith - Chief Curiosity Officer, Founder and Director

Nick is an expert in leadership development, executive coaching, learning strategy design and implementation, culture change and employee engagement. He's led transformative programmes in agile, technology implementation, diversity and inclusion, mental health and wellbeing, mindset and behaviour change, ways of working and learning enablement, and is very interested in building great employee experiences to drive great customer experiences which drive great business outcomes. He's a highly skilled facilitator and public speaker, and has a knack for spotting and unleashing the potential in those around him. He's got over 20 years of experience in doing the small stuff and the very big stuff at some of the world's and NZ's leading organisations - in financial services with Barclays Capital, Barclays Wealth Schroders, Lloyd's of London, and Goldman Sachs. In consulting services with Deloitte. In the public sector with Auckland Council, and most recently in digital services and telecommunications with Spark New Zealand.

I've recently written about:

Performance

Take empowerment back

The critique of empowerment has become deafening, and it’s frustrating.

People

Leadership development for our time

Great leaders are everything, and can be the difference between a performing organisation, and a high performance organisation. They can inspire people to be at their best, even when the outlook is challenging. They can create magical relationships which are based on deep trust and respect, and unlock significant amounts of discretionary effort in the workforce. They can be a force for positive cultural change, and can turn around long-standing issues in double-quick time. In short, they are awesome, and every organisation should do whatever they can to attract/develop/retain them. Trouble is, lots of organisations fall short in developing their leaders. There is another way…..

Performance

Getting agile right

There are so many aspects to agile, and it’s really important to understand what they are all about and why each of them are necessary. Some are structural, or procedural - things like having a very disciplined cadence of times when teams come together, or having really well defined set of objectives and expected results within a defined period of time. The structure allows teams to build upon their work in a repeatable and incremental way, and means that massive programmes of work can be broken down into much smaller and more manageable chunks.

Business strategy: Hunker down or pivot?

Businesses everywhere are facing new headwinds and constraints - conflict in Ukraine and geopolitics elsewhere are having enormous impacts on financial markets, consumer confidence, and supply chains. In times like this, it's easy to be fearful and hunker down to protect yourself from the coming storm... but is that the best thing you could do? What if there was a smarter move to make - one that would see you ride the wave instead of duck and cover?

Strategy & Leadership

The critical connection between organisational culture and strategic success.

The success of an organisation is heavily reliant on the alignment between its culture and strategy. While strategy defines an organisation's long-term direction, culture determines how things get done within the organisation. A misalignment between culture and strategy can have severe consequences, both financially and reputationally. Despite this link, many organisations fail to develop a deep understanding of what their culture is, could be, or needs to be in order to drive their strategic ambitions. It’s time to dig deeper.

People

Reimagining outplacement.

Outplacement support has been around for as long as I can remember. Organisations soften the blow of a redundancy or restructure by offering the departing employee some help in finding the next role; CV writing, LinkedIn profile updating, reviewing key achievements. The list goes on. Now, it’s different. Consider the organisations who are cutting hundreds - or thousands - of jobs. A little bit of CV prep and interview practice isn’t going to cut it for those people leaving… there simply aren’t thousands of jobs available for people to move on to. Something else is needed.

Nick Mackeson-Smith

I've recently written about:

Take empowerment back

Leadership development for our time

Getting agile right

Business strategy: Hunker down or pivot?

The critical connection between organisational culture and strategic success.

Reimagining outplacement.

You can talk to me about:

CultureXpert

Discovery

EX and CX Mapping

Executive Coaching

Executive Traction Labs

Innovation Design Sprint