Illustration by Yann Le Bec
Performance enhancing partnerships
To share a challenge, explore giving your team access to our platform and programmes or to explore a tailored partnership, drop an email to hello@ycn.org or call +44 (0)20 7033 2140 — and we'll fix a time to share more from both sides.
Popular talking points
Individual, unlimited and self-directed learning that gets teams discovering, trying and applying new skills daily, and connecting with a supportive community of peers.
From standalone workshops, ongoing programmes or partnerships rooted in self-directed resources — we'll design a development approach that's directly measured against the challenges of the day.
Giving managers the confidence and capability to have the conversations that count, with the right cadence, is critical in our work supporting growing organisations of all shapes and sizes. And we love to share what we've learned so far.
Key contacts for our conversation
Nick Defty, Founder and Director
Pictured with YCN associate and DE&I advisor Abi Adamson; Nick established YCN in 2001, and has since collaborated widely on the design, development and delivery of our efforts — both direct into teams, and through the continual evolution of our cross-organisational programmes. A particular area of focus in recent years has been our emerging work around neuroinclusive teams, developed in partnership with Dr. Anne Cockayne.
Sophie Johnson, Partnerships Director
Sophie, pictured left with Culture Shift canine Poppie and YCN Associate Coach-Facilitator Sarah Banks, joined the team in 2022 to support growth within our current community and enrich it with new partners. Sophie brings bags of people-focused experiences from leading The School of Life for Business and Philosophy at Work and enjoys helping organisations to craft practical, energising and enabling learning experiences.
Abi Adamson, Associate Facilitator and DE&I advisor
We've collaborated with Abi since 2021 to design and deliver modern and motivating DE&I training across our platform and directly into partners teams — from KFC and Spotlight, to Koto and Epic Games. As the founder of The Diversity Partnership, Abi brings energising expertise to the fore; helping us ground our work in academic excellence and contemporary work culture.
Katy Kent, Associate Coach-Facilitator
Katy worked for six years in our close-knit central team, before evolving her focus and expertise as a YCN Associate — leading on the delivery of many of our tailored leadership development programmes, and popular Open Manager Cohorts alongside her own practice. Most recently Katy has been busy enabling managers at YCN partners including Cubitts, Campari and Cleo — and that's just the C's.
Download a simple and easy-to-share overview of our work, approach, community and collaborators — and the ways we'd love to enable continual learning among your managers and teams.
The relevance of YCN's approach made our team re-think training from something that happened to them, to an experience that they wanted to be part of and that would actually make their lives easier.