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Niven Postma
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- Strategy, leadership and culture consultant partnering with clients in diverse industries around the world, to (re)ignite the discretionary energy of people and teams, build an enabling culture, and develop meaningful strategies.
Biography
Meet Niven Postma
Niven has held executive positions since she was 29, in a career that has spanned multiple sectors and roles. Before starting up her own consultancy and embarking on her PhD in Organisational Behaviour, her positions included: CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association, Head of the South African Reserve Bank Academy and Head of Leadership and Culture for the Standard Bank Group (the largest bank by assets in Africa).
Having started her career as a strategy consultant, she now coaches global executive teams in industries as diverse as financial and professional services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing, to build what she calls “Whole System Leadership” and so doing, fundamentally transform how they are able to work together and what they are able to achieve.
An expert in organisational politics, Niven is the author of the best-selling book If you don’t do politics, politics will do you – A guide to navigating office politics ethically and successfully (published in 2020).
Her articles and ideas can be found in various well-respected media and podcasts. Niven is a Harvard Business Review and Inc. contributor, a part time tutor at Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and has been a guest lecturer at Stanford University.
She is an expert facilitator on women’s leadership development programmes around the world and
serves as the Chairman of the Board of Cotlands, an NGO that for 87 years has done cutting edge work in the Early Childhood Development sector in South Africa and beyond.
Her keynotes on organisational politics, leadership, culture and women’s leadership have been delivered to audiences of up to 60,000 people.
Niven holds an Executive MBA in Systems thinking, Human capital development, knowledge management, leadership and change. She also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Future Studies and a BA in English Political Science. Niven has been awarded with the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship in 2007.
Videos
Popular Talks
If you don't do politics, politics will do you...
Anything complex will always have more than a single story, but all too often we fall into the trap of the one dimensional, because it doesn’t even occur to us to look for more.
Exactly the same is true when it comes to office politics. There is so much more to office politics than the single negative and destructive story that we hear and tell ourselves.
This practical and eye-opening keynote is based on my recent book and draws on my 20 year experience as an executive, together with insights from some of the leading business thinkers of our time, It will open your eyes to the real definition of office politics, convince you that it’s possible to play politics without sacrificing your principles and teach you how to use politics to advance your career and build your organisation.
Paradigm shift: curiosity, resilience and leadership in an era of disruption
Year after year, Gallup’s Global Employee Engagement Survey shows that, irrespective of company, industry or country, more and more employees are disengaged. And yet, studies have shown that upwards of 80% of adults would want to work even if they financially didn’t need to.
It is time for a paradigm shift where leaders encourage curiosity, nurture resilience and disrupt their industry. It is time for people to continuously acquire new skills and unlearn past routines. And it is time for organisations to understand the importance of a culture that allows for great things to happen.
Women's leadership – from systems and views to actions
Sexism and racism are systems and world views rather than (only) individual actions. As such, I think we miss a big part of the point when we focus only on women executives and the challenges that they face rather than starting right at the beginning to understand some of the challenges that all girls and women face in society.
The first thing it affects is the female body. The second is women’s unpaid care burden. And the third aspect is male violence against women, including the disproportionate impact that war and conflict have on women. That said, even in ‘peaceful societies the scourge of domestic violence is always present and worsens at times of economic difficulties.
Managing disruption in the now normal
With the ever-increasing rate of change that we are all dealing with, individuals, organisations and leaders all need to become better equipped to deal with what is our “now normal”; a disruption that will continue for years to come and unfold in many ways that for now we can only guess at.
In this disruption, we will undoubtedly be confronted with many more challenges but so too will we have many more opportunities – opportunities for growth, learning, collaborating and doing what really matters.
Books
