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Dr Susan Hetrick

Author

Organisational Psychologist and Author of Toxic Organizational Cultures and Leadership

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About

Gender: Female

Nationality:

Languages: English

Travels from: United Kingdom

Engagement Types

Topics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biography Highlights

Toxic workplace cultures damage corporate reputations, alienate good people and wreck the wellbeing of the individuals impacted. Susan combines case studies from the headlines with an expert understanding of leadership, human resources and culture and hands on experience of dealing with the issues and opportunities she describes. Her real-life examples have the power to shock and engage an audience and motivate them to build a better workplace. Susan is a respected author, speaker and consultant in leadership, international human resources, and building positive workplace cultures. Susan works with senior executives and organisations across the globe.

Biography

Meet Dr Susan Hetrick

Dr Susan Hetrick is an organisational psychologist, HR business leader, academic, and author of Toxic Organizational Cultures and Leadership, How to Build and Sustain a Healthy Workplace (Routledge, 2023).

For more than 35 years, Susan has worked with global and multicultural organisations such as the World Bank Group, RBS Group, Aegon, Arab Banking Corporation, HSBC, and Deloitte. Her career has enabled her to live and work in the UK, USA, Europe, and the Middle East.

She has held academic roles with the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, and London, as well as Birkbeck College and Helsinki School of Economics. Her doctorate in Organisational Psychology was awarded by City University Business School.

Susan has had numerous articles on corporate culture and HR published. Toxic Organizational Cultures and Leadership is her second book. Her first, Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management, was co-authored with Professor Graeme Martin.

Susan runs her own specialist culture consultancy, zuhra consulting, and is Chair of the Board for Dundee Rep and the Scottish Dance Theatre.

Relevant experience

Dr Hetrick is an experienced and confident conference speaker, panellist and facilitator.

Susan specialises in culture, corporate reputation, people management and organization design. She is perhaps best known for her research, writing and consultancy work in toxic leadership and workplace cultures.

Videos

Popular Talks

Toxic Cultures

Available: Virtually

Building Positive Workplace Cultures

Available: Virtually

Books

Toxic Organizational Cultures and Leadership: How to Build and Sustain a Healthy Workplace

Toxic organizational cultures and leadership have led to major reputational failures, with the greatest impact felt by the people who dedicate their careers to working for these organizations. And yet organizations do not become toxic overnight. They do not consciously set out to break rules and regulations, nor do they actively seek wrongdoing. This book defines toxic culture, explains how toxic cultures emerge over time, and provides practical approaches supported by in-depth research for overcoming a toxic culture at the individual, team, and organizational level. Pragmatic and applicable, the book provides a call to action that can be applied in any type of organization. While the role of leadership in toxic cultures is acknowledged, the book sets out four distinct stages to embedding toxic cultures and draws on examples from leading organizations and companies to illustrate each stage. The book then identifies interventions and levers that can be implemented by executives, boards, and HR practitioners to prevent toxicity and to change toxic cultures back to healthy, positive workplaces. Drawing on research and interviews with senior HR leaders and executives, the book provides: – An understanding of the four stages of toxic cultures and the impact of performance pressures in driving toxicity – An appreciation of the role of senior leadership and personality traits – Practical tools and guidance on interventions for practitioners to build and sustain a healthy and positive workplace. Senior executives, HR, and organizational development practitioners in local and global organizations spanning a range of industry sectors will find this book invaluable. The book is also highly relevant to consultants working in the field of corporate culture and change.

Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management: A Strategic Approach to HR (Advanced HR Practitioner)

The book helps HR practitioners understand corporate-level concepts and their relevance to the key strategic agendas of organizations by drawing on a wide range of ideas from branding, marketing, communications, public relations and reputation management. It then examines how effective people management strategies and the role of HR specialist can contribute to this corporate agenda. This contribution lies in four key areas: organizational communications strategies, developing compelling employee value propositions and employer branding; HR strategies, employer of choice policies and talent management; creating new forms of psychological contracts and building stronger individual-organizational linkages through employee identification, employee commitment and psychological ownership; and in developing supportive employee behaviors. The book is based on a new model of the links between HR, corporate reputation and branding, developed from an extensive review and synthesis of different bodies of management literature. This model has been refined from extensive case research and practical experience in building corporate reputations and brands. Specially researched cases include Orange, Aegon, Scottish Enterprise, Hudson International, BSkyB, Standard Life Investments and the Royal Bank of Scotland.