Niven Postma

Niven Postma

• Human potential igniter: strategy and leadership expert
• Organisational politics expert and bestselling author
• Filled a variety of executive positions in diverse industries and organisations
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership And IWF Fellow

A strategy, leadership, and culture consultant, Niven Postma partners with clients from diverse industries across the globe. She helps ignite the discretionary energy of both people and teams. In so doing, she assists them in building an enabling their unique culture while developing meaningful strategies.

Widely considered an organisational politics expert, Niven Postma is the author of the bestseller “If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You – A guide to navigating office politics ethically and successfully”.  You can find her widely published articles and ideas in numerous respected media, including podcasts.

A Harvard Review contributor, Niven Postma is also a visiting lecturer at Henley Business School and a part-time tutor at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership,

Her diverse career has seen Niven Postma take up a varied variety of executive positions crossing multiple organisations and sectors. Amongst these, she includes the CEO of the Businesswoman’s Association, CEO of NOHA, i.e., Nurturing Orphans of AIDS for Humanity, Head of External Strategy and Head of the SARB Academy at the South African Reserve Bank, and Head of Leadership and Culture for the Standard Bank Group.

Currently a doctoral student, Niven Postma 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.

In 2007, Niven Postma received the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship Award issued by the African Leadership Institute. She is also an IWF Fellow which was issued by the International Women’s Forum in 2002.

Niven Postma served as a Reserve Police Officer for two years and is currently the Chairperson of the Board at Cotlands. Cotlands is an organisation offering quality educational programmes to children living in poverty to improve their intellectual and social development.

Niven Postma – Speaker

As a conference speaker, Niven Postma has delivered keynotes on organisational politics, leadership, culture, and women’s leadership to audiences of up to 60,000 people. She lives in South Africa and speaks English and Afrikaans.

Speaking Topics

• 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.

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 years of 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.

This for me, begs some questions: How conscious are each of us being in our career and life and the choices we are making in both? As a leader, can I honestly say that I am creating environments in which people grow, and feed their need to contribute? Or are they just dying a slow death every day that they drag themselves to work?

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 & 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.

“Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez is a superb book, which has deservedly won several major prizes, including the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, for what the judges recognised were “unassailable facts backed by powerful stories.” In the book, she speaks of the massive gender data gap that exists in the world around women’s experiences, because we live in a world that is largely built by, and for, men. This gender data gap affects three critical aspects concerning women’s experiences all around the world.

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.

These issues don’t stop affecting women just because they are executives. So, while executives may have more resources with which to cope with some of them, they are still part of the system that all human beings live in.

For organisations and the women in them to thrive, we need to acknowledge and understand these things far better than we currently do. This is neither about ‘fixing’ women nor ‘blaming’ men but rather about understanding the two kinds of risks we face if we don’t – the risk that bad things will happen and the risk that good things will not.

• 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 – growth opportunities, learning, collaborating, and doing what really matters.