As a TomorrowToday associate, Niven offers the insights and experience of a consultant as well as a practitioner. For over 12 years, she has successfully built high performing organisations, teams and people, pioneering and leading transformations in performance, culture change and diversity.
As such, she offers informed and personal insight into how to:
- build an effective leadership culture,
- the challenges in creating future fit organisations and
- the challenges and opportunities in ensuring greater inclusion in the workplace.
Niven has spent 18 years working at a senior and executive level in business, civil society and the public sector. Interspersed with a few sabbaticals and road trips…In the process she has developed an integrated and unique range of expertise. Her career started in management consulting, where she worked in client engagements across industries as diverse as healthcare, mining and retail. This global experience gave her invaluable grounding in how to analyse and craft company, group and country strategies from “the outside-in”.
What it didn’t give her was any experience in how to translate strategies from the analytical language of spreadsheets and models, to the language of people’s heads and hearts, i.e. working from “the inside out” to deal with all manner of stakeholders, perspectives and world-views. That experience came in the 10 years that she spent as the CEO of two national NGOs and as a senior leader at the South African Reserve Bank where she successfully led major changes and strategic projects.
Niven’s mantra is that a meaningful life consists of 3 things: Something to do, someone to love and something to look forward to. I consider myself very lucky to have all three. I’ve been able to do work that is rewarding and that matters. I’ve been very happily married for 8 years and living in South Africa but being a citizen of the world means that there is, to my mind, never a shortage of things to relish, including mountains to hike, great restaurants to go to, cities to explore, books to read, art to buy, roads to run and people to meet.