United Kingdom
Athalie Williams is a global transformation executive with more than three decades of experience guiding organisations through complex change across resources, telecommunications and financial services. She has worked extensively across Australia, the UK and Southeast Asia, most recently as Chief HR Officer at BT Group (British Telecommunications). Having moved into a portfolio career, she now works as a non-executive director, CEO and board adviser, and executive coach, partnering with boards, executives and senior leaders navigating strategic inflection points and organisational change.
If you want to understand how quickly Australia's AI capability gap is widening, look at who is choosing to learn and how fast they are moving. When Emma Earley opened a free foundational AI skilling program for 1,000 Australian women (https://1000womeninai.
In a previous CHRO role, I had an executive incentive with a specific talent underpin: for it to pay out, I needed to have a credible "ready now" successor in place, as assessed by the CEO and the board.
Ask most boards what they want in their next CEO and the list grows fast. Strategic visionary, operationally credible, culturally attuned, commercially sharp, transformation leader, stakeholder savvy, inspiring communicator, financially fluent.
A chair I respect sent me a note last week. His industry had found itself in the middle of the storm, he said.
Most boards lose trust long before they realise it. Not through a single decision, but through the way their decisions accumulate into a story they didn't intend to tell.
In 2016, BHP announced an audacious goal to achieve gender balance across its global workforce by 2025. At the time, women represented just 17.
My daughter was coding this morning. She is completing a Masters of Teaching and wants to teach Design, Art and Mathematics.
In every major organisation‑wide change I have worked on, the formal program plan has rarely been the real determinant of success. The real forces sit underneath the surface in the way people understand and exercise power.
In yesterday's AFR, Rachael Bolton's article surfaced a revealing contradiction. Australian CEOs are more confident about growth, more eager to invest in AI, and more anxious about moving too slowly than their global peers, yet they are also forecasting deeper job cuts.
In every major organisation‑wide change I have worked on, the formal program plan has rarely been the real determinant of success. The real forces sit underneath the surface in the way people understand and exercise power.
Succession planning is often treated as a risk exercise; an operational process to ensure continuity and avoid disruption. But when boards pause long enough to reflect, a deeper truth emerges: appointing a CEO is not just a leadership decision, it's a cultural intervention.
AI adoption is accelerating and investment is surging, yet most organisations struggle to realise meaningful returns. The technology is advancing, but the human architecture around it often is not.
Executive pay is one of the clearest signals a board sends about what it values. When I was a new CHRO, our company chair, Jac Nasser, gave me advice I've never forgotten: "Be careful you don't become the shop steward for the executive team on pay.
Boards would never accept capital allocation or risk oversight as a side agenda item, yet many still treat culture that way. Culture often appears in board packs as an HR briefing or an engagement survey update, disconnected from strategy, performance and risk.
We ask leaders to deliver exponential results, lead with compassion, drive innovation, and navigate ambiguity, all while staying energised, clear, and composed. Every day.
If appointing the CEO is one of a board's most important accountabilities, how ready are you, really? Most boards would say they take CEO succession seriously, but the data suggests a different story. Deloitte's research found 86% of leaders agree it's an urgent priority, yet only 14% believe their
In 2016, we announced our aspirational goal to achieve gender balance by 2025. At the time, the number of women working in in the mining industry was just 16 per cent, with BHP not much better at 17.