Athalie Williams

Non-Executive Director and Advisor

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.

Portfolio
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Who is actually closing Australia's AI capability gap?

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.

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Who succeeds the CHRO?

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.

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The Pattern Beyond the Machine

My daughter was coding this morning. She is completing a Masters of Teaching and wants to teach Design, Art and Mathematics.

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The Power Dynamics That Decide Whether Change Succeeds

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.

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AI Isn't Taking Jobs, Leadership Choices Are.

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.

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The Power Dynamics That Decide Whether Change Succeeds

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.

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How Boards Shape Culture Through Succession

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.

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Culture by Design: Rethinking Executive Pay

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.

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CEO Succession: A Leadership Action, Not Just a Governance Process

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

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The road to gender balance

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.