Dr Marianne Broadbent

Speaking Topics Include

Leading Global Teams That Work
increasingly business is being conducted by groups of people who are not necessarily co-located. Within organisations, technology has enabled teams to operate across geographic and political boundaries, and across cultures. People are often part of several virtual teams – working with others with whom they are not co-located. Some teams will comprise individuals working for different organisations in an external sourcing arrangement, in a joint venture, or in an end-to-end supply chain or customer care process. What are the challenges of leading a virtual team and being part of a leadership team spread across three continents? For most of the past 15 years, Marianne Broadbent has led globally dispersed teams, recognised internationally as high performing teams.

In this session Marianne shares and reflects on those experiences - what worked, and what didn't work. She put those experiences into her current context of executive search, leadership assessment and advisory work, where she is constantly diagnosing and assessing 'teaming' and 'collaborative' capabilities in individuals and groups.

The Executive and IT Governance: What is it and how can you improve it?

Executives want to be able to make better decisions faster. This is especially the case around decisions related to information technology investments and IT-enabled business initiatives. This means good governance of IT – clarity and transparency around input, decision rights and accountabilities for information and IT-related decision making. But with the greater infusion of IT responsibilities in business and greater business understanding of IT professionals, these areas are now muddied.

In this session Dr Broadbent will work through how leading firms are using good governance to help shape better and more informed decision making. It's not one size fits all, but there are some real learnings about what is important based on different business perspectives.

CEO and Executive Succession Planning: What does it really look like?
CEOs appointed from within an organisation tend to be more successful than those appointed from an external candidate pool. The appointment of a significant number of senior executives from an internal talent pool also gives a great message to others about the quality of experiences gained as an executive or manager in an organisation. Understanding capabilities at different levels helps inform smart decisions bringing people into the organisation. While you can never guarantee who should succeed whom and when, knowing and growing the right talent is a now a mainstream competence for business performance. It is also critical in mitigating risk.

This session explores the practice of Succession Planning in organisations – how are thoughtful and effective organisations developing and sustaining their talent pool? How do they extend and enrich work experiences and provide practical opportunities for mobility experiences as part of talent pool development and regeneration?

The Board and IT Governance: Making it Work

As IT-related capabilities and expenditure are now so significant, and IT-influenced risks so pervasive, it seems obvious that these are areas that Boards should now be dealing with in a timely way and with the necessary expertise. At the top level, Boards are responsible for corporate governance. The executive team, led by the CEO, is responsible for shaping and implementing informed strategies, encouraging desirable behaviors and managing key assets for sound performance. These assets cover many classes, such as financial, relationships (with customers, suppliers etc), people, physical resources, intellectual property and information and IT. While the governance of IT in enterprises is improving it is still relatively immature. And that appears even more so at board level.

In this session Dr Marianne Broadbent shares recent experiences working with boards on IT governance. Note: When this session was included in annual Australian Institute of Company Directors Conference it was the first session booked out.

For Chief Information Officers, their teams and technology service providers

Building and Sustaining Great Talent

Great talent will go to where it is appreciated, valued, and encouraged to thrive. Effective talent management requires taking thoughtful and considered actions today. It's not something to do next month or next year. By then the 'talent' will have walked and it's very hard to get it back. Conscientious talent management and succession planning is now a mainstream expectation for all executives. It's not something to do when things slow down. For truly competitive organisations, it is now a 'must do' to deal effectively with growth, with changing or shifting demands, be they to contain costs, develop innovative ways to delight customers or integrate a newly acquired business. But it's not easy to do well. It takes persistence, creativity and constant executive engagement to 'know and grow' the talent you have.

This interactive session explores how business leaders and strategically-focused people and capability directors shape, implement and sustain an effective talent management program that shape, implement and sustain an effective talent management program that delivers the next level of organisational performance, while minimising risk.

Implementing Exceptional 21st Century Leadership

The Executive environment has changed irrevocably. Private and public sector enterprises have all raised the performance bar for executive talent and shortened the time frame for an appointee to prove themselves. At the same time, technology is fundamentally changing how businesses operate and longstanding competitive positioning. Innovation and business regeneration is now a requirement to remain competitive. However, identifying new business models is usually not the biggest challenge – rather it is implementing the change, executing on innovation through difficult economic times. This requires change in how organisations operate, changes in internal business governance, changing in necessary people capabilities and changes in the way people do their work and behave.

This is particularly the case for executives and managers as their ability to make and implement better decisions faster becomes critical. It means much greater focus on how organisations 'know and grow' their own people capabilities.

This session examines the changing demand on executives and managers and what organisations can do by way of 'executive innovation'. The focus is on how leading organisations are implementing practical and pragmatic approaches to assessing and developing leadership and cultural capital to accelerate their performance.

Note: This session has been run as a Keynote, and as a half day or full day workshop in different countries around the world

Learnings on Leadership: Developing your Personal Strategy

Expectations for leaders and leadership have shifted over the past decade. These shifts are influenced by the interaction between sectors, in how organisations have evolved, and in the diversity of individual aspirations. Some attributes of leaders and of organisations now matter much more than previously. These are important inputs for individual managers and executives.

This session will examine:

• What sustains executive success today, and what does it mean for individual executives?

• Your organisation's values base? Why does it matter to you and your organisation?

• Your personal strategy: what is it and why have one?

Drawing particularly on her leadership advisory work, Marianne will share her insights on the changing expectations for leaders, how those expectations are being met and the implications for the sort of personal strategy we should each consider.

Creating Innovative and Effective Teams

The era of the 'hero CEO' and 'hero' executive has not passed. Work gets done in teams and great leaders lead great teams. They don't do it on their own. They work with their team, their peer colleagues and the rest of the executive to set the vision and identify what it takes to get there. They are dependent on their team members for follow through and dependent on their broader team to exercise leadership that is consistent with the desired culture and values of their organisation. Teams with diversity, that is, that comprise members with different backgrounds and experiences and a good gender mix, are more likely to be both more creative in their approach to solutions and contribute more to business performance.

This interaction session examines what makes teams dysfunctional, what makes teams effective. It challenges each participant to review his or her contribution as a team member and explores strategies for effective teamwork in the context of specific organisations.

The New CIO Leader: Do you have one and would you know?
Executive teams need the support of a chief information officer who understands both business and technology. A 'new CIO leader' has earned their place at the executive table: they understand the fundamentals of the business and the enterprise, they have a vision for the business and know they have to shape and inform the expectations of their executive colleagues to realise and deliver on that vision. They are able to weave together business and IT strategy, understanding all the time that what their executive colleagues really want and expect from them is to deliver, deliver, deliver.

In this session, Dr Broadbent will explore what the role and responsibilities of a 'new CIO leader' from the perspective of the CEO and executive team, drawing on multiple sources. These include her international work with executive teams and CIOs and her book The New CIO Leader as well as her most recent work in Leadership Assessment and Executive Search. Why is this role so critical and what does it really encompass? How do you know if your CIO has the 'right stuff'?

For board members and CEOs

The 'New' CIO Leader: Are you one or are you be sidelined?

For CIOs standing still is not an option. The choice is to become a new – or constantly 're-new-ing' - CIO or to be replaced. The choice is about executive leadership, and the demands change as their business changes. CIOs who consciously or unconsciously fail to the shift with their business will become mere technology mechanics. Their role as new CIO leaders will not be eliminated—they simply won't have the job themselves.

A 'new CIO leader' has earned their place at the executive table. They are able to weave together business and IT strategy, understanding all the time that what their executive colleagues really want and expect from them is to deliver, deliver, deliver.

In this session, Dr Broadbent will explore the responsibilities and behaviors of new CIO leaders, drawing on multiple sources. These include her international work with executives teams and CIOs and her book The New CIO Leader as well as her most recent work in Leadership Assessment and Executive Search. Why is this role so critical, what does it really encompass? How close are you to being a new CIO leader?

Note: This session has been run as a Keynote, and as a half day or full day workshop in different countries around the world.