Experience

Mary’s approach has been shaped by her background and experience working for 10+ years as a counselling psychologist, followed by 20 years with the Boston Consulting Group. During her time at BCG Mary advised, coached and supported a broad range of CEOs and senior leadership teams on challenges related to leadership, teaming, people, culture and delivering change.
Mary is passionate about helping individuals realise their full potential as leaders and supporting them to discover how to bring out the best in others. She is an advocate of Ben Zander’s ‘Art of Possibility’ approach to leadership.

She believes the best business results are delivered when employees are fully engaged and empowered to contribute to their full potential, and that leadership is key to this. She has also found that bringing about change in organisations requires more visible and active leadership than most senior executives realise, and that leaders who understand this deliver better outcomes with their change programs.

Mary has helped a broad range of CEOs and senior teams understand what they must do differently to ensure change programs deliver results in full. Typically she would coach each member of the top team as individual leaders and the senior team as a team. Often this has involved working on accelerating the adoption of the leadership behaviours needed to embed a high performance workforce culture.

During her time at BCG Mary led global research projects on top executive teams, change management and high performance cultures. She was BCG’s global topic expert on Leadership and Culture from 2003 until her retirement as a Partner in 2008. She was also the Asia Pacific regional leader of BCG’s Women’s Initiative – aimed at attracting and retaining high performing females, and she conducted a large global research project for BCG on this topic in 2006.

Mary’s deep expertise and knowledge of the people side of large corporations, combined with her psychology background, have enabled her to coach senior executives to deliver change and achieve a competitive advantage through people. She has a wealth of stories, tools and techniques that she uses to help leaders discover how to enhance their effectiveness.

 

Coaching & behavioural science qualifications

• Diploma of Education, Monash University, 1970

Business qualifications and business experience (selected)

• Bachelor of Science, Pure and Applied Mathematics and Psychology, University of Melbourne, 1969
  
• Partner, Boston Consulting Group
  

Selected client organisations

Clients include: Nestlé, BP, AMP, ANZ, National Bank Montreal, SGX, Finance Ministry Dubai, Department of Premier and Cabinet Victoria, North Limited (now Rio Tinto), Boral, National Foods, Dairy Farmers, Pacific Brands, Donaldson Coal, Fonterra, Telecom NZ, Fletcher Challenge NZ, Electricity Corporation NZ, Transpower NZ

Instrument Accreditations

DiSC, MBTI