Griselda Togobo

Why organisations work with Griselda Togobo

• She brings an engineer’s and chartered accountant’s bias for measurement to inclusion work, which is unusually rare in the field and lands credibly with operational and finance audiences.
• She has run a 20,000-member women’s professional network (Forward Ladies, now Novi) for over a decade, so her view of where female and minority talent gets stuck is grounded in pipeline data, not anecdote.
• Her client list, Boeing, Shell, HSBC, NatWest, Sage, Cambridge University, Oxford University, indicates senior buyers in technically demanding, male-dominated environments hire her back.
• Her style is direct and based in psychology rather than moral pressure, which is the only register that survives in rooms where DEI is now politically contested.

Biography highlights

• MPhil, Industrial Systems, Manufacture and Management, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.
• Chartered Accountant (ACA); former management consultant at Deloitte LLP.
• CEO of Forward Ladies (now Novi), a 20,000-member women’s professional network since 2014.
• Author, Unstoppable Women: Female Entrepreneurs’ Stories to Inspire and Motivate.
• Founder of Advancing Futures, a non-profit on education and economic empowerment in Ghana.
• Board member, Northern School of Contemporary Dance; Fellow of the Girls’ Schools Association.

Biography

The hard part of inclusion inside large organisations is not policy. It is what senior leaders do in the small moments: who they sponsor, who they interrupt, whose ideas they credit, and how they decide who is “ready” for the next role. Togobo’s work sits exactly there.

She came to that work through an unusual route. She trained as an electrical and electronic engineer in Ghana, took an MPhil at Cambridge in Industrial Systems, Manufacture and Management, then qualified as a chartered accountant at Deloitte LLP. That technical and financial grounding shapes how she briefs executives. She uses data and behavioural psychology rather than moral argument, which travels better in operations, finance and engineering audiences than the standard DEI register does.

Since 2014 she has led Forward Ladies, now relaunched as Novi, growing it into a 20,000-member professional development network for women across the UK. That platform gives her a continuous read on where mid-career women actually stall, which feeds the diagnostic work she does inside client organisations including Boeing, Shell, HSBC, NatWest, Sage, ASDA and Yorkshire Water.

Her own writing extends the same theme. Unstoppable Women, published in 2022, profiles female entrepreneurs as case studies in commercial decision-making rather than personal struggle. Outside her commercial practice she founded Advancing Futures to support girls’ education in Ghana and sits on the board of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance.

Key speaking topics

• Inclusive leadership inside FTSE-100 organisations
• Women in STEM and the senior pipeline
• Behavioural psychology of bias in promotion and sponsorship
• Building and sustaining women’s professional networks
• Female entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership
• Cross-cultural leadership and the global workforce

Ideal for

• CEOs and executive committees who have run DEI programmes and are not seeing pipeline movement.
• CHROs and heads of talent designing succession and sponsorship into senior leadership.
• Engineering, energy, financial services and industrial businesses with gender-imbalanced senior cohorts.
• Boards reviewing inclusion strategy in markets where DEI language is now politically contested.

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of which leadership behaviours actually move representation, and which are theatre.
• A working diagnostic for where female and minority talent stalls inside their own organisation.
• Language for inclusion that holds up in finance, engineering and commercial audiences.
• A more honest read on the gap between stated DEI commitments and how senior leaders behave in week-to-week decisions.