Niven Postma
Senior leaders are told to focus on performance, and then watch peers with weaker results get the promotion, the budget, the room. Most organisations run on relationship currency and influence capital that no one teaches. Leaders who refuse to engage with that reality lose ground; leaders who engage with it badly lose credibility.
Niven Postma helps senior leaders treat organisational politics as a teachable executive discipline, drawing on her HBR work and her time running leadership and culture at Standard Bank Group.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Niven Postma
- She gives executive teams a vocabulary and method for organisational politics that most leadership programmes refuse to address directly, anchored in her Harvard Business Review article and her best-selling book on the subject.
- She has run the function from the inside: Head of Leadership and Culture at Standard Bank Group, Head of the South African Reserve Bank Academy, CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa.
- Her work travels across financial services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing, so the politics framework is tested against very different operating environments rather than one sector’s habits.
- She holds a recognised platform in African leadership development as Programme Director of the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship, run by the African Leadership Institute in partnership with Oxford University.
- She codified her approach into a LinkedIn Learning course aimed at senior leaders, which means the content is structured for executive use, not anecdote-driven keynote material.
Biography highlights
- Author, If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You (2020).
- Harvard Business Review contributor; “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” (2021), selected for HBR Press collection Bosses, Coworkers and Building Great Relationships (2024).
- LinkedIn Learning instructor, Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader.
- Former CEO, Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa; former Head, South African Reserve Bank Academy; former Head of Leadership and Culture, Standard Bank Group.
- 2007 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellow; Programme Director of the Tutu Fellowship Programme from 2025 (African Leadership Institute, with Oxford University).
- Lecturer at Henley Business School and managing director of Niven Postma Inc.
Biography
Office politics are usually treated as something serious leaders should rise above. Niven Postma’s argument, set out in her Harvard Business Review article and her 2020 book If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You, is the opposite. At senior levels, politics is the work. Influence capital and relationship currency decide which strategies get resourced, which leaders get promoted, and which decisions actually stick.
Her credibility on the subject comes from having held the seat. She was Head of Leadership and Culture for Standard Bank Group, the largest bank by assets in Africa, after running the South African Reserve Bank Academy and serving as the founding CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa. From those roles, she saw which executives understood how organisations really work and which ones did not, and built her practice around closing that gap.
Today she advises executive teams across financial services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing through her firm Niven Postma Inc., lectures at Henley Business School, and teaches Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader on LinkedIn Learning. Her HBR piece “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” was selected for the HBR Press collection Bosses, Coworkers and Building Great Relationships in 2024.
In 2025 she became Programme Director of the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship, the African Leadership Institute’s flagship programme run with Oxford University, having been a Fellow herself in 2007. That role situates her work in a wider conversation about how African senior leaders develop the practical political judgement complex organisations require.
Key speaking topics
- Organisational politics for senior leaders
- Leadership and culture in complex organisations
- Executive presence and influence
- Women’s leadership and systemic gender equity
- Leading through disruption and change
- Culture transformation in financial services and large enterprises
Ideal for
- C-suite and executive committees in banking, insurance and large regulated enterprises
- CHROs, chief people officers and heads of leadership development are designing senior-leader curricula
- High-potential leadership cohorts and women’s executive networks
- Boards and management teams operating across multiple geographies or post-merger contexts
Audience outcomes
- A direct, non-euphemistic vocabulary for the political dynamics that shape decisions in their organisation
- A practical reading of where their own influence capital sits and which relationships are under-invested
- A framework for engaging in politics ethically without retreating into “I just focus on the work”
- Sharper judgement about how strategy, culture and politics interact at the top of complex organisations
- Specific moves senior leaders can use the next week, drawn from her HBR work and the LinkedIn Learning course
Talks
A keynote on why senior leaders cannot opt out of organisational politics, and how to engage in them with integrity.
Key takeaways:
- Why performance alone rarely produces the promotion, budget or recognition leaders expect
- The difference between relationship currency and influence capital, and how to build both
- Practical moves for ethical political behaviour at senior levels
A keynote on the leadership posture required when employee engagement, organisational stability and strategy are all in flux at once.
Key takeaways:
- How senior leaders sustain credibility when the operating context keeps changing
- The role of curiosity as a managerial habit, not a personality trait
- Where resilience belongs in the leadership job description and where it does not
A keynote that moves the gender-equity conversation from rhetorical commitment to systemic intervention.
Key takeaways:
- Why most women’s leadership programmes fail to shift the system they sit inside
- The structural decisions that actually change senior representation
- How male and female senior leaders can act on this without performing it