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New Zealand’s best places to work are those that are intentional about how they create and maintain their cultures. And this is why they have thriving and successful teams. However, when organisations leave culture to chance or become complacent about it, they often struggle to successfully implement strategies and achieve their purpose. This is because a key to ensuring organisational success is having people who actively collaborate and trust each other.

The data from the Best Places To Work (BPTW) Annual Survey tells us that Kiwi organisations understand the importance of creating people-centric cultures where their teams can thrive, but sometimes need support and guidance on developing the tools and strategies to do this.

If you are wondering about how to keep your organisational culture relevant, fresh, productive and people-centric, then the BPTW Culture Masterclass is a great place to start.

Key Topics

Understand the cultural framework and contributors in your organisation.
Make progress on actionable strategies and processes to build and maintain a positive, productive, and people-centric culture.
Tips for maintaining culture when the forces around you are rewarding more short term results.
Make progress on a particular challenge you face that impacts the experience of people around you.
Create a business case for a people-centric culture.
Understand how to create the conditions for people to impact positively on culture the organisation

Why attend?

The interactive and engaging BPTW Culture Masterclass has been designed to equip you with practical and actionable strategies and tools, providing a strong foundation to create or improve your culture.

As a participant you will:

Learn from 2024 BPTW Awards winners about how they have created best places to work cultures.
Gain strong foundational knowledge on how to create and maintain the conditions for your people to positively impact from wherever they are in the organisation.
Learn processes for both creating and keeping alive a people-centric culture.
Make progress on a particular leadership challenge you personally have in the culture space.
Leave with at least two new ideas to experiment with to improve your culture.

The Masterclass consists of

A full day in-person workshop on 27th March, 2025
A follow up 90 minute action learning workshop on 7 April, 3.30-5pm to solidify the practice
Online resources.

Facilitators

The BPTW Culture Masterclass will be facilitated by Leanne Holdsworth and Jim Wicks. They will be joined by international guest, Dr Jennifer Garvey Berger, who will be visiting New Zealand during a break from working with some of the largest companies in the world.

You will also hear real-life insights on culture and initiatives from some of the 2024 BPTW Awards finalists and winners.

Dr Jennifer Garvey Berger

Jennifer is a co-founder and CEO of Cultivating leadership. She lives in France and teaches around the world. Jennifer designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches Executive leaders and their teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people. In her four highly acclaimed books, Unleash Your Complexity Genius (co-authored with Carolyn Coughlin), Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Simple Habits for Complex Times (co-authored with Keith Johnston), and Changing on the Job, Jennifer builds on deep theoretical knowledge to offer practical ways to make leaders’ organisations more successful, their work more meaningful, and their lives more gratifying. Jennifer has worked with senior leaders in the private, non-profit, and government sectors around the world (like Novartis, Google, KPMG, Intel, Microsoft, Wikimedia).

She has a masters and a doctorate from Harvard University. Formerly an associate professor at George Mason University, you can now find her travelling and working from the French countryside, where she has bought a house with eleven friends who live in a community and try to keep the dog from terrifying the cats

Leanne Holdsworth

Leanne stands for a future where it is normal for work environments to be places where human beings thrive, enabling organisations to succeed whilst at the same time, building social capital through how those humans are able to show up with their families and communities.

She is the co-author of Human Work: Five Leadership Mindsets for Humanising workplaces and author of the book A New Generation of Business Leaders and has spent 15 years advising organisations, predominantly in the private sector (across most sectors including banking, primary sector, FMCG, tech, pharmaceuticals), as well as the public and not for profit sectors in sustainability strategy and leadership.

A big move from Auckland to the Northern Hemisphere happens for Leanne and her family in April 2025 where she is taking her passion for people-centric cultures to support clients in other parts of the world.

Jim Wicks

Jim is the Managing Director of Cultivating Leadership, He has an eclectic mix of experiences with roots in rural New Zealand and a career that has been driven by curiosity, an attraction to new things and some key values. This has seen him in very technical roles solving trade finance issues, designing ground-breaking computer systems and moving into senior leadership roles in operations, sales, organisation development and change programs in the finance and health sectors – never a dull moment! He also has over 15 years consulting experience and is an experienced leader, facilitator, coach and consultant. His strength in leadership and governance has been to take a whole of organisation overview that integrates change alongside managing risks and achieving results.

His practical technical and leadership experience is complemented by a deep knowledge of adult development concepts, understanding of ideas and approaches relating to complex adaptive systems and a quest to bring those ideas to life for the greater good. He is a certified coach, holds accreditations in a number of tools, has a Master of Commerce and postgraduate DipHRM. Jim has a gift for integrating leadership development with business improvement, innovation, and complexity ideas – bringing people, processes, systems, and technology together to create sustainable and generative cultures.