Our people

Meet the academics, researchers and professional staff from the centre, who are all passionate about leadership and governance.

Brigid Carroll

Professor Brigid Carroll, Director

Brigid is a Professor in the Department of Management and International Business and holds the Fletcher Building Employee Educational Fund Chair in Leadership. She teaches broadly in the area of leadership, organizational theory and qualitative research methods at undergraduate, postgraduate and executive level and does extensive cross sector leadership development work with corporate, community, professional, and youth organisations. In her development work Brigid has specialized in whole system, collaborative and cross organisation leadership development alongside a focus on leadership identity, mindset and practice. Increasingly she works with cross-faculty and interdisciplinary research and development teams. Brigid has recently begun a series of research and development work involving participatory, grassroots and adaptive governance, and complex, multi-sector collaboration.

Ongoing research themes revolve around identity work, power and resistance, leadership development, distributed and collective leadership and discursive/ narrative approaches. Ultimately Brigid is interested in leadership as a discourse, identity, and practice and in exploring how it is constructed and shaped between people, spaces, and artefacts in different organisational contexts.

She has written recently on the management/leadership relationship, the re-theorisation of role, the dynamics of leadership development, leadership as practice, and the relationship of leadership to constructs such as authenticity, resistance, aesthetics, responsibility and learning.

Brigid has co-edited three leadership books, Leadership, Contemporary Critical Issues, Responsible Leadership: Realism and Romanticism and After Leadership. She has published over 50 articles in journals such as Organization Studies, Human Relations, AMLE, Organization, Management Learning and Leadership. She is currently one of four editors on the new Sage Handbook of Leadership to be published in 2022.

In her spare time Brigid hangs out with her three sons and a menagerie of pets, likes to walk, cook and bake, enjoys film festival movies and loves to read classic and contemporary literature.  

Susan Watson

Professor Susan Watson, Director of Governance

Professor Susan Watson holds joint chairs in the Faculty of Law, and the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland. She is the Dean of the University of Auckland Business School.

Professor Watson researches and teaches primarily corporate law and corporate governance. She has a particular interest in the corporate form and in her research seeks to understand how the form developed, why it is so successful, and the economic and societal impact of corporations. Her current monograph The Making of the Modern Company focusses on these questions. Her research has been published widely in New Zealand and internationally; she has edited and co-authored treatises and textbooks, five edited collections and numerous articles and book chapters. Her work has been cited and discussed by other scholars in the field and by courts at all levels including the UK Supreme Court.

Susan has co-authored a book and series of articles on the relationship between leadership and governance and is currently co-authoring a book that collates a set of case studies on prominent New Zealand companies also focussed on the leadership role of boards of directors She is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) the only New Zealander to be appointed to date.

From 2007 until 2014 Susan was joint editor of the New Zealand Business Law Quarterly, and is currently the New Zealand editor for the Journal of Business Law. In 2016 she won the Legal Research Foundation Sir Ian Barker Published Article Award for How the Company Became an Entity - A New Understanding of Corporate Law. Her most recent book is Corporate Law in New Zealand (Thomson Reuters) jointly edited with Professor Lynne Taylor of Canterbury University.

Professor Watson has been a visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University (2008, 2012, 2018) Tilburg University where she was invited to teach courses on corporate governance. In 2018 she was a visiting academic in the Oxford Law Faculty. She was elected president of the Society of Corporate Law Academics (SCoLa) at the beginning of 2020; the first President for the Association elected from outside Australia where it is primarily based. She has organised conferences on corporate governance drawing leading national and international scholars and commentators in the field.  

Rhiannon Lloyd

Dr Rhiannon Lloyd, Director of Leadership

Rhiannon holds a PhD from Cardiff University, United Kingdom. She is a Professional Teaching Fellow in Management and International Business at the University of Auckland, and currently holds a Research Fellowship through which she undertakes research on leadership, leadership development and governance. Rhiannon’s theoretical and empirical background is in the nexus of environmentalism and organisational theory, with her PhD (2014) exploring the green narratives of the UK energy industry with a particular focus on nuclear power. Within such institutional contexts she is particularly interested in the confluence of power, institutional logics, social movements, and forms of sustainable action. Such interests continue to underpin her current work on leadership, responsibility, and sustainability.

Over the past few years, Rhiannon’s teaching and research interests have focussed on student leadership development. She runs the Deans Leadership Award for the Business and Economics Faculty and contributes to the design and facilitation of the Kupe Leadership Scholarship. Alongside her leadership development work, she teaches critical management and organisational theory across Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels. Her facilitation and teaching skills won her Faculty level teaching excellence awards in 2018 and 2019, and the University’s Early Career Teaching Excellence Award in 2019.

Her recent work with Professor Brigid Carroll on health and safety leadership was recently published in Human Relations (2021), and she has presented her research at international conferences including at the Academy of Management and HERDSA.

Outside of academia, Rhiannon is an illustrator, fiction reader and keen hiker. She volunteers for West Auckland Hospice as a life reviewer and an ad-hoc bucket shaker.  

Leny Woolsey

Leny Woolsey, Director of the Kupe Leadership Programme

Leny’s interest in leadership and governance originates from her early-career experiences working with corporates in London. With a BA and a brief career in the performing arts behind her, Leny was struck by the dominance of formal structures and hierarchical relationships in the workplaces she encountered during those formative years. Leny worked for nearly 10 years as a marketing and event management consultant to private and commercial clients before emigrating to Aotearoa in 2009. She continued on a similar path in Auckland, working initially on major sporting events, then national and global conferences. In 2010 she commenced her MBA at the University of Auckland and, upon completion in 2012, took a role at the University of Auckland Business School as Business Development Manager in the Graduate School of Management (GSM) and manager of the Fletcher Building Leader’s Edge programme for Executive Education. Her MBA thesis was based on exploring connections between leadership and theatre, a pursuit that led to further research collaborations with the New Zealand Leadership Institute, including work around Improvisation in Student Leadership Development. Around this time, Leny presented papers on Arts-based Leadership Development at the Executive MBA Council Global Conference and the International Leadership Association Oceania Conference, and became active in the Art of Management and Organisation international scholarly community.

Leny began her PhD in 2014 and commenced her fieldwork in late 2015 by implementing a longitudinal arts-based leadership development intervention within the NZ branch of a multinational supplier to the construction industry. Her thesis, completed in early 2019, was placed on the Dean’s List for academic excellence, and has led to publications in Organisational Aesthetics Journal and an invitation to present at the AoMO conference in Brighton.

While Leny is still interested in opportunities for creative expression within collaborative and critical/dialogic modes of leadership and leadership development, her research focus has more recently shifted towards the integration of indigenous perspectives, such as Wayfinding Leadership theory, into leadership development, and the important role of the facilitator in this process. Her work as Executive Director of the Kupe Leadership Scholarship and facilitator of the University of Auckland’s Leadership Mindset programme allows her to collaborate with some exceptional scholars in these fields.

In her spare time, Leny is a musician, composer and conductor of a local community choir in the Eastern Bay of Plenty where she lives with her husband and two young daughters. She volunteers as a Trustee for a primary school in Whakatāne, is Director of a local horticulture business and is committed to pursuing a treaty-based future for Aotearoa.  

Lusi McCabe

Lusi McCabe, Programme Manager, Student Leadership Programmes

Lusi has a background in Programme, Event and Relationship Management in NZ and the UK. She is passionate about community development and enabling the potential of others. She previously worked in the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship running programmes that supported the leadership development and growth of the students involved.

Lusi enjoys working with students and building the community among the wonderful and diverse community of scholars, alumni, mentors, sponsors, speakers, and other important programme contributors involved in the University of Auckland’s Kupe Leadership Scholarship and the Business School Dean’s Leadership Award.

In 2013-2015 Lusi was part of in an innovative postgraduate Pasifika Leadership Development Programme which intertwined current leadership theories, connected with leadership in the corporate environment, communication and leadership through creativity and poetry ‘Pasifika Mat’ all explored through a Pasifika lens.

Amanda Sterling

Amanda Sterling, Research Assistant

Amanda is a mum, leadership coach, writer and researcher. She has over 15-years experience working in corporate human resources, learning and development, and leadership development for global businesses including Fisher and Paykel Appliances, Frucor and Vitaco Health Ltd.

Amongst working within corporates, Amanda has also run her own consulting company collaborating with local and global organisations on their social learning, digital change, and cultural transformation journeys.

Her achievements include winning an award for her work leading the global people and culture community (HR, Recruitment and Learning and Development) to rethink how they approach people practices in a complex ever changing world, and writing a book, called The Humane Workplace, about how social technologies can, and should, make workplaces more humane.

More recently Amanda has been working on her PhD on the topic of Motherhood and Leadership, contrasting the embodied experiences of motherhood with idealised images of leadership to throw up greater opportunities for women to progress to senior leadership positions.

When she is not working on her PhD, Amanda coaches mums who are leaders or who want to be (and it’s up to you how you define leadership), spends time with her son, and gardens. She is trained as a neuroscience based coach through the Neuroleadership Institute and is working on her ICF accreditation.  

Alexandra Todd

Alexandra Todd, Research Assistant

Alexandra Todd is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Management and International Business and research assistant to Professor Brigid Carroll. She is researching the ways in which the media constructs and influences our understanding of what leadership is, looking at the disconnect between our perceived understandings and the function that leaders and leadership fulfil in our society. She is working under the supervision of Professor Brigid Carroll and Dr Helen Delaney.

Alexandra previously worked at the New Zealand Leadership Institute as a research assistant and administrator. During this time she provided support to the research and development team across a number of responsibilities, including: ensuring that research was undertaken according to the University's ethics guidelines, completing literature searches and reviews, providing editing support, and assisting in the funding application process.  

Associate members

The Aotearoa Centre for Leadership and Governance works in close collaboration with associate members within the University.