Harriet Khataba

Is the Founder and President of Her Story Matters, an international consultancy focused on leadership, governance, and institutional impact. Over fifteen years, she has worked with NGOs, governments, corporate boards, and global institutions across four continents, including the UN, the UK Government, and major financial institutions. Her work focuses on the intersection of leadership and organisational outcomes over time, with particular attention to governance structures, leadership culture, and institutional patterns that shape whether organisations can function at the level their ambition demands. function at the level their ambition demands.

What Board Members Are Rarely Told When They Are Appointed.

What Board Members Are Rarely Told When They Are Appointed. There is a moment most trustees can recall with surprising clarity. The moment their expertise is recognised, the value of their networks is clear, and their credibility carries weight. They are exactly what the organisation needs. The conversation is affirming in a way that makes yes feel like the only natural answer. What they are not told is that everything that made them the right person to appoint is separate from what the role will require of them. The assumption is that accomplished professionals will work it out, that exposure to board life will produce capability, and that competence transfers. It does not, and the cost of that assumption is carried quietly for years before it becomes visible. What governance requires tends to come as a surprise to people who have been highly effective in other roles. The board does not run the organisation, it holds it accountable for how it is run.  That requires the ability to scrutinise without micromanaging, hold a position under pressure without becoming adversarial, and ask the question the room is quietly avoiding. These are learned capabilities, and most trustees have never been given the opportunity to develop them because the organisations they join assume the learning is unnecessary. The result is boards populated with highly capable people who are, in governance terms, largely self-taught, and the gap between their individual interpretations of the role is where most board dysfunction quietly lives. That gap shows up in predictable ways. Some trustees interpret their role through the lens of their professional expertise, bringing value but drifting into operational territory without always recognising it, because they are applying what has made them successful in a role whose boundaries were never made explicit.  Others disengage, attending and voting but not scrutinising with the rigour the role requires, often because they are uncertain what good governance looks like in practice and have learned that asking might expose that uncertainty.  And some, full of commitment and good intention, do not yet distinguish between their responsibility and the executive’s, reaching into operational matters and creating confusion while believing they are helping. All of this is the predictable result of appointing people to a governance role without developing them for it. Governance capability cannot be assumed into existence. It has to be built deliberately and collectively, because a board is not a collection of individuals exercising separate responsibilities. It is a collective body that either governs effectively as a unit or does not, and what produces that effectiveness is a common understanding of what governance requires, clear standards for how the board operates, and accountability for the quality of its decisions. Most boards have never had that development, because attention is given to who is appointed, not to whether the board is prepared to govern. Having the right people and having an effective board are different things. The distance between them is governance capability. Most boards we work with arrive at this point having already invested significantly in who sits around the table. The work of the Governance and Leadership Intensive is to build what appointment alone cannot create. If that is where your board is, we should talk.

Why Leadership Transitions Fail

Why Leadership Transitions Fail Even When the Incoming Leader Is the Right Person. Most organisations approach a leadership transition as though the primary risk is selecting the wrong person. The selection process reflects this. It is the most visible, resource-intensive, and carefully governed part of what the organisation does in preparation for a change at the top. And when the transition fails, which it does regularly and at significant cost, the organisation often returns to the same question. Was this the right person? It is rarely the right question. The incoming leader is frequently capable and right for the role. What the organisation did not prepare was the transition itself, and a transition is not the same thing as an appointment. It is a distinct process with its own requirements, its own dynamics, and its own ways of failing, and most organisations have never treated it as such. What gets placed inside an unprepared transition is a capable person navigating a system that was not ready to receive them, carrying expectations that were never made explicit, inheriting relationships and informal power structures that were never mapped, and entering a culture that is in the process of deciding whether to extend to them the authority their title suggests they now hold. The reason this matters is that authority in organisations is not simply transferred by appointment. Formal authority is straightforward and allows a leader to make decisions within a defined remit. But the authority that determines whether a leader can function, the authority that allows them to set a direction and have people move in it, is granted by the people being led through a process that takes time and cannot be shortcut by the quality of the appointment itself. A new leader who does not understand this often responds to the resistance they encounter by pressing harder on the formal authority they have been given, which is precisely the thing that delays the granting of the informal authority they need. The variable that receives the least honest attention in most transition processes is the outgoing leader. The succession plan identifies the successor. It rarely examines what the outgoing leader will do with the change,  in the sense of what it costs a person who has built something significant to hand it to someone else. To move from being the authority to being the former authority. To sit with the discomfort of watching decisions being made differently than they would have made them. These are  difficult experiences and they produce  predictable behaviours. The implicit second-guessing. The presence at the edges of decisions that should now belong to someone else. The availability for informal consultation that maintains a line of influence the formal structure has been changed to remove. All of this is a human response to a loss that organisations rarely acknowledge as such, because loss is not the language that succession planning speaks. The incoming leader navigating this dynamic is  building authority in a system that the previous holder of that authority is still present in, at least relationally and culturally and often practically. They are trying to establish themselves in a role whose informal rules, the things that are really going on beneath the documented processes and stated expectations, are known to everyone except them. They are managing a board or senior team that is simultaneously adjusting to the change and carrying its own relationship to the person who came before. And they are doing all of this while being evaluated against a standard that is partly explicit and largely not. The governance structures that a transition moves through are rarely built for what a transition requires. They are built to manage the formal aspects of the handover. They are not built to manage the relational and cultural aspects, which are the ones that actually determine whether the new leader can function effectively in the role they have been given. The board that oversaw a rigorous selection process often has no structured way of supporting the new leader through the first year of genuine authority building. The outgoing leader who agreed to a transition plan often has no formal accountability structure for adhering to it when the pull to remain present becomes strong. What transitions that work share is not a more perfect incoming leader. It is a more honest organisational reckoning with what the transition requires of every party involved. The outgoing leader being supported to leave fully, which is different from leaving formally. The incoming leader being given a genuine account of the informal landscape they are entering, not just the one that appears in the documentation. The board being actively involved in the transition as a process rather than as a set of procedural requirements to complete. And the organisation being given time and space to adjust to what it is losing and to invest in what is coming, because transitions that do not create that space produce a loyalty deficit the new leader inherits and cannot understand the origin of. The right person in the wrong transition fails because the organisation mistook the appointment for the work and called the transition complete before it had begun. Most transition failures are process failures that organisations are rarely equipped to see in the moment. Her Story Matters works with boards and leadership teams navigating this. You can explore how we work here.

The Cost of a Leadership Team That Has Learned to Manage Upward

The Cost of a Leadership Team That Has Learned to Manage Upward Most leadership teams do not set out to turn their attention upward. It happens gradually, through decisions that each make sense in the moment they are made. A presentation shaped to be well received by the person at the top, a difficult truth softened before it travels upward, a recommendation adjusted to fit what is likely to be approved rather than what the situation requires. None of these feel like abdication when they happen, and accumulated over time that is exactly what they are. The people and teams below feel this before they can name it. Their leader arrives to conversations with attention divided, operating somewhere between the work in front of them and the relationship above them, and the energy that should be moving downward into the organisation is moving upward into the management of a power dynamic.  What those teams receive is a version of their leader at reduced capacity, and they adjust accordingly, lowering their expectations of what is possible and stop bringing the things that require full presence to receive. This is what it costs an organisation when its leadership team has learned to manage upward rather than lead outward. Communication through the organisation reflects the same pattern. Information travels upward carefully, shaped and filtered at each stage, and downward communication becomes slower and often incomplete because clarity in that direction was never consistently rewarded. The middle layer fills the gaps with inference, corridor conversation, and informal networks that begin to carry more weight than formal channels. The strategic cost is the least visible in the short term. A leadership team oriented toward managing upward operates within a managed version of strategy, shaped by what the person above will accept instead of what the situation requires. When the right direction has not been pre-endorsed, that orientation determines whether the conversation happens at all. The considerable capability sitting in that leadership team is being spent on managing a single relationship rather than on the organisations, teams, and challenges those leaders are nominally responsible for leading. That is the pattern, and it is recognisable once you know what you are looking at. Recognising the pattern is the first step. Changing it requires working at the level of leadership culture, not just individual behaviour. Her Story Matters supports organisations in doing exactly that. You can explore the full range of services here.

Good Governance Is Boring

Good Governance Is Boring Good governance is boring, and organisations that understand this are the ones that govern well. The ones that do not tend to discover its value at the worst possible time, when a crisis makes visible what had been quietly eroding long before anyone named it. The return on good governance is largely invisible. You cannot point to the crisis that did not happen or quantify the decision that was made well through a clear process, yet decisions are made by the right people, with the right information, at the right level of the organisation, and the accountability that needs to exist is there when it is required. The organisation moves through its complexity without producing a crisis, and there is nothing visible to point to. This is what success looks like in governance, and it is consistently undervalued because people are not well calibrated to notice the absence of problems. What gets lost is the distinction between boring governance and passive governance. Boring governance is active and deliberate, it holds standards, applies process, and intervenes when it needs to. Passive governance looks similar on the surface, but it is characterised by avoidance, missed challenge, and decisions that go unchallenged.  This work is unglamorous. It does not produce moments of spectacle or visible transformation. It produces the steady accumulation of an organisation that functions reliably because its structures are sound and the people responsible for them uphold them with consistency. The discipline good governance requires is maintaining standards when the pressure to relax them is present and the cost of doing so is invisible. It means applying the process even when informal shortcuts are available and tempting, and asking the question that slows things down when everything in the room is leaning toward agreement. That discipline is what makes governance boring in the best possible sense. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening because the structure is doing what it is supposed to do, making the right outcomes more likely and the wrong ones harder to emerge without anyone noticing. The organisations that treat governance as an administrative burden tend to discover its value at the worst possible time, because organisational crisis takes shape through the gradual erosion of governance standards where accountability becomes theoretical, decision making processes are bypassed in favour of informal agreement, and those informal decisions eventually produce outcomes the formal structure would have caught. The gap between governance on paper and governance in practice widens quietly over time until it becomes the organisation’s reality. The goal of governance work is to keep that gap as small as possible, to build structures that are understood, used, and maintained with consistency, and that hold because they are built well enough to function. The organisations that govern well over time, that move through complexity without producing crises and hold the confidence of funders, regulators, and the communities they serve, are doing something consistent. They have built structures that work and they maintain them with discipline. Good governance is boring because when it is done well and maintained with integrity, the organisation runs quietly and reliably in the direction of its mission. Her Story Matters works with boards and leadership teams to build governance structures that hold and to maintain them with discipline. If that is the work your organisation needs, the details are here