Maree Harris is a leadership development coach and facilitator of leadership development workshops and training. Her expertise is in the area of people dynamics and people management - growing leaders so they can grow their people. While generally she works with both men and women, she has always had a passion for the issues that affect the lives of women. Her own life story, both personally and professionally, has been an engagement with those issues by way of enriching her own life and that of the women who journey with her.

Maree is the director of People Empowered, the leadership development consultancy she established in 2005. This emerged from a counselling and psychotherapy practice she had conducted since 1989. Around 1995, when there was a very significant shift in workplace culture and practices here in Australia, increasing numbers of senior executives and middle managers began to come for “counselling”, experiencing powerlessness in the face of the change they were being asked to manage and negotiate in their workplaces. Very few of these people needed “counselling”. They were highly competent people overwhelmed by a new workplace reality. They did, however, need a confidential relationship with an objective professional who could work with them through what they were experiencing and help them find meaning, focus and direction. Without even knowing the word at that stage, she began “coaching” these people.

In 2003, Maree completed a PhD with a thesis on “Being a Reflective Practitioner in An Age of Uncertainty”. This in-depth study was a motivating force for the establishment of People Empowered. It looked at how people’s ways of knowing and being are foundational to the way they live and work and therefore need to be made explicit. She wanted to take her insights and develop processes to help people do that in their lives. As she gradually closed her counselling and psychotherapy practice, her leadership development work with both individuals and groups began to take centre stage.

Underpinning her PhD thesis, and very relevant to this blog, was a study of how being a woman had impacted on her professional development and her career. Maree has been in a long term relationship with her marriage partner and has three young adult children. The choices she made regarding her work/family balance had significant impacts on her life. She did not anticipate the high price society would charge her for choosing to mother her children in the way she did. These reflections will be shared in time within the blog.

Maree Harris brings to her work an extensive experience from across a wide professional landscape. As well as her corporate coaching and counselling and psychotherapy she has been engaged in education through primary, secondary, tertiary and adult and is a trained mediator. She also has experience in social research, social work and community development which has given her the ability to critically analyse social change and social development and their impact on organisations and communities. She see that skill being important to understanding what is happening for women in leadership. She has a strong belief in the value of networking as a professional and career development resource. She belongs and contributes therefore to a number of organisations that offer her that opportunity.