Sarah Williams

Asia-Pacific

Sarah Williams works with Simply Energy where she is working with internal teams to develop high performing culture and leadership capabilities, and partnering with energy customers, in collaborative and creative ways, to help tackle tricky problems such as climate change.

Sarah has also started a consultancy journey with Both Limited to help businesses find the sweet spot where both purpose and profit come together symbiotically

Experience

Embarking on a career in environmental management and sustainable engineering solutions 20 years ago, Sarah has worked as a resource management planner for local government in the UK and New Zealand, and in environmental planning and engineering consulting roles in New Zealand. In 2010 Sarah joined Contact Energy where amongst the disrupted New Zealand electricity industry her inherent skills in collaborative team culture development and change management strengths flourished. Working with Acumen for several years supporting Contact Energy on their Safe to Run safety leadership programme was instrumental in Sarah’s development.

With Simply Energy for the last 3 years, Sarah has continued to develop her ability to bring the whole team on the journey, helping them find ways to connect with the corporate purpose (to lead New Zealand businesses to low carbon energy solutions) and discover their own leadership strengths. At Simply, Sarah has been able to share her collaborative approach to assist customers find their best low carbon energy solutions.

Making room in her working week for Both has been an exciting development for Sarah as she explores the opportunity to help businesses leverage the good they can do in their communities and environments all the while ensuring the financial sustainability of the business is sound. Sarah believes that authentically using team culture, values and purpose that already exists within a business can help with talent attraction & retention, as well as strengthening the product or service offered and naturally, customer attention and loyalty

Qualifications

In 1999 Sarah gained a Bachelor of Resource Studies with Honours from Lincoln University, and in 2004 achieved a Master of Engineering in Chemical and Process Engineering from University of Canterbury. In 2018 Sarah attended the Design Thinking bootcamp at Stanford University, and became ICAgile accredited with the Agile Professional Foundation course with Boost. From 2019 – 2022 Sarah held her first governance role as a Trustee for Taupō Economic Development Agency, Amplify.