Welcome!
We are Kate King and Nelis van den Berg, colleagues and executive leaders at SIL International, a global faith-based non-profit organisation.
Leading in conversation is our passion and our vision. We are excited about the transformative power of free-flowing conversations that generate new insights and open up possibilities for change.
As we’ve begun to experiment with conversational leadership and seen it transform how we work in our organisation, we’ve found that it resonates with other leaders and they want to know more. This podcast is our response to that growing interest. Together, and with guests, we want to explore how conversational leadership works on a daily basis in the workplace. We are practitioners, not experts: please join the conversation and learn along with us!
Kate comes from the UK and has degrees in languages and leadership. She has always been passionate about people and the power of language to connect and change us. She’s worked in communications, event design and facilitation and in leadership roles, in the UK, Papua New Guinea and globally.
In her current role as Director of Community and Culture, Kate has found her dream job: overseeing community life, internal communications and change conversations in an organisation of over 4000 staff. She loves nothing more than to get people connected and sharing their experiences and wisdom in a variety of spaces, both online and face-to-face.
After witnessing a number of failed change processes, Kate came across conversational and dialogic leadership during her Masters research. She quickly became convinced that this was an approach to change that could actually work and started experimenting on her colleagues, including Nelis.
Nelis comes from the Netherlands and has a Masters in Educational Psychology. He started out working Cameroon, developing educational materials with a minority language community, moved into training and partnership roles and then through a variety of leadership roles in the Netherlands, Cameroon, Francophone Africa, and now globally.
In his current role as Associate Executive Director, he enjoys unleashing the passion of people, seeking a common vision, and empowering meaningful conversations.
As part of a global leadership team, working with Kate and others on finding new ways to lead, Nelis found in conversational leadership a new way of looking at what organisations are all about and how change works.
The views and opinions expressed on this site are ours alone and do not represent the organisation we work for.