Who is
Kathy Hilyard
anyway?

Kathy is one of Australia’s leading facilitators and has a 25 year track record in the design and facilitation of stakeholder engagement and collaboration processes, large gatherings, workshops, and developing leadership and culture frameworks and tools. She is renowned for her engaging, intelligent and skilled facilitation.  She works with executive leadership teams and in group settings, facilitating conversations that matter.

With experience and expertise in public and social policy, reform and complex change, Kathy is particularly passionate about leadership in the context of bringing about change and reform.  She is thinking a lot about the decision-systems leaders operate within and how decisions are and aren't being made in our modern organisation.  She is also obsessed about meetings and the gap between their potential and the lived experience of us all.  She is on a bit of a mission to help leaders rethink their approaches to meeting and gathering.

Kathy was KPMG Australia’s Lead Partner for Leadership, People and Change for  Health, Ageing and Human Services Sector clients. She also lead the Federal Government account for Leadership, People and Change.  Kathy established a team delivering a range of transformation and leadership services for clients across public services, health systems, social services, aged care and corporate sectors.

Over her four careers so far, Kathy has worked with a wide range of clients to shape, co-design and facilitate issues of transformation, strategy, reform, change, leadership, culture, engagement and performance.

Kathy is a dynamic and creative leader, facilitator and consultant with extensive experience working in and with public sector organisations at the Federal, State and Local government levels.  She has also been a leader in and worked with corporate sector clients and not-for-profit organisations and ran her own boutique consulting firm for many years.  She has a particular experience base and passion for working with leaders in health systems and public good organisations to tackle big change challenges, navigate conflict and disagreement, modernise and improve decision-making and accountability practices.











Contemporary leadership does require new skills, changing practices and shifting the ways executive team conversations are conducted.  Kathy facilitates for trust-building, working relationships, collective decision-making, mutual accountability and collaborative advantage in environments that demand new approaches.  She can design and facilitate a series of conversations and provocations to open up new potential for leadership in your team and beyond.

Her style is diagnostic not judgemental and typified by deeply listening, introducing and experimenting with robust and tested frameworks and diagnostic tools, and framing questions that shift conversations in order to surface barriers and find the potential for shared insights, improvement and change.