After decades in leadership roles and coaching women leaders, Sue has spent the last three years developing and sharing stories as a tool for connection, healing, and supporting women leaders.  

Sue is the founder and CEO of Connected Leadership, an organisation that connects women who lead in Aotearoa New Zealand to one another and to greater opportunities and impact. 

She believes that leadership is most powerful when it is strongly connected to our purpose,  whakapapa and life experience. In challenging the narrative that to succeed as a leader, we need to present a sanitised version of ourselves, Sue has embarked on several creative projects exploring her past and the ways it has contributed to her leadership purpose. 

Her first book, Finding Cynthia Winters, explored and honoured her own experience of closed adoption. After its warm reception, the story was adapted into a one-woman stage play, written and directed by Renee Lyons. Sue performed as herself to sold-out audiences in Wellington and Waiheke, with a second theatre adaptation in the works for a national tour in 2027.

Through this experience of sharing and embracing her own personal story, Sue unlocked a powerful foundation for her leadership practice. Weaving together her leadership experience with her deepened understanding of self, Sue authored her second book, Connected Leadership: Wisdom For Women Who Lead, in 2026. Designed to help the women she has spent her career serving, Sue outlaid the process and framework for developing more powerful, more impact-driven, and sustainable leadership. 

Connected Leadership has been endorsed by the Rt Hon Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and is accompanied by a range of support systems for women leaders, including in-person and digital programmes, a community of connection, and a self-coaching card deck.

To read more about Connected Leadership and how you can access Sue’s leadership work, visit: www.connectedleadership.co.nz/