We advise leaders through the reforms, restructures and transformations that shape New Zealand’s public, infrastructure and regulated organisations.
Two principals, with a trusted bench of senior associates.
Significant experience at the executive table.
These four pieces of work are connected. A strategy refresh often becomes an operating-model question, which turns into a workforce conversation, which turns into a transformation programme. We are happy to start anywhere on the journey.
Strategic framing, executive alignment, options analysis, and roadmaps that hold up after the offsite. The work is about helping a leadership team make a clear call about where the organisation is going, and what it needs to do to get there.
Operating models, structures, governance, role and team design, and a practical path from where you are to where you say you want to be. The aim is a realistic model that works in practice, not one that looks impressive in a board paper and quietly falls apart on contact with the actual organisation.
Programme governance, transition planning, stakeholder engagement, and keeping the workforce and the service running while the change is in flight. Most transformations stumble on the same things: pace, sequencing, joining up the wires across workstreams, and the bits of detail that nobody had time to think through. That is the work we keep showing up for.
Workforce strategy, skills development, leadership development, culture and the soft wiring that holds change together, and interim or fractional senior cover when an organisation needs experienced hands faster than a recruitment process will deliver them. We work alongside your team, not over the top of it.
Our experience runs deepest in public-purpose, infrastructure and regulated environments. We are drawn to work with purpose and real impact, where the outcome matters beyond the organisation that commissioned it.
Places where Ministers, boards, regulators, iwi, unions and the wider community all have a legitimate stake in the outcome, and decisions sit in public view.
We also work across construction and property, financial and professional services, membership and certification bodies, and not-for-profit and kaupapa-driven organisations.
Most of our work is confidential, so the examples below are anonymised. We are happy to talk through references directly.
Worked with the executive team of one of New Zealand's largest local government organisations to redesign the operating model after the financial picture shifted and a meaningful number of roles had to come out. The aim was not just to take cost out, but to land in a shape that would hold up afterward, with the right accountabilities, spans of control, and a central strategy and performance function to keep the new model honest. Around 430 roles and $105m of operating cost came out, alongside the design work to make the smaller organisation actually function on the other side.
Designed and planned the transition for a major reform programme. Operating-model options, organisation design, and the unglamorous workforce detail required to make new entities operational on the day they were supposed to be operational.
Led the organisation design and workforce transition workstreams for a complex, nationwide multi-entity restructure. Worked alongside executive sponsors, unions and HR teams to move thousands of staff into new arrangements with clarity and care.
Worked with the executive team to line up the strategy, the operating model and the leadership arrangements after a strategic refresh, including the leadership development needed to make the new model work in practice.
Designed and ran leadership and capability programmes anchored to live organisational priorities. Not the generic kind. The kind where the development is connected to the strategy and structure changes already underway.
Stepped into client organisations as interim executives, directors or workstream leads during high-stakes phases. Sometimes to lead the work, sometimes to hold the seat warm while the permanent hire is recruited.
Worked with a national membership body to design the professional capability and certification framework that sits underneath their member proposition. Assessment design, accreditation pathway, and the change management to roll the whole thing out across the membership.
Developed and implemented engagement architecture for a large, national organisation with over 100,000 staff. Created the forums, governance and working rhythms needed to move from reactive issue management to earlier, more constructive engagement with workforce representatives, executives and government stakeholders.
Worked with a national charity to understand learning needs and design a suite of practical workshops and facilitator guides. Translated existing material into a structured, scalable offering, enabling the charity to establish a new funding stream through standard and tailored delivery to employers supporting staff through significant life challenges.
The people who scope the work are the people who do the work.
That sentence sounds obvious until you have hired a consultancy before. Big Four engagements often begin with seasoned partners in the room and quietly migrate to a delivery team of junior associates you have not met. Ours don’t. We stay involved from the first conversation to the last steering committee.
The team you meet is the team you work with.
Most of what we do moves through four steps.
Where the work needs specialist depth (remuneration, data, employee relations, policy, kaupapa Māori, leadership coaching, transformation delivery) we bring in associates from a trusted bench we know well and have worked with for years.
On AI
We use AI the way a great team uses a great intern: brilliant at first drafts, hopeless at final calls. It takes on the slow stuff: synthesising long documents, pulling patterns out of a year of engagement notes, structuring options for a workshop while it is still running, turning raw data into something a room can actually read. That gives our clients more thinking, faster, on the parts of a project where speed matters.
What stays strictly human is everything that requires any judgement. Reading a room. Calling a difficult moment. Deciding what to recommend and standing behind it.
AI predicts what a plausible answer looks like.
Whether it is the right answer for your organisation, the people you serve and the legislation you operate under is our job, and we sign our name to it.
We are one of around twenty professional services firms in the NZ AI Forum, which keeps us close to how this is being thought about, governed and put to work across the country.
We are best suited to complex, high-stakes work that needs judgement as much as it needs methodology, and a willingness to still be there when the announcement is six months old and the hard yards have started.
We founded Harris Shea together because we kept ending up on the same jobs anyway, with the same view about how change should be done. Our strengths are different and complementary, which makes the thinking better. Most engagements are led by one of us, with the other in the background as a sounding board when it helps. We have each spent more than twenty-five years inside executive teams, restructures and large-scale reform programmes, so the work gets the right senior attention without the cost of two principals on every meeting.
Co-founder and Director
Sara has spent more than twenty-five years inside executive teams across central and local government, infrastructure, utilities, banking, construction, transport and professional services. Recent senior roles include National Organisational Design Lead for New Zealand's Three Waters Reform Programme and Executive Officer for People and Performance at Auckland Council. Her home territory is organisational change and transformation: organisation design, operating models, workforce transition, and the work of turning a strategy into a plan that teams can actually deliver. She brings a calm, pragmatic approach to environments where political, regulatory and operational pressures collide, and is trusted for delivery that holds up long after the programme has wrapped. She is at her best with executive teams working through reform, restructure or a programme with too many stakeholders and not enough time.
Co-founder and Director
Sara has spent more than twenty-five years working on the people side of large-scale change, first in the UK and now in New Zealand, across public and private sectors, including time in senior leadership roles at Big Four firms in London and New Zealand. Her focus is transformation at scale, meaningful stakeholder engagement, capability lift and navigating the industrial-relations and people complexity that arrives uninvited in most serious transformations. She works with executive teams on how to lead this work in a way that builds trust, momentum and capability that outlasts the programme that funded it. She is at her best with executive teams working through reform, restructure or large programmes with multiple stakeholders, turning the vision into a practical plan while working through competing demands.
Our work is delivered alongside a trusted group of senior practitioners we have worked with for years. Between them they cover transformation, operating-model design, data and analytics, remuneration, people and culture, kaupapa Māori, leadership, coaching and facilitation. They are experienced, capable people we choose to work with because we like the way they work and trust the quality of what they deliver.
Former Director at Deloitte. Senior transformation and leadership advisor with extensive experience across complex change, strategy, organisational performance, digital and technology-enabled transformation, ERP-related change, and executive-level advisory. Expert in local government and water CCO establishment.
Organisation design and business change specialist with twenty years across boards and executive teams. Former HR executive and M&A lawyer. Strengths in large-scale organisation design, mergers, acquisitions and divestments, post-deal integration, and turning strategy into a structure that can actually deliver it. Recent experience advising the Hawke's Bay Water programme.
Data and BI specialist with deep experience in people and workforce analytics, including national Water Services Reform Programme work, and Waikato Waters. Strengths in SQL, Power BI, reporting, data cleansing, and turning workforce data into decision-ready insight.
Senior organisational development practitioner who brings transformation experience at executive level. More than 23 years across public, private and tertiary sectors in New Zealand and the UK, including New Plymouth District Council ELT, Auckland Council, Manukau Institute of Technology and PwC (London and Auckland).
Senior remuneration and reward specialist with more than 20 years across local government, media, utilities, professional services and the Water Services Reform Programme. Strengths in remuneration frameworks, pay equity, job sizing and reward reviews.
Pragmatic, real-world HR, employee relations and workforce specialist. Strengths in fair-and-firm people advisory across change, transition and day-to-day complexity.
Senior people and capability practitioner with strong HR, workforce and organisational development credentials. Educator and certified results coach, blending experienced HR judgement with capability-building craft.
People and Culture leader with strong kaupapa Māori foundations and current Waikato-Tainui experience, including the Waikato Waters programme. Strengths across HR, governance, workforce planning, tikanga, Te Reo Māori, and practical people strategy in bicultural contexts.
Senior organisational development specialist with executive-level OD experience, including delivery of New Plymouth District Council's Te Ao Māori Learning Framework and Māori Responsiveness Plan. Strengths in people strategy, leadership and team development, culture change, and embedding bicultural frameworks into organisational practice.
People and culture advisor and certified coach. Strengths in NLP, neuroscience-informed practice, leadership development and team facilitation.
People and culture specialist with HR advisory, organisational change and employee experience strengths. Coach, facilitator and lifter of people performance.
HR and OD practitioner. Strengths in engagement, capability, culture and practical change support, delivered with a heart-centred and compassionate leadership style.
Culture and capability specialist with seventeen years lifting how people and organisations work together. Strengths in culture assessment and change, learning and development strategy, leadership capability, and stakeholder facilitation, with strong tikanga and kaupapa Māori foundations. Recent work includes redesigning the Southern Cancer Society's education outreach for community-based facilitators.
Leadership and team coach. Academic, author and ICF-credentialled growth cultivator with depth across executive coaching, team coaching and leadership development.
Experienced leadership and transition coach, ACC-accredited with the International Coaching Federation. Background in capability, workplace change, communications and leadership programmes across Auckland Council, Foodstuffs and her coaching practice.
Certified leadership coach, facilitator and workshop designer. Specialises in leadership development and team development.
Facilitator, trainer and coach with more than a decade designing and running learning experiences across New Zealand. Originally trained and worked as a registered nurse, which shows in the way she works. Empathy is a baseline, not a flourish. Strengths in workshop design, leadership development, and getting a room engaged and actually learning.
The most useful conversations are the ones that happen early, while the change is still being shaped.
Tell us what you are working through. We will come back to you within two business days with a considered response.