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Andrea Mason
Indigenous Corporate Leadership
program—Andrea Mason
Andrea Mason is a Karoni and Ngaanyatjarra
woman and CEO of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council. In that
role, she manages over 100 staff who provide
services across 350,000 square kilometres of central
Australia. She won the 2016 Northern Territory
Business Woman of the Year Award and the 2017
Northern Territory Australian of the Year Award. But
like other women dedicated to serving community
in key roles, Andrea reflected on the modest
expectations placed on that form of leadership and
the limited opportunities on offer:
The majority of Aboriginal women in CEO or
general manager roles are working in the health
or community sector. We don’t see ourselves as
business leaders. We see ourselves as managers
of Aboriginal organisations.
Seconded to the Business Banking Team at Westpac,
Andrea worked on a customer project and became
part of Westpac’s exclusive Executive Leadership
Program. Her manager ensured that her leadership
strength was developed, while also supporting
her to gain concrete skills and commercial and
organisational knowledge. Andrea’s reflections were
both personal and professional, indicative of new
experience and energy she would reinvest in her
organisation and community:
I’ll go back to central Australia with this inside
knowledge of business banking and how this
sector works … This is valuable as Indigenous
Australian development efforts intensify in for-
profit work.
Andrea also felt the program was well timed not only
for her, but also for the NPY Lands region she is a
leader of:
The Indigenous Corporate Leadership program
was offered to me at a time when I was seeing
opportunities on the horizon for the NPY
Lands, but I lacked the knowledge to set out a
clear, realistic, achievable plan to create these
opportunities. The secondment helped me fill in
these gaps.
18 JAWUN
2017 LEARNINGS AND INSIGHTS