Back to all insights

Interview with Ansie Ramalho -Overcoming leadership challenges

In this conversation, Dr Claudelle and Ansie Ramalho explore modern-day leadership challenges and how Ansie has dealt with some of the challenges she has had to face. Ansie gives some insight into the challenges she faced in joining the Board of KMPG (SA) at the time when the firm was steeped in a scandal in South Africa. She also gives some advice to emerging leaders which are worth embracing.

Ansie Ramalho is a lawyer by training and considered a leading authority on corporate governance, with both deep and broad theoretical and applied knowledge on the topic.

Ansie serves as a professional non-executive director. In addition, she regularly writes and facilitates training on corporate governance and company law.

Ansie was the appointed King IV Project Lead with responsibility for the successful finalisation of the King IV Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa and she now chairs the King Committee.

Her prior positions include having been the Chief Executive of the IoDSA from 2010 to 2014. 

more insights

When Ethics and Compliance Cast a Shadow

5 August 2026

Some topics are not easy to write about. Not because we do not know what our views are about them, but because we know how easily the views may be misunderstood—especially by those who prefer a version of pristine ethics and compliance that does not allow for shadows.
I know. Ethics and compliance shadows? That is where you land when you take the liberty—perhaps a little audaciously—of borrowing a concept from one discipline and applying it to another. I have borrowed from psychology and found the result illuminating enough to risk a few furrowed brows.

Read more >

Menopause Is a Leadership Issue

4 August 2026

Since it has become clear that organisations that are deliberate about ensuring diversity in leadership tend to be more successful, many organisations have been trying to strengthen the pipeline of women into senior leadership. They invest in development programmes targeting women, are intentional around targets and succession plans, as well as mentoring of women in the leadership pipeline. Then, just as many women reach the point at which their experience, judgement and influence are at their most valuable they hit a wall. A natural biological transition suddenly makes remaining at work considerably harder – and the organisation is often entirely unprepared for it.

Read more >

When Leadership Wounds the Conscience

30 June 2026

The last thing I expected that day was an apology. For a few seconds that felt like an eternity, I was at a loss for words. The young man sitting opposite me had just admitted that he had helped fabricate stories about me because his boss had instructed him to do so. I remember my anger. What I did not understand then was the injury he had suffered himself.

Read more >