The key focus for our discussion was on how leaders can successfully navigate the increasingly digital world we inhabit. Alena started her career studying English, then moved to Economics and finally settled on Geography in her quest to understand why things are the way they are. Geography provides her with an interesting perspective, revealing how much our lives are informed and touched by where we live. Over time she’s moved into the technology side: she says we have a big data problem as we’re always collecting masses of geospatial data, and the big challenge is what to do with it, how to l ..read more

This statement encapsulates much of my conversation with special guest Glen Sharman who is General Manager for MaxiTRANS NSW. He’s always been in the transport industry and has had the happy opportunity to have a diverse career across different working cultures, with global and local brands, working for large and small companies. Glen reflects that from a young age he had a diverse mix of people around him who were invaluable for providing him with advice and suggestions, which he greatly appreciated. He started his career in the transport and manufacturing industries and he’s maintained a lot ..read more

It can be challenging knowing what it’s like to work in a particular role, industry or organisation. Not knowing is one of the real impediments particularly for women moving into male dominated work. This is something that Donna Stace mastered very early in her career. Donna is an Operational Specialist in a Functional Safety Team at Rio Tinto. Growing up in The Pilbara as she did, she was exposed from an early age to various trades and to the mining industry, and that sparked her interest. She fed her interest by getting out and finding work experience and became known, which of course helped ..read more

This is such an important piece of advice that Hanli Pretorius offers in this Leadership Amplified episode. Hanli is General Manager, People and Culture – Defence and Social Infrastructure at Ventia. As she says, while she got into HR by chance rather than design - she took on a job, and found herself a career - she’s had great leadership support and the freedom to play and experiment to implement new programs or technologies. She’s had experience across many different organisations and industries, both partnering in the business as well as working in a centre of excellence. Hanli says ‘This y ..read more

It was an interesting way to end the latest conversation on Leadership Amplified: getting great performance from others starts with you, the leader, taking accountability for your own performance and self-improvement. Rohan Horsley made this conclusion after we’d discussed the often-times tricky challenge of team performance and its successful measurement. I enjoyed Rohan’s take on performance and its measurement: it alternately seems to be pretty obvious and yet is at times – usually the tough ones- a delicate balancing act. He starts with the foundation assumption that people want to perform ..read more

The complexity of our world just continues to grow. We have multiple challenges of very different kinds to make sense of and prioritise attention to. One thing that helps is being able to see a way through contradiction, so I was very pleased in this new episode of Leadership Amplified to speak with Ilka Fuerstenberger, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Australia about one contradiction that is regularly encountered by leaders. Leading through warmth while also driving for performance. This is a balancing act that is foremost in Ilka’s mind as she leads her organisation. For her, establi ..read more

In this latest episode of Leadership Amplified, listen in to Tim Drinkall’s wisdom about careers, their weird but wonderful trajectories, and the value of career support. Tim should know, he’s Head of Learning and Organisational Development at Metro Trains! While Tim has spent 25 years in various learning and organisation development roles, his career started on a surprisingly different trajectory – as a chef and then a Physical Education teacher. In our conversation Tim reflects on how the lessons learnt from these very different kinds of roles have stood him in good stead for the work he doe ..read more

As someone who’s seen a lot of change in her life Sudha Sharma has some terrific advice for approaching it successfully. In Episode 38 of Leadership Amplified we have a powerful conversation about influencing others for change, and Sudha shares her very human-centered and pragmatic approach. She says that ‘in the corporate world where results matter, you can’t achieve them if you don’t take care of people.’ She’s focused on doing that, and helping other leaders do the same. She says ‘Post-COVD there is no playbook on how to deal with a team.’ The old one doesn’t work, but what takes its place ..read more

In this episode I speak with Lauren Jones  about how she helps technical experts transform into great people leaders. Lauren started her working life as an electrical engineer in petrochemical manufacturing and quickly moved into operations management. During that period, she developed important leadership skills heading an operations team, and the importance of quality assurance, health and safety, and environmental compliance became ingrained. One thing that she felt unable to do as a young leader was to step back and see the big picture – it’s critical to understand the big picture, th ..read more

Much of my conversation with Chris Pearce centered around being flexible in your style and leading authentically. Chris started his career in the Army, then spent a number of years in leadership roles in transport organisations such as FedEx, Linfox and MaxiTrans, and is now with ecoDynamics as Group Fleet and Asset Manager. The connection between flexibility and authenticity is always an interesting one. With some coaching clients, there is a challenge about being flexible in your style VERSUS being authentic. How can you be both? If you’re being your authentic self, who you truly are, should ..read more