Flick the Switch on Switching Off This Summer

What Does It Take to Switch Off from ‘Always On’ Leadership?

Every summer, we are reminded that Australia is a sunburnt country, the compounding effects of climate change, deforestation, and urbanisation become blazingly evident in the bushfire season. But the other smouldering cumulative effect that doesn’t end up on the news is burnout. The sunburnt country is becoming known globally as a burnt out country.

Australians are among the most burnt-out employees in the world, according to the OECD Better Life Index. We rank 32nd out of 41 countries, and this beyond a critical mental health issue, this is also a critical productivity issue (Melbourne Business School, 2024).

Cognitive overload in the attention economy.

Burnout is often framed as an individual psychological state; exhaustion, cynicism, reduced efficacy. But this framing is incomplete. What we are witnessing across Australian workplaces is a systemic saturation of attention, driven by the collision of digital technologies, cultural expectations of constant availability, and leadership models that have not evolved to identify the performance risk posed by the attention economy. Our dopamine-fuelled, diary-filling addiction to proving our worth has created leaders who are perpetually occupied, yet increasingly absent from the deeper work of sense-making and direction.

The result is not just fatigue, but impaired cognition at scale.

The Attention Economy and the Limits of Human Cognition

Human cognitive capacity is finite. Attention, working memory, and executive function are constrained resources. Decades of cognitive science research confirm that sustained performance depends on periods of focused engagement and recovery.

Yet modern work violates these principles almost entirely.

Have you every heard a colleague comment, “I’ve got so many browsers open, I just can’t think!” Our brain is exactly the same; caught in a loop of diminishing returns when it comes to switching costs.

Digital tools — email, collaboration platforms, mobile devices — fragment attention into continuous micro-interruptions. Each interruption imposes a switching cost, degrading working memory, decision quality, and problem-solving capacity. Over time, this produces what researchers describe as cognitive overload: a state in which information demands exceed the brain’s ability to process them effectively.

In an attention economy, where responsiveness is implicitly rewarded, leaders are often the most exposed. Their roles sit at the intersection of strategic decision-making, relational demands, and perpetual information flow. The myth persists that seniority confers greater cognitive resilience. Research suggests the opposite: complex decision environments magnify the cost of overload.

AI and the Catch 22 of Cognitive Overload

The growing reliance on human-in-the-loop AI systems introduces a subtle but profound risk when leaders are already cognitively overloaded. In theory, human oversight is intended to preserve judgment, ethics and accountability. In practice, under conditions of attentional depletion, the human role often degrades into passive validation rather than active cognition. Research on automation bias shows that when mental bandwidth is constrained, individuals are more likely to defer to algorithmic outputs, even when errors are evident. This creates a catch-22 of convenience: AI is adopted to reduce cognitive burden, yet its use further erodes critical thinking capacity by displacing effortful sense-making. Over time, leaders risk outsourcing not just execution, but judgment itself, weakening the very human discernment the loop was designed to protect.

Burnout Is a Lag Indicator of Cognitive Failure

From an academic perspective, burnout should be understood as a downstream outcome, not the core problem.

Long before emotional exhaustion manifests, leaders experience:

Reduced attentional control
Impaired judgment and risk assessment
Declining capacity for systems thinking
Narrowing time horizons and reactive decision-making

This has profound organisational consequences. When leaders operate under cognitive overload, they default to short-termism, over-reliance on heuristics, and excessive control, precisely the behaviours that undermine trust, adaptability, and long-term performance.

In this sense, burnout is beyond a wellbeing issue. It is a performance degradation signal.

Why “Switching Off” Is a Leadership Capability

Disconnection is often mischaracterised as absence. In reality, it is a precondition for higher-order cognition.

When you take a break, your brain can go from tactical tunnel vision to strategic big-picture thinking (Forbes, 2025).

Neuroscience research demonstrates that periods of disengagement activate the brain’s default mode network, critical for sense-making, integration, creativity, and insight. Without this downtime, leaders remain trapped in execution mode, unable to engage in the deeper cognitive work their roles require.

From a leadership standpoint, the ability to switch off is not self-care. It is cognitive governance.

Yet many leaders resist disconnection because they conflate availability with value. In doing so, they inadvertently signal to their organisations that constant responsiveness is a proxy for commitment, embedding overload as a cultural norm.

A Systems Leadership Lens on Disconnection

From a systems perspective, the inability to switch off is an emergent property of how work is designed, rewarded, and led.

Leaders who operate as systems thinkers recognise that:

Attention is a shared organisational resource
Overload in one part of the system propagates elsewhere
Recovery is not inefficiency; it is maintenance

In this context, disconnection becomes a lever for system health, not a personal indulgence.

Why the Australian Summer Matters

Festive commitments aside, extended breaks (aka the Australian summer) offer a rare opportunity for deep cognitive recovery, not just short-term rest. This is qualitatively different from weekends or brief leave, which rarely allow attentional systems to reset.

For leaders, this period represents a strategic intervention point:

To interrupt chronic cognitive load
To restore executive function
To re-enter work with greater clarity, perspective, and adaptive capacity

A Provocation for Leaders

If leadership is fundamentally about judgment, sense-making, and long-term value creation, then chronic connectivity is not neutral, it is corrosive.

The question is no longer whether leaders can afford to switch off.
The evidence suggests they cannot afford not to.

This summer, disconnection should be treated not as retreat, but as deliberate cognitive investment.

Because in an attention economy, the scarcest leadership resource is not time.
It is clarity of mind.

Growing Enterprise Leadership in the Public Sector with ANZSOG

Leadership in the Public Sector is rising to meet the many challenges of the day. Public servants remain deeply committed to serving their communities. Yet a recent OECD survey of 60,000 public sector workers revealed a troubling gap: while commitment to purpose and service remains high, confidence in leaders’ ability to drive change has fallen.

This disconnect matters. Housing crises, healthcare system pressures, and complex service delivery challenges don’t respect organisational boundaries. They demand a fundamentally different approach to leadership, one that reaches beyond individual agencies and portfolios to embrace what’s being called “enterprise leadership” in the corporate world.

The limitations of collaboration

For years, public sector leaders have championed collaboration and collective leadership. But as organisations grapple with increasingly complex, cross-cutting challenges, it’s becoming clear that good intentions around collaboration aren’t enough.

Enterprise leadership takes collaboration several steps further. Rather than simply working together when needed, it means consistently acting in the best interest of the broader sector or system, even when that conflicts with your own unit’s immediate interests.

The concept, first coined by Gartner, describes leaders who function like a T-shape: deeply expert in their vertical domain, but equally capable of leading laterally across the organisation. As Dr Marcele De Sanctis put it in a recent ANZSOG panel on public sector capability,

“They’re custodians of the whole, not just their patch.”

Why now?

The case for enterprise leadership in the public sector is particularly compelling. Dr Marianne Broadbent, speaking alongside Marcele on the panel, suggested that,

“Unlike the private sector, public agencies tackle challenges that are inherently complex, ambiguous, and politically sensitive. Issues around NDIS, housing, and healthcare service delivery require the coordination of multiple agencies across different levels of government, plus private and non-profit service providers.”

As one public sector leader put it: “If these things were easy to solve and big revenue generators, the private sector would solve them.” The reality is that these complex problems simply cannot be addressed by individual agencies thinking only about their own remit.

The establishment of integrated service networks, such as Victoria’s 12 local health service networks supported by the team at Future Leadership, exemplifies this shift. These models demand leaders who can think beyond traditional boundaries, embrace shared governance structures, and connect teams across previously siloed systems.

Four behaviours that define enterprise leaders

Enterprise leadership isn’t just a mindset; it translates into four specific behaviours:

Solidarity mindset: Leaders demonstrate a genuine belief that “we are stronger together.” This means supporting collective decisions even when you privately disagreed, building the muscle to stand in solidarity with leadership team decisions outside the room.

Radical candour: Drawing on Kim Scott’s work, this involves balancing care and candour in feedback, leaning into discomfort when calling out issues that might be unpopular or fear-provoking, and contributing to peer conversations even when they fall outside your direct responsibilities.

Decision making: Enterprise leaders see themselves as custodians of the business unit, function, or organisation as a whole. They speak up when decisions aren’t in the organisation’s best interest, contribute to decisions that barely impact their own area, and ensure component parts move forward in alignment.

Network leadership: This is about multiplying impact through connection and inclusion, connecting teams rather than just directing work, giving visibility to work you’re not personally involved in, and understanding the indirect flow-on effects of decisions across the system.

Understanding context is critical

Not all public sector leadership roles demand the same capabilities. A leader at Services Australia faces different challenges than someone at the Bureau of Meteorology or a state hospital system. Context varies based on the nature of work, stakeholder environments, media exposure, and interaction with industry or citizens.

This means HR and talent leaders must move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches. The ask of leadership – what’s genuinely required for effectiveness in a specific role – needs to be clearly defined. Only then can organisations identify the right capabilities to develop and the experiences needed to build them.

For organisations that interact heavily across public and private sectors, this might mean carefully bringing in external talent. Future Leadership takes an approach we call “Model of Leadership”. Acknowledging that success requires focus on context, capability and capacity. The level of political acuity and tolerance for ambiguity required in the public sector is sophisticated, and not everyone will thrive in that environment.

Practical implications for talent leaders

The shift to enterprise leadership has clear implications for how public sector organisations develop their people:

Distinguish technical from leadership capability: Many public sector careers progress based on deep technical expertise, which is valuable. But at some point, future leaders need opportunities to broaden beyond their specialty. You cannot wait until someone is a deputy secretary to suddenly develop an enterprise mindset.

Create cross-boundary experiences: Talent functions need to think strategically about the right point in someone’s career to move them across the organisation or into other agencies. Secondments, complex cross-agency projects, and rotations aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re essential development experiences for enterprise leaders.

Invest in structured development early: While learning happens continuously throughout careers, structured leadership development programs play a crucial role. The key is not just asking “what programs should we put people on?” but “what experiences do they need, and how do we create those opportunities?”

Take a connected view of talent: Individual agencies often struggle to develop enterprise leaders on their own. This demands coordination from central agencies, whether Public Service Commissions, the Premier’s Department, Prime Minister and Cabinet, or similar bodies, working with the most senior leadership teams to think collectively about developing the next generation.

Leadership development cannot be left to chance or accumulated solely through years of service. As one leader noted, “You can’t wait until you’ve been in the sector for 30 years and you’re a deputy secretary and all of a sudden start to have an enterprise mindset.”

Moving forward

In an era when trust in leaders and institutions feels fragile, when public discourse is polarised, and when the pace of change is relentless, the public sector cannot afford leadership that operates in silos.

The challenges facing society, from climate change to healthcare transformation to housing affordability, are simply too complex, too interconnected, and too important. They demand leaders who can work across boundaries, put collective interests ahead of individual agendas, and multiply their impact through connection and inclusion.

For HR and talent leaders in the public sector, the path forward is clear: identify high-potential leaders early, give them cross-agency experiences, invest in structured development that builds enterprise capabilities, and coordinate talent strategy across the sector.

Our public servants are ready, they remain committed to purpose and service. The question is whether leadership development is evolving quickly enough to meet the moment.

AI in Healthcare: The Leadership Imperative

Embedding AI in Health: What Leaders Need to Know About AI Today

By Michael De Santis, and Dale Bracegirdle, Future Leadership

In five years, AI will be deeply woven into health systems. Leaders who have ignored this moment, or treated AI as superficial hype, will find themselves chasing reactive remediation. Yet proactive leaders, who have built foundations in governance, ethics, data, and culture, will be competitively positioned.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer for the early adopters; it’s a disruptive force reshaping healthcare’s landscape and rendering laggards obsolete. For health leaders, the challenge is urgent: guide AI’s responsible integration while safeguarding patient welfare, clinician trust, and institutional integrity. The days of passive observation are over. Leaders must lead.

As a leadership consultant, drawing on recent Australian and NSW strategic reports, along with industry commentary, here’s how I’d advise health executives to approach AI with clarity and impact:

Vision & Strategy

Set a clear ambition: AI as a pillar of mission alignment by 2030.
Prioritise high-impact use cases (e.g., triage, population health, chronic services).

Governance & Oversight

Establish an AI Ethics Committee.
Implement regular audits, bias reviews, and safety assessments.

Workforce & Capability

Launch education programs at scale.
Recognise clinician innovators through grants and time release.

Infrastructure & Data

Invest in secure data lakes and interoperability platforms.
Engage IT, legal, and privacy teams early.

Piloting & Scale

Start small—with pilots co-led by clinical and digital teams.
Define clear metrics (e.g. time saved, diagnostic accuracy, cost efficiency).

Culture & Communication

Celebrate successes and share failures to normalise learning.
Engage patients on transparency and consent.

If that sounds like a fitting and proactive approach for you, let’s chat further.

For those interested in diving into the unique Health landscape, let’s break down the emerging environment and further explore the promises and perils.

Principled Ambition

A timely piece in Health Services Daily warns of a troubling paradox: the benefits of AI are vast, but so are the stakes for getting it wrong. Missteps, like flawed diagnostics, biased algorithms, or data misuse, risk irreversible harm. How do leaders navigate innovation as it outpaces safeguards?

Here I raise the importance of Principles. Every team should have them. Principles help us navigate the tension of “just because AI could do it, does that mean it should?”

Investments in innovation must go hand-in-hand with enterprise-grade governance: policies, oversight mechanisms, continuous auditing, and ethical review.

Regulatory Momentum: A Double-Edged Sword

Current Australian laws largely encompass AI, but require refinements for clarity and agility, particularly for high-risk healthcare applications. Last week, the Australian Department of Health published its final report, Safe and Responsible AI in Health Care Legislation and Regulation Review. This is a pivotal milestone. It outlines an integrated, multi-pillar strategy across five domains:

Regulatory clarity – closing legislative gaps.
Governance frameworks – embedding best practice.
Capability uplift – training and skills.
Government as exemplar – leading by example.
International engagement – aligning with global norms.

The government is contemplating mandatory guardrails, notably for situations that include decision support or automation affecting patient care. Leaders must interpret this not as bureaucratic heavy-handedness, but as alignment, a necessary assurance that ambitious digital transformation is underpinned by legal and ethical legitimacy. It also flags areas requiring proactive attention: consent processes, professional accountability, data stewardship, and clinical responsibility.

Beyond Compliance

Whether in Australia, NSW or internationally, emerging guidance emphasises ethics, governance, and aligned incentives. In NSW, the AI Assessment Framework (AIAF) now underpins all AI deployments, with a dedicated Health AI Taskforce ensuring alignment on clinical governance, safety, legal and ethical standards.

Effective frameworks demand active leadership, not just for technology review, but for culture-shaping. Health services should embed:

High-integrity data strategies ensuring accuracy and bias mitigation.
Cross-functional committees blending clinical, legal, ethical, technical and patient perspectives.
Continuous oversight, from model development to real-world performance monitoring.
In essence, health leaders must not simply govern AI; they must steward its ethical infusion into care delivery.

NSW Health Strategy: A Model for Innovation-Infused Leadership

In May this year, NSW released its Health Research and Innovation Strategy 2025–2030. For the first time, AI is centrally recognised as a catalyst for system-wide innovation. The strategy sets a collaborative roadmap: bridging government, academia, and industry in a coordinated innovation ecosystem.

Leaders should note several enablers:

Shared R&D infrastructure, including data linkage and AI testbeds.
Flexible funding models that reward translational and operational impact.
Capacity building, not just in data science, but in frontline clinician engagement.

The strategy heralds a shift from siloed pilots to scalable, mission-aligned innovation. Leadership’s role is to steward this shift: empower multidisciplinary collaboration; signal clear priorities; sustain investment; and share early wins to build momentum.

Risks and Realities

Research shows underuse of AI costs both efficiency and clinical opportunity. Yet AI failures like biased output, weak data governance, or poor performance can undermine trust, harm patients, and destabilise adoption. A recent BCG analysis concludes the same: AI isn’t a panacea. Its most powerful effects come from disciplined digital transformation, including clear outcomes, measurable KPIs, and readiness to recalibrate when pilot performance falls short.

Leaders must keep three guardrails in sight:

Safety-first mindset: every deployment must be risk-assessed and clinically validated.
Operational discipline: embed AI into workflows with clear ownership, training, and monitoring.
Adaptive culture: expect failure; learn fast and integrate lessons.

Data as the New Frontier

AI depends on quality data and quality data governance. The Australian review highlights gaps: privacy law, consent mechanisms, My Health Record, and identifiers, all may require amendment. NSW and national strategies echo the need for stewardship.

Future-fit health organisations must invest in:

Robust privacy and consent models, with clarity on data use, anonymisation, and retention.
Infrastructure for secure, interoperable data platforms.
Governance governance – not a double up! A double down, including committees, technical advisors, data stewards, and breach protocols.

Without these, even the most sophisticated AI remains a liability.

Beyond Algorithms

AI isn’t just a clinical tool, it’s a strategic capability reshaping health systems. NSW Strategy places AI at the centre of 10‑year research and investment planning. AI’s inflection extends to operations, population health, chronic disease management, genomics, and social care systems.

Health leaders must resist the narrow view of AI as a hospital-level innovation. Instead, position it for system-level transformation:

Chronic disease: predictive analytics to guide prevention stratification.
Workload: automating documentation and triage to free up clinician time.
Service planning: demand forecasting for equity-focused resource allocation.
Telehealth: intelligent decision support to boost reach and quality.

The goal is a suite of connected, scalable applications delivering measurable benefits.

Looking Ahead

AI in healthcare isn’t coming, it’s here. As the recent Australian regulatory roadmap puts it, the balancing act between innovation and safety must be proactive and integrated

For health leaders, the time to act is now: lead with clear vision, match it with rigorous governance, empower clinicians, and build the data infrastructure that makes intelligent care possible. Celebrate milestones, but commit to the long game. Leaders who seize this moment won’t just avoid harm; they’ll shape better, smarter, and more inclusive healthcare for the future.

Does your workplace need to embed AI leadership across the organisation? I’d love to have a chat about the challenges and opportunities for capability building.

Michael De Santis is a Partner at Future Leadership and a recognised expert in health system leadership and workforce transformation. This article draws on current trends, national inquiry findings, and Future Leadership’s on-the-ground experience to support health sector leaders in shaping sustainable, future-ready organisations.

Dale heads up the Future Leadership L&D practice. He has extensive leadership development experience in taking executive teams to new levels of performance. Dale is known for his practical and engaging approach to AI-augmented leadership and team effectiveness facilitation, staying ahead of current thinking and critical perspectives with a driven passion for leadership development and wellbeing.

References:

https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-07/safe-and-responsible-artificial-intelligence-in-health-care-legislation-and-regulation-review-final-report.pdf

https://www.healthservicesdaily.com.au/ai-in-healthcare-unrealised-benefits-irreversible-consequences/31860

https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/research/Pages/research-and-innovation-strategy.aspx

https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/research/Publications/research-and-innovation-strategy.pdf

Leveraging Leadership Transitions: Navigating Professional Aging and Capability Renewal

When our leadership context shifts, our repertoire must expand to match it.

By Dr Amanda Bell

What is the leadership flatline?

Leadership, like any profession, follows a cycle. Yet too often, senior leaders, particularly those in education, health, and community sectors, find themselves at risk of professional flatlining: a state where mastery and comfort begin to erode curiosity, innovation, and learning agility.

At the University Colleges Australia Biennial Conference 2023 in the Gold Coast, leaders explored this phenomenon through the lens of our Model of Leadership, a framework developed to help individuals and institutions assess not only their ability to perform but also their likelihood to impact. The model maps leadership through three intersecting dimensions: context, capability, and capacity. Together, they define the ask of leadership, the ability of leadership, and the likelihood of impact.

Understanding where one sits across these dimensions provides a critical mirror for renewal. As Dr Amanda Bell reflected,

“Flatlining is not failure; it is feedback. It tells us that the leadership context has shifted, and our repertoire must expand to match it.”

The Economics of Professional Life: Learning, Leveraging, and Letting Go

Leadership is as much an economic construct as a personal one. The forum introduced the concept of Professional Economics, a lifecycle model illustrating the stages leaders move through, including learning, leveraging, contracting, renewing, and eventually transitioning or reimagining.

Alongside my colleague, Dr Marcele De Sanctis, we invited participants to consider where they stood within their own contract cycles. Were they still learning? Were they leveraging hard-earned wisdom? Or were they repeating patterns that no longer delivered value?

This reflection uncovered a truth familiar to organisational psychologists: professional growth and leadership transition are non-linear. It is cyclical, responsive to both internal motivation and external complexity. As Marcele observed, “Our capacity to lead is not static; it expands and contracts according to the quality of our reflection, the stretch of our environment, and the psychological safety of our context.”

The Dunning–Kruger Effect and the Myth of Mastery

A highlight of the morning discussion was a deep dive into the Dunning–Kruger Effect. This effect refers to the cognitive bias where individuals overestimate their competence at early stages of leadership and underestimate it at later stages.

Participants examined their journeys, noting how early confidence often masks developmental gaps, while mature leaders, equipped with broader awareness, may undervalue their expertise. Recognising this paradox allows leaders to recalibrate humility and confidence, to stay teachable, while still backing their wisdom.

I see this contextualised within higher education leadership, and noted that:

“Institutions thrive when leaders have both the courage of their convictions and the humility of perpetual learners.”

Professional Aging: AI, Wisdom, and the Human Edge

In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly encroaches on the cognitive and administrative domains of leadership, the forum posed a provocative question: What remains uniquely human in leadership?

Under the theme Professional Aging: AI vs Human Wisdom, leaders explored how experience, intuition, and moral reasoning distinguish human judgment from algorithmic processing. While AI can predict patterns and analyse complexity, it cannot yet replicate empathy, ethical discernment, or the capacity to hold paradox.

Dr De Sanctis framed this through the lens of organisational psychology:

“Wisdom is the integration of knowledge, experience, and reflection over time. It cannot be automated, it must be earned.”

AI can support leadership, but not substitute for it. The challenge is not competition but coexistence, harnessing technology to enhance rather than erode human agency.

Capability as the Currency of the Future

The afternoon session shifted focus to leadership capabilities. The tangible and intangible traits that drive impact. The Future Leadership Capability Framework served as the organising scaffold, encouraging participants to identify which two capabilities would most enable their next stage of maturity.

This exercise drew attention to the dynamic interplay between technical mastery and adaptive capacity. Leaders recognised that while technical expertise anchors credibility, adaptability sustains relevance.

In my work with senior leaders and boards, every day I witness that the capabilities of tomorrow are deeply human. I see them as complex problem-solving, empathy, contextual intelligence, and courage in ambiguity. These are the qualities that build trust, guide transformation, and ensure ethical stewardship in turbulent systems.

Learning as Leverage: Investing in Professional Renewal

Leadership renewal demands continuous learning of future capabilities, but not all learning is created equal. The forum highlighted several powerful examples of professional development: from the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership to Oxford’s Institute of Continuing Education and the Melbourne Business School’s Women in Senior Leadership Program.

Such experiences remind us that development is not remedial; it is regenerative. Professional learning allows leaders to reconnect with their sense of purpose and stretch beyond the confines of institutional routine.

Marcele captured this in psychological terms:

“Learning is one of the most potent levers for emotional rejuvenation. It reactivates curiosity, rebalances our cognitive load, and reignites intrinsic motivation.”

The Human Equation: Context, Capability, and Capacity

At the heart of the Future Leadership approach lies a simple but powerful Model of Leadership: Context, Capability, Capacity.

Context defines the ask of leadership: the strategic, social, and cultural expectations leaders must meet.
Capability defines the ability to perform: the knowledge, skills, and mindset required.
Capacity defines the likelihood to impact: the psychological and physiological readiness to sustain performance.

When these three dimensions align, leadership is amplified. When they fall out of sync, performance wanes, and renewal becomes essential.

This triad not only reframes how we assess leaders but also how leaders assess themselves, through a lens of alignment rather than deficit.

Collective Wisdom: Voices from the Panel

The forum’s Expert Panel featured Dr Sally Pitkin AO, Dr Liam Mayo, and Catherine O’Sullivan. They each brought rich cross-sector perspectives.

Dr Pitkin emphasised governance as a moral and strategic act, reminding participants:

“Boards must not only oversee performance but steward purpose.”

Catherine O’Sullivan reflected on the transformative power of education and equity, illustrating how inclusive leadership can reshape systems from within.

Dr Mayo challenged attendees to think beyond institutional silos, envisioning:

“a future where Australians live and age with dignity and trust.”

His insights on futures thinking and social innovation underscored that leadership renewal is not just a personal imperative; it is a societal one.

Toward a Renewed Leadership Ethic

As the day closed, Dr De Sanctis and I invited participants to reflect on their next inflection point: What will your next stage of leadership maturity require of you?

This question encapsulates the essence of the forum. Leadership is not a linear ascent but a continual recalibration, balancing the demands of context with the evolution of self.

Renewal, therefore, is not optional. It is a professional responsibility to ourselves, to our institutions, and to the communities we serve.

Australian Board Appointment Trends 2025

Australian Board Trends 2025: A Reflection on Evolving Governance

By Anthony Ellis
Chief Board Researcher, Future Leadership

As Future Leadership marks 23 years of guiding chair and board appointments, I find myself reflecting on the evolution of board recruitment practices in Australia. Having personally led research for over 300 board roles during my 18-year tenure, I’ve witnessed a profound shift in how boards are composed, governed, and held accountable.

Our firm has long championed diversity, not just as a metric, but as a mindset. We’ve encouraged clients to lead with intention, embedding gender and cultural diversity into their governance DNA. We’ve also advocated for skills-based appointments, using matrix frameworks to identify capability gaps and build boards that are strategically aligned and future-ready.

These principles, now widely adopted, mirror the foundations of Future Leadership’s Model of Leadership and Capability Framework, which emphasise adaptive governance, strategic foresight, and inclusive leadership. It’s heartening to see that what was once considered disruptive is now standard practice.

Gender Diversity: Progress with Purpose

The latest AICD data shows continued momentum:

Women now hold 37.5% of ASX 300 board seats, with 39.3% in ASX 100 and 38.1% in ASX 200
73% of ASX 300 boards have surpassed the 30% threshold for female representation
In Victoria’s water sector, 59% of board members are women, with a mandate for 50% female appointments (an area in which we have been running Women’s Leadership Programs in partnership with the government for years)
NSW and Queensland have set and exceeded gender targets, with Queensland boards reaching 55% female representation.
Tasmania’s Women on Boards Strategy has lifted female participation to 48.3%.

These figures reflect a growing recognition that gender-balanced boards are not just equitable, they’re effective.

Cultural Diversity: A Call to Action

Despite gains in gender equity, cultural diversity remains a challenge. Anglo-Celtic directors now occupy 91.9% of ASX 300 board seats, up from 91.2% last year. First Nations representation is critically low, with only five directors holding seven seats.

However, there are green shoots. The First Peoples’ Assembly in Victoria is poised to become a statutory body with powers to appoint Aboriginal representatives to government boards. Replicating this model nationally could be transformative.

Skills Transparency and Accountability

The Corporate Governance (Board Accountability) Act 2025 has ushered in a new era of transparency. Boards must now publish a skills and experience matrix, allowing stakeholders to assess alignment and identify gaps.

This legislative shift echoes our Capability Framework’s emphasis on visible leadership and strategic clarity. Directors are increasingly accountable to oversee corporate culture, navigate regulatory complexity, and integrate ESG risks into strategy and reporting.

Strategic and Technical Expertise in Demand

Board appointments are becoming more targeted. We’re seeing increased demand for directors with domain expertise in:

Cybersecurity
AI governance
ESG and sustainability
Human capital and stakeholder engagement
Marketing and digital transformation

In many cases, we’re embedding these capabilities directly into role titles, signalling a shift from generalist governance to specialist stewardship.

From generalist governance to specialist stewardship

This trend aligns with our Model of Leadership, which prioritises functional depth, adaptive capability, and strategic influence. Boards are no longer just custodians, they’re catalysts.

Educational Leadership Development: From Positional Authority to Purposeful Influence

Are the power dynamics of the past fit to empower the future?

By Liam King and Dale Bracegirdle, Future Leadership

At the recent AHISA Biennial Conference in Wellington, we had the privilege of facilitating a leadership development masterclass on “Principalship: The Politics of Power and Purpose”. The learning forum culminated in a panel discussion alongside Michelle Carroll, Principal of Matthew Flinders Anglican College, and moderated by Judith Tudball, Principal of St Mary’s Anglican Girls’ School. The conversation that unfolded revealed something we’ve been observing across the independent schools’ sector for some time: the old models of leadership power are breaking down, and many senior leaders find themselves equipped with yesterday’s tools to solve tomorrow’s challenges.

The Māori proverb “Ka Mua Ka Muri”—walking backwards into the future—framed our exploration. It asks a provocative question: Are the power dynamics of the past fit to empower the future?

The Modern-day Struggle of Positional Power

During the panel discussion, a recurring theme emerged from the assembled principals and senior leaders: the traditional levers of authority simply don’t work the way they once did. One participant described the experience as “trying to drive an electric car using a manual written for a 1950s Holden.”

This resonates deeply with our work in leadership development. We’re watching capable, well-intentioned school leaders struggle, not because they lack capability or capacity, but because they’re operating from an outdated paradigm of power, one rooted in position rather than purpose.

Consider what we refer to as “positional power” in the independent schools context. It manifests as the leader who believes, “To maintain my influence, I must be seen to have the answers.” It drives short-term compliance through authority rather than building long-term commitment through alignment. Most critically, it collapses when you’re not present, and in today’s hybrid, distributed, and complex school environments, we can’t do it all, and we can’t do it alone.

The consequences are profound. Positional power breeds resistance and resentment among today’s teams. It creates dependency rather than developing leadership capability in others. It struggles to maintain connection in the very settings where modern education increasingly happens, the informal, the digital, the collaborative spaces where formal authority carries less weight.

The Shift to Purposeful Power

Real power in schools today is the trust your community chooses to give. This isn’t a platitude; it’s a fundamental reimagining of how influence works in educational leadership.

Personal power, or what we might call “purposeful power,” operates on entirely different principles. It’s earned by aligning hearts and minds around a shared purpose. It grows when we speak plainly and act with uncompromising ethics. It influences through human stories that invite commitment, not compliance. Most importantly, it strengthens in your absence because it’s embedded in culture and purpose, not dependent on your presence in the room.

Michelle Carroll’s words resonated during our panel, depicting this shift in her own leadership journey. The transition from needing to have all the answers to asking better questions (of herself and her team) fundamentally transformed how her leadership landed with her colleagues, students, and families. This isn’t about being less decisive; it’s to do with being more intentional about where your power actually comes from.

The Leadership Shadow Framework: A Diagnostic Tool

One of the most practical frameworks we shared during the masterclass was the Leadership Shadow concept, shared by our Advisor, Dr Amanda Bell, using concepts adapted from Larry Senn’s work. In essence, your leadership shadow is the sum of what you say, do, recognise, and prioritise. Each element casts its own influence:

What you say: To what extent do you openly talk about the importance of living your school’s purpose? Not just in formal addresses, but in daily interactions, crisis moments, and casual conversations?

What you do: What are you doing every day that makes your shared purpose compelling, even when you’re not in the room? Your actions send signals far more powerful than your words.

What you recognise: What are you consistently recognising and celebrating that advances your shared purpose and builds alignment? The behaviours you acknowledge become the behaviours you multiply.

What you prioritise: How are you prioritising your time, so your shared purpose is visible, and brings colleagues, students, families, and your community into genuine alignment?

The uncomfortable truth is that most school leaders discover significant gaps when they honestly assess their shadow. We speak eloquently about innovation but recognise traditional markers of success. We espouse collaboration but incentivise individual achievement. We declare student wellbeing paramount, but allocate time primarily to academic outcomes and operational issues.

Purpose-Power Integration: The Strategic Imperative

This is where capability building becomes critical. Understanding the theory of purposeful power is one thing; systematically integrating it into how your leadership team operates is entirely another.

We introduced a three-stage framework during the masterclass that we use extensively in our leadership development work:

Purpose Clarity: Can a ten-year-old in your school explain why your school exists at a deeper level? If your leadership team can’t articulate this with crystalline clarity, you cannot possibly align your community around it.

Power Assessment: Who holds formal authority over key decisions? Who holds informal influence over their success? Where does your leadership team have credibility, and where do you need to build it? Most leadership teams have never mapped this explicitly.

Strategic Alignment: How do you frame decisions to align with each stakeholder’s values? What resistance can you anticipate, and how do you address it pre-emptively? How do you make decisions feel collaborative while maintaining clear direction?

This integration isn’t intuitive. It’s a learnable skill set that requires deliberate practice and often an external perspective to master.

Navigating Stakeholder Power Dynamics

One of the most valuable discussions during our panel centred on the different political landscapes school leaders must navigate simultaneously. Internal politics (your team) require professional respect and relationship trust. External politics (parent community) demand results, clear communication, and accessibility. Governance politics need strategic thinking, fiscal responsibility, and compliance.

Each domain has its own power sources, purpose alignment requirements, and common traps. The internal trap is assuming your vision is automatically shared. The external trap is over-explaining the process while under-communicating the purpose. The governance trap is leading with compliance instead of vision.

Effective school leaders must fluently code-switch between these domains, not through manipulation, but through genuine understanding of what drives trust and alignment in each context. This is a sophisticated leadership capability that most people don’t naturally possess but can surely develop.

Why This Matters Now

The independent schools sector faces unprecedented complexity. Enrolment pressures, staff retention challenges, evolving pedagogical expectations, safeguarding imperatives, digital transformation, and community expectations that seem to expand daily. All of this requires leadership teams that can navigate politics with authenticity while staying anchored to purpose.

The schools that will thrive aren’t necessarily those with the most resources or the longest traditions. They’re the ones building leadership capability systematically throughout their senior teams.

Here’s what we consistently observe: most school leadership teams have never been explicitly taught these capabilities. They’ve inherited models of power from their own principals and cobbled together approaches through trial and error. Some have a natural aptitude for purposeful leadership. Most are doing their best with frameworks that increasingly don’t fit the environment they’re leading in.

This is precisely where strategic leadership development makes the difference. Not generic leadership training, but deep capability building specifically designed for the unique power dynamics and political complexities of independent school leadership.

At Future Leadership, our work with schools focuses on making these concepts actionable, not just intellectually understood but embedded in how leadership teams operate daily. We work with senior leaders to map their leadership shadows, identify gaps between intention and impact, and build practical capabilities for navigating stakeholder dynamics with both political acumen and authentic purpose.

The question: “Is the shadow you cast one of political authenticity and purpose?” is relevant to every school leader. Because your shadow is always there, whether you’re conscious of it or not, whether it’s serving your purpose or undermining it.

The power dynamics of the past won’t empower the future. But purposeful leadership, deliberately developed, assuredly will.

Ready to build purposeful leadership capability in your senior team?

Future Leadership partners with independent schools to develop leadership capabilities that align power with purpose. Led by Liam King (Education Practice) and Dale Bracegirdle (Learning & Development Practice), we bring deep expertise in both educational leadership and systematic capability building.

The Future of University College Leadership

The Australian residential university colleges are the quiet achievers in higher education.

Led by a rejuvenated professional association, University Colleges Australia (UCA), there is a deliberate strategy to provide insightful professional development programs for college councils and their (small in number) but highly motivated staff leaders.

Through UCA’s commitment to investing in opportunities for membership to learn together, a productive partnership was formed with Future Leadership to provide a webinar series and a tailored one-day masterclass for college heads. The content covered key governance topics, including: Leading at the Board Table; Strategy as a Platform for Leadership and Influence; and Shadow Culture.

The one-day Masterclass, the Future of Governance, resulted from the collaboration between Dr Liam Mayo, a sociologist and Futurist, and Dr Amanda Bell, an educationalist. Topics unpacked included board hygiene factors, sector trends, considering problems and initiatives via the Cynefin Model, and a deep dive into futures methodology and thinking.

The purpose was to challenge delegates from aspirational colleges to think differently about their strategic futures and their role in university life − for their students, staff and communities. The heads who attended clearly saw themselves as university-aligned educational providers, with ambitions to support and lift the intellectual success, leadership capabilities, and broad opportunities beyond those invested by their universities. These university college leaders see themselves as being much more than an accommodation provider (Hall of Residence). They are refreshingly thirsty for sector-specific professional learning opportunities that not only augment and lift their own knowledge and strategic thinking, but that of their aspirational staff.

The feedback from UCA members has been affirming, and we look forward to continuing partnerships, not only with UCA, but with individual colleges as well.

“Your UCA session just now was fantastic. Truly, genuinely, deeply useful.” – College Principal.

Beyond Capability: Building Leadership Capacity for a Future-Fit Workforce

In today’s leadership landscape, the language of “capability” is familiar and comfortable. For decades, capability frameworks, competency models, and role-based assessments have underpinned how we define, select, and develop leaders. But as the pace of change accelerates, I believe it is time we shift our attention to a more powerful and nuanced concept: capacity.

Capacity, in contrast to capability, is not just about what a leader can do today, it is about their headroom to grow, adapt, and sustain performance over time. From my experience working with executive teams and boards across industries, I see that capacity is emerging as the most critical lever for navigating volatility, uncertainty, and disruption.

“Capability tells us what is possible.

Capacity tells us what is probable.”

– Naomi Fox

I love a good capability framework – they are important tools for being clear about what is important for the organisation and aligning individual and team expectations for performance and development. They also provide a valid and sound basis for measuring what people know, what skills they have developed, and what outcomes they have achieved. But they do not tell us how leaders will respond under new, ambiguous or extreme conditions. And let’s face it, this is the BAU environment for leaders today.

This is why we strongly believe capacity must be overlaid to understand capability.

Capacity is a forward-facing measure. It signals whether a leader can:

scale their influence beyond their current remit
metabolise complexity and stay hungry
maintain energy and wellbeing through challenge
and continually learn and renew their own, their team’s and organisation’s performance.

As a leader in evidence-based executive insights, I see capacity as the bridge between an individual’s proven performance and their potential to grow with (and ahead of) the role.

Why capacity matters now

Three interconnected trends are making capacity the leadership differentiator:

Enduring change: Change is no longer episodic; it is continuous. Leaders need the adaptive capacity to navigate shifting strategy, stakeholder priorities, and environmental disruptions.

Human sustainability: We cannot afford a generation of burnt-out leaders. As psychological safety and mental health become non-negotiable, a leader’s ability to sustain themselves and protect their teams is an essential form of capacity.

Talent diversity: Boards and executive teams cannot rely on legacy pipelines alone. We need to identify more diverse talent supply – such as overlooked or emerging leaders whose capacity to grow is high, even if their experience is non-traditional – to mitigate succession risk and enhance readiness.

How do we understand and assess capacity?

While capacity can feel intangible, it is absolutely assessable with the right approach. Here’s what I see working in practice:

Psychometrics and validated assessments: These tools provide us with objective data on cognitive agility, resilience, learning orientation, and even a leader’s comfort with risk and complexity.
Behavioural interviews: Exploring a leader’s growth stories, failures, and their responses to challenges can reveal rich evidence of capacity.
360 feedback: Capacity is often best judged by those who see a leader under stress, in unfamiliar settings, and in their relationships with others.
Longitudinal tracking: Building capacity is a process. Leaders who reflect, adapt, and recalibrate show higher capacity over time than those who stick rigidly to what worked in the past.
Developmental Assessments: These assessments measure not just what a leader does, but also how they think, making them especially useful for evaluating how a leader interprets and responds to situations, providing insight into their capacity to lead in complex, ambiguous, and transformational contexts.

Building capacity, not just measuring it

At Future Leadership, we believe that capacity can, and should, be developed. A robust leadership development program needs to go beyond skill-building and embed:

structured stretch opportunities to encourage perspective taking.
diverse views to disrupt old patterns, assumptions and mental models.
psychological safety for experimentation and support systems to maintain wellbeing.
coaching that holds tension to support growth, facilitate new insights and transformation.

We need to create the conditions for leaders to expand their capacity, evolve, and grow stronger. Across my career supporting executive teams, I have seen again and again that leaders with access to these conditions build not just better capabilities, but fundamentally stronger and more future-fit leadership identities.

A new lens for the future

If we are serious about equipping organisations for the future, we must reframe the conversation from “Are they capable?” to “And, what is their capacity?”

Capacity is about energy. It is about learning. It is about adapting and being resilient. And ultimately, it is about the sustainable growth of both leaders and the organisations they serve.

As we stand on the edge of technological, geopolitical, and environmental shifts, I believe this is the conversation we must have, because the future will reward those who can adapt, grow, and sustain themselves far beyond what they were ever taught to do.