Like many of us, the Foundation has had a challenging year. COVID-19 has presented many obstacles and has had a significant impact on our partners. This has delayed several of our initiatives whilst at the same time allowing us to consolidate the strategies that underpin the work and deepen our relationships with these partners. We have been grateful to walk beside them at this difficult time and look forward to 2021.
The Foundation’s involvement in the collaborations supporting our strategic initiatives gives us a unique insight into the current challenges of leadership. As a Foundation, we are committed to raising the profile and importance of ‘outstanding’ leadership. We do this by identifying leadership challenges and supporting initiatives to address these issues. We then encourage our partners to engage with us to consider the insights from this work and the implications for leadership more generally. An important part of the Foundation’s engagement with the leadership discourse, is embodied in the inaugural Menzies Swinburne Leadership Hackathon which kicked off in early December – and focused on the provocation: ‘The Leadership that got us into this mess, can’t get us out of it. What does Leadership 4.0 need to look like? Over 50 leaders from across every sector in the community joined us to consider this question. Day 2 of this event is scheduled for February 2021. Contact us to get involved.
In many respects leading in a COVID-normal world requires many of the leadership attributes that are emergent in our initiatives. Adaption, comfort in complexity, clarity around purpose, an entrepreneurial disposition and a focus on empathy and building strong teams are the qualities most likely to support all our efforts to work in the ‘new normal’.
Our work is focused on deepening our understanding of these attributes and innovatively building platforms to develop Australia’s leadership capacity. We would be delighted if you joined us in this work.
Have a wonderful holiday season.
Best wishes,
Liz Gillies