Menzies Foundation

You're carrying work nobody formally asked you to carry. And you're getting tired.

Leadership has not disappeared. It has relocated. Across organisations and communities, leadership work increasingly falls to people who were never formally given the role—and rarely given the authority to match. Sarah Jenkins examines the growing gap between responsibility and authority in "The Leadership Load Nobody Named." This is the work that keeps systems functioning but remains invisible in performance metrics. The danger is not simply burnout. It is a gradual withdrawal of care. When people carry responsibility without the authority to shape outcomes, energy drains from systems. The future of leadership may depend less on who steps forward. And more on whether we notice who has been carrying it all along. Read the essay.*

→ Name what you're carrying
https://menziesfoundation.org.au/the-leadership-load-nobody-named/

We love to call young people "the leaders of tomorrow."

It's a generous phrase. It's also a way of asking them to wait.

Arya, Ashton and Pooja didn't.

This October, the three will represent Australia at the United Nations General Assembly's Sixth Committee — the room where the world decides what international law becomes. None of them has finished their law degree. All three have already chosen the problem they intend to spend a career solving:

One looks at who the law forgets.
One at who it lets walk free.
One at who we quietly hand over to a machine.

They were selected as the 2026 Sir Ninian Stephen Law Delegation Fellows — a fellowship named for the Australian judge who helped rebuild international justice after Nuremberg, and went on to serve as Governor-General.

The leaders of tomorrow? They're already here. And they stopped waiting for the invitation.

Follow their journey 👇
https://menziesfoundation.org.au/at-the-edge-of-the-law-meet-australias-sixth-committee-delegation/

His father was a bricklayer. The lesson that shaped his entire leadership philosophy took thirty seconds to deliver.

"You only want to touch the bricks twice."

That's Michael Saadie — CEO of JBWere and Head of NAB Private Wealth — in Episode 4 of Purpose: Leading into the Future. The context was a construction site. The application reaches a lot further.

The argument Saadie makes throughout the conversation is one I don't hear often enough at senior levels: compliance frameworks tell you where the boundaries are. They don't tell you what to do inside them. That's judgement. And judgement requires something rules can't supply.

Here's the framework worth keeping. Before any significant decision, run two questions:

Have I thought far enough ahead that I only need to touch this problem once?
Am I anchoring to the outcome — or to the nearest available policy?

If you can't answer both clearly, you're not ready to act. That's not caution. That's the discipline Saadie's father was actually teaching.

Three things from this episode I'd take into any leadership context:
→ Complaints aren't operational noise. They're diagnostic signals. Saadie's team reviews customer frustrations weekly — at every level. Not to manage optics, but to find where systems have broken down.
→ Purpose isn't motivational language. It's a stabilising reference point. When no rule resolves the dilemma in front of you, something has to. Purpose is what you return to.
→ Rigid systems serve institutions. Adaptive systems serve people. NAB restructures around clients who can't fit standard banking hours — including medical specialists with limited time. The leadership principle: don't make people adapt to your system unnecessarily.

From compliance as the ceiling of leadership → to judgement as the floor.
That's the shift this episode is really arguing for. And it starts — apparently — with knowing where to put the bricks.

When the rules in your organisation run out, what actually guides the decision? I'm curious what senior leaders here reach for — and whether it's explicit or just instinct.

🎧 Full reflection piece + the episode linked in the comments.

WEEK 9: IMMEDIATE vs. LONG-TERM

Purpose is the anchor that stops urgency from swallowing strategy.

The challenge isn't choosing between what's screaming for attention today and what truly matters for tomorrow — it's holding both without losing your footing.

Rob Scott on purpose as the through-line that enables both clarity and courage when the pressure is loudest.

💭 What urgent demand is pulling your attention from what's truly important? How might you honour both?

🎙️ Listen: A Purposeful Edge 🔗 https://menziesleadershipforum.podbean.com/e/leading-with-change-and-courage-what-s-next-hosted-by-dr-peter-collins-featuring-special-guest-rob-scott/

Australian health and medtech innovation has enormous potential. But potential alone doesn't scale.

It takes connected systems — aligned capital, specialist expertise, trusted networks and leaders who know how to navigate complexity.

That's what makes HESTA's anchor investment in Synthesis Capital so significant. It's not just a capital story. It's a systems story.

Synthesis Capital brings together capital, venture-building capability and global networks to help high-potential companies move from breakthrough science to real-world impact. For us at Menzies Leadership Foundation, it reflects something we've believed for a long time: innovation doesn't scale through individual brilliance alone. It scales when the conditions around it are right.

Since 2018, through our partnership with MedTech Actuator, we've been helping researchers, clinicians and founders build the capability, confidence and connections to move ideas forward. Synthesis Capital is a powerful next step in that journey.

As our CEO Liz Gillies put it: "This is systems entrepreneurship in action. It shows what becomes possible when catalytic capital, capability and connectivity are brought together around a shared purpose."

We've shared our full thinking on what this announcement means — for Australian health innovation, for ecosystem-building, and for the role philanthropy can play in helping systems shift.

👉 Read our response https://menziesfoundation.org.au/mobilising-capital-to-help-australian-health-innovation-scale/ — and follow the AFR's coverage of HESTA's $70m investment to see the broader picture.

If this kind of work matters to you, we'd love to have you in the conversation.

🎬 A Leadership Recommendation from the Menzies Foundation

Resource: "You are the Future of Philanthropy" – Katherine Fulton (TED Talk)

Platform: TED

This fortnight, we're recommending a forward-looking TED Talk from Katherine Fulton, then-President of the Monitor Institute, who offers a profound reimagining of what philanthropy can become. Delivered at a pivotal moment in the sector's evolution, this talk remains extraordinarily relevant for anyone thinking about how giving is changing — and must continue to change.

The talk explores:
🌐 the five forces reshaping the future of philanthropic giving
💰 how collective, distributed giving is democratising philanthropy
🔄 moving from isolated donations to networked, collaborative social investment
📲 the role of technology in enabling a new generation of philanthropists
🌍 why 'mass collaboration' may be philanthropy's most powerful new tool
💡 reimagining the ordinary citizen as a force for extraordinary change

Key insight from Katherine Fulton:
"Philanthropy is reorganising itself before our very eyes. This is a moment in history when the average person has more power than at any other time."

A visionary watch for leaders thinking about the next chapter of strategic, collective impact.

👉 Watch/Listen here: https://www.ted.com/talks/katherine_fulton_you_are_the_future_of_philanthropy

From our Transforming Systems Forum 2025, hosted with Collaboration for Impact and Mark Cabaj: belonging shapes not only what we seek to transform, but how transformation unfolds.
When communities are trusted and resourced to lead on their own terms, collective agency becomes a powerful civic force.

💭 Who in your sphere doesn't yet feel they belong? What would it take to shift from inviting participation to genuinely sharing power?

Leadership is the practice of creating the conditions where everyone can thrive.

A single mother kept her daughter home from birthday parties.

Not because of the parties. Because of the gifts.

She couldn't afford one that wouldn't draw judgement — so it felt safer to just not go.
She wrote to Kmart to tell them this. Anonymously. And what she said was that affordable products had changed it. Her daughter could finally say yes.

That story is from Episode 3 of Purpose: Leading into the Future — a conversation with Callum Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Kmart Australia and New Zealand. And it reframes something easy to overlook.

Because underneath that price tag isn't a margin. It's dignity. Belonging. The difference between a kid who gets to go and a kid who stays home.

In a cost-of-living crisis, affordability stops being a commercial issue. It becomes a social one. And leadership at the frontline stops being about reducing prices — and starts being about reducing exclusion.

A few things from the conversation worth sitting with:
→ Purpose is tested most under constraint. Anyone can hold values when things are stable. When fuel, shipping and inflation all hit at once, the real test is who absorbs the pressure. Kmart's commitment was to take as much of it as possible before passing it to customers.

→ Fairness is never isolated. Every pricing decision is a trade-off somewhere else — suppliers, logistics, workers, communities. Long-term thinking is what keeps the whole system honest.

→ Culture isn't built in speeches. Across 50,000+ people, many starting casual work at 15, purpose only survives through repetition. Stories told. Values reinforced. Every single day.
The clearest proof came during COVID. Stores closed — and leadership kept paying team members anyway, despite the hit. Not a drawn-out boardroom debate. A fast call, because internally it was simply understood as the right thing to do.

That's the tell. Purpose isn't what an organisation says when it's easy. It's what it does when there's a real cost.

The leaders worth paying attention to right now are quietly moving:
Margin → meaning.

Short-term gain → long-term stewardship.
"I" → "we."

Because in hard times, people remember more than products. They remember whether you showed up. Whether you acted fairly. Whether purpose stayed visible when the pressure was on.

This is the question at the heart of the series: when costs are rising and something has to give, what's the test you actually use to decide who absorbs it?

🎧 Purpose: Leading into the Future — Ep. 3
Conversation with Callum Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Kmart Australia and New Zealand.

Full reflection piece: https://menziesfoundation.org.au/fairness-at-the-frontline/
Episode link: https://menziesleadershipforum.podbean.com/e/fairness-at-the-frontline-with-guest-callum-smith-purpose-leading-into-the-future/

Kmart Australia Kmart New Zealand