This is the speech I gave at the launch of the Property Council of Australia’s 500 Women in Property launch.
Good Morning Everyone,
I’ll start by saying this:
The value of learning and development combined with Strategic Relationship Development for emerging female talent is more important than we can imagine and more powerful than we can measure.
Yet some of us really struggle with this.
I believe it’s because we don’t have the right tools.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve had the privilege of working across multiple industries, geographies and challenges.
- Navigating everything from Royal Commissions and Boardroom crises to grassroots stakeholder disputes, running my own business for 15 years and finding the unexpected connections between a family farm and corporate life.
- I have a habit of talking about my cows and sharing pics of sunrises, sunsets and my photo-bombing horse
Through all this, I’ve seen firsthand how the right strategy can turn a potential disaster – or downturn – into an opportunity for growth.
And how the wrong one can embed it beyond redemption.
As Participants in this year’s 500 Women in Property, you are at the beginning of a fantastic opportunity for career growth – I encourage you to grab it with both hands.
- Find ways to take initiative
- Think about where you can provide greater value to the people you work with
- Lean in, step up and have a go.
Opportunities – and bosses – absolutely love this!
- Look at this program as lifelong skill development
- Learn from key people and top performers
- Be curious
It won’t always be comfortable – and frankly, you wouldn’t want it to be.
We’ve all faced workplace challenges that have seemed insurmountable.
And we’ll likely face more as we go through life.
Our workplaces are evolving at an unprecedented pace.
Giving us a perfect storm of challenges:
- Ineffective planning and communication is one of the leading causes of project failure.
- Misaligned expectations create major barriers to success
- We have an Employee Engagement Crisis: Less than 21% of employees globally are engaged.
That’s one in five people
Women and those under 35 are experiencing the steepest declines.
- Burnout and lack of support are real threats to productivity and morale.
You might like to think of burnout like a piece of toast – from being lightly toasted to full charcoal…
You need to carefully manage yourself to avoid this
- The Trust Deficit is huge: Around half of employees don’t trust their company’s leadership.
Without trust, even the best strategies fail.
- Technological Disruption is reshaping our work: AI and automation are creating anxiety about job security while requiring new skills and mindsets many of us feel ill-equipped to embrace.
- And then there’s Complex Stakeholder Relationships: These seem to grow on trees and require a sophisticated, strategic approach
Why do some people thrive amid these challenges while others struggle?
I think the answer lies in how you respond and how you leverage the life skills you’ll build with the ups and downs you’ll inevitably face.
The good news is you don’t need to do this alone.
I’ve been thinking about how I can help
So I’m going to encourage you to lean into these things:
Strengthen your critical thinking and problem solving
– this is a wonderful neuroplastic opportunity – the more you do, the more you can do.
Create space to think and process, to decompress, come up with ideas and test them, create plans and ask questions
For me, this involves walking my dogs, riding my horse, feeding my cows – see I told you I keep talking about it! And catching up with my friends.
Find out what works for you and build it into your daily life as a not negotiable.
Build professional relationships – Create a community that grows with you – these people are sitting with you today
Deb Sims story – Deb was a Director when I was at PwC. It was the GFC and I wanted to attend an expensive Corporate Affairs course, but there was no budget. Deb said to me PwC was happy to pay for me to go and have coffee with the presenters from the course as a way to gain some of the insights and to build relationships.
I don’t think she thought I was actually going to do it.
And I nearly didn’t!
Can you imagine being a young professional and calling 20 of the top leaders in your industry and asking them if you could buy them coffee because you wanted to hear about their careers and how they got to where they are…?
Funnily enough, they nearly all did.
The hardest part was picking up the phone and calling them.
It was one of the best things I ever did and I remain in contact with many of them today.
Figure out what you’re hoping for
- Hope is essential for a positive mindset.
- Something better, something else, something to stop or maybe for something to start.
- And Hope is interchangeable – you can change what you’re hoping for any time you like.
Learn to Communicate more clearly and effectively – we’re going to work on this together in our masterclass.
Use Time – to your advantage. This might be taking a minute to control and plan your best response or standing back a minute and letting other people talk.
Something I’ve observed is very few people operate at pace – this might drive you nuts sometimes, but it can also help you when you need to think.
QC story – he asked for five minutes to think about a matter he was helping me with. I was shocked, my instant response was, “Absolutely, take as long as you need!”
Don’t be afraid to ask for time to think about something.
Play to your strengths & do things that light you up
It’s all well and good to build on your weaknesses, but I’m never going to be good at or terribly excited about coding software. Just not my thing. And that’s ok.
There’s a fabulous little tool called the Fascination Advantage if you want to explore this a bit. It’s quite illuminating.
Hold onto your confidence for all it’s worth – it’s essential to your success
There are plenty of people with the power to take it away.
I’ve seen people lose confidence more times than I can count and some take years to get it back.
Back yourself – there is no point waiting for someone else to come along and save you
This is something you learn when you have your own business. You have to back yourself and you have to do it relentlessly. It eventually becomes second nature.
Be careful who you let near your head – this means negative people.
I was told this many years ago and it has helped me steer clear of the negative talkers – and social media!
In the first few years of running my business, I was told, 99% of new businesses fail…
It was both unhelpful and annoying.
The same goes for job changes, you might get a promotion that others feel threatened by and they will spout negative comments to bring you down.
If you spend a lot of time on social media, this can impact you as well. Really manage – or ideally limit – how much time you spend here.
Have fun – it absolutely does co-exist with hard work.
This is where the right team comes in.
Take notes. Do not for a second think you’re going to remember things unless you take a few notes.
- Less than 100 people in the world have been diagnosed with a photographic memory and I’m pretty sure none of them are in this room.
- Writing things down clarifies your thinking and it also makes the people you’re working with feel confident you’ve understood the key points
- And it helps you remember
These are your tools.
You won’t learn them at school or uni. You’ll learn them by listening and doing, being around great people and building your collection of experiences.
For emerging female talent your relationships, and learning and development are more important than we can imagine
and more powerful than we can measure.
I’m super excited to kick off this year’s 500 Women in Property with you.
To prepare for our masterclass, start thinking about your own workplace challenges and how they’ve helped you grow.
- The big issues you’ve tackled
- The career defining moments
- The stories people have shared with you about their experiences
And the people you’ve worked with – good and bad
When you finish this program, you’ll have your own person toolkit of strategies — drawn from decades of experience and the latest industry insights.
This will help you not just navigate but thrive throughout the complex and challenging situations that are going to be thrown at you throughout your career.
I’m looking forward to working with you in our masterclass.
Thank you.
