By Clare McCartin

Managing Partner

Search & Advisory at Davidson

There is a uniqueness to Kate Roffey’s leadership style, which could be best described as game changing and it literally is.

The Melbourne Football Club President is the first female to hold the title in the club’s 160-year plus history and just seven months into her presidency, although eight years on the board, her team, Melbourne Demons, took home the 2021 Premiership trophy – ending a 57-year drought.

Renowned within the sporting, government, and corporate worlds for her transformational, inclusive and no holds barred leadership approach, Kate has the formula for success. 

When not at the club, Kate is also the Director of Deals and Major Projects at Wyndham City. Her professional career has seen her the CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, the CEO of VicSport and the manager of the Melbourne Park Redevelopment for Tennis Australia. 

Game-changing leaders challenge the status quo, go against the norm that ‘affect history’ and it’s this very reason why Kate was my guest on the latest instalment of the Davidson Xchange series. 

During the chat, we looked at her transformational approach where she opened up about her game-changing leadership qualities – offering insights into her five key, top building blocks for success.

1. Maturity 

One of the most important elements for success according to Kate is maturity. “The players (men and women) have matured both in their skills and mental ability to play the game over the years,” she said. “But also, our staffing structure has matured and certainly our board and governance structure have matured as well. When you get that maturity and the total alignment from the top down, in our case, from president down through to the board, CEO, the staff, the coaches and players, then it's quite an extraordinary thing. If you can get that in your organisational culture, it's an extraordinarily positive thing,” she said.

2. Your personality is your spark

“The thing that I bring (to my role) is that I'm a very welcoming, very open, very accessible sort of person,” Kate said. “Our main aim is to make sure we are clearly one club, one very united club, and that includes not just the people who work there, the players and the coaches but also the supporters and our past players. I'm like a mother hen at that club and I think that was the missing little bit of our jigsaw puzzle.”

3. Be accessible 

Known for her openness to accept calls and text messages from players and their partners, Kate said she liked to be involved in people’s worlds as much as they want her to be. “I always say, whenever I speak to our players or our staff or anyone else, ‘I want you to be the best person that you can be’,” she said. “If they're the best people they can be, then they'll be more comfortable, more confident and more capable to be the best players that they can be.”

Kate said being accessible doesn’t just apply to the football world. “I still have staff who worked for me 15 years ago, who ring up and ask for advice. I mean, as a manager or a leader, you don't get to do anything better than help someone else take steps up a ladder,” she said.

4. Put your customer first

“A (negative) word of mouth from a customer can do a lot of damage but one positive thing said about customer service (can) spread like wildfire,” Kate said. “If there's anything organisations do poorly out there, is that they forget that it's not about us inside the organisation. I always say, when I'm down at Wyndham, the Local Government Area ‘your customers are not your staff’. Your customers are the people who live in this municipality and your job is to make their life better. Your job is to make the liveability of the municipality better, not to worry about what your office looks like or what desks you have,” she said.

5. Keep going

According to Kate, the best ‘learning process’ for individuals, is to keep going. “Whether it's work or life, (it’s important to know) you'll get knocked down plenty of times, but you've got to have the courage to get up and get in the ring again and fight on,” she said. “And our men and women are ready to go and give it their best shot for more of those nice, shiny cups, which are very nice to hold,” she said.

Leadership styles may have labels from Laissez Faire to authoritative, but it doesn’t need to be static. Success is hard to come by and often takes a lot of knock-backs before you start seeing results.

There’s always room for improvement and growth in leadership; so, why not change-up your game-plan and adopt some of Kate’s tips and start kicking goals for 2022.

To learn more of Kate’s leadership lessons; and everything from her unique reflections on the experience of Grand Final Day;  to lighthearted comparisons of MFC and the storyline of Ted Lasso, please click here to view the full chat.