Leadership with Sonia | Part 1 of 2
Courage over charisma. Character over confidence. Evidence over ego.
TRUE STORY
Wednesday night. International departure gate. 1am in the morning, everyone tired and slightly over it. I got to talking to the couple next to me. Both middle managers, different organisations, same face — that particular look of people who hold the entire thing together and get thanked for approximately none of it.
We got onto what I do. And then she asked me the question. Not as small talk. She asked it the way you ask something you’ve been carrying around for a while:
“So where are all the great leaders?”
Not who. WHERE. As in: Where have they gone? Why aren’t they above us? Why are we being led by people who wouldn’t survive a fortnight doing our jobs?
Then they called the flight. I have been asked that question in boardrooms and on stages for twenty years. It has never landed on me the way it landed at that gate.
Here is the answer I didn’t finish. It’s a two-parter, because it turns out I had rather a lot to say. Shocking, I know.
First, I gave them names
When someone asks that question, the worst possible response is to go philosophical on them. They didn’t want a framework. They wanted names. So they got names.
Paul Scurrah
Paul led Virgin Australia into and through voluntary administration in 2020 — the single most brutal stretch in the history of Australian aviation. He stabilised it, protected every job and route he could, got it sold, and then stepped down when the new owners decided they wanted a different sort of leader. He went on to run Pacific National, and since November 2025 he has been Managing Director and CEO of Fiji Airways. In January he was made a Member of the Order of Australia.
But the résumé isn’t what I admire. What I admire is that the thing he was most consistently praised for was how he treated people while the ground was disappearing beneath them.
Anyone can lead when the numbers are pretty. Leadership is what you do at 2am when there is no good option left and you still choose to tell your people the truth.
Courage over charisma.
Christine Holgate
Christine built Blackmores into an ASX200 company, led Australia Post, and then went through one of the most public and punishing episodes any Australian executive has ever endured. Six months later she picked up Toll’s old Global Express business — a company bleeding money — and rebuilt it into Team Global Express. In 2025 she stepped up to Group Executive Chair, now driving the group’s international expansion.
She has said it better than I could: the lesson was never whether bad things would happen, because they will. It is how you rise and how you conduct yourself afterwards, because that is the part people remember. And what she was determined to do when she walked into that business was make sure her people had a voice and that the leadership team actually showed up.
Show up. Give people a voice. That’s it. That is the entire strategy deck.
Character over confidence.
Peter Birtles
Peter led Super Retail Group for 13 years, growing it from around $500 million in sales to $2.6 billion. He was a Male Champion of Change and moved on female representation at board and executive level before a single soul was making him do it. He now chairs Metcash and Universal Store and sits on the board of Good360, which redirects surplus goods to Australians who need them.
Peter is the quiet one. No personal brand campaign. No interest whatsoever in being the story. A steward, not a star.
We have very nearly stopped recognising that as leadership. Which says considerably more about us than it does about him.
Evidence over ego.
Three completely different humans. One thread: not one of them leads for the applause.
And then I told them the truth
This is where the temperature of the conversation changed. The great leaders are mostly not at the top. They never were. We just keep looking up there because that is where the lighting is good.
They are the nurse unit manager who quietly rebuilt a roster so a grieving staff member could get through the month. The operations supervisor who has never once thrown his crew under a bus in front of an executive. The twenty-eight-year-old team lead who noticed someone had gone quiet in meetings and actually did something about it. The finance manager who says “I got that wrong” out loud, in front of everyone, and by doing so makes it safe for eleven other people to do the same.
I have coached hundreds of these people. You will never know their names. They will never be on a magazine cover. They are, without a shred of exaggeration, the reason their organisations still function on a Tuesday.
Three leaders have stayed with me.
Jaime, at the Port of Brisbane. The commitment she made to her own development was extraordinary, and she matched it with the same commitment to her teams. She was always herself, and she used her voice.
Vee, at Nando’s. The passion she has for her company and her people is the kind you can’t teach. You feel it in the room before she says a word.
Matt, a senior leader at Seymour Whyte. His energy and his willingness to be vulnerable in the pursuit of becoming a better leader gave me hope.
None of them were trying to be impressive. They were trying to be better. That’s the difference.
This is what human leadership looks like in practice. Not a framework. Three people choosing to show up honestly, over and over.
And while we’re here — can we talk about the young ones?
Because I am so deeply over the eye-rolling. They ask for feedback instead of waiting seven years for someone to remember to give it. They expect honesty. They hold boundaries that my generation was told to be grateful we didn’t have.
We call that entitlement. It is not entitlement. It is a healthier relationship with work than we ever managed to build for ourselves — and a great deal of it is very good leadership instinct arriving about thirty years early.
If they seem demanding, it is because they are asking out loud for the things we quietly needed and were far too frightened to request.
I would rather coach that than fix another decade of learned silence.
How to spot a great leader (they will not announce themselves)
If you are hunting for them in your own organisation, here is exactly what I look for.
• They move towards discomfort. They have the conversation nobody wants to have, early, while it is still small and survivable.
• They give credit away and absorb blame. Watch the four seconds immediately after something goes wrong. That is the whole test, and it takes less time than a kettle.
• They are the same person in every room. Same tone with the CEO as with the cleaner. Consistency is the most underrated leadership trait on earth.
• They can say “I don’t know” and “I got that wrong” without it costing them anything internally.
• They grow other leaders. Because the real measure of a leader was never what they built. It is who they made.
Notice that not one single item on that list requires a title.
Before you go
If you read that list and someone comes to mind — tell them. Today. Ninety seconds. Most great leaders have absolutely no idea they are one, because nobody has ever bothered to say it out loud.
And if you read that list and quietly recognised yourself? Sit with that for a minute. You might well be the answer to the question you have been asking.
One more thing about that couple at the gate
Neither of them had a coach. Neither of them had ever been offered one. The coaching budget in both their organisations goes to the twelve people at the top — the ones the woman next to me was asking where the great leaders had gone.
That’s the actual problem. We reserve development for the people who need it least.
I built Worksparks so the nurse unit manager and the twenty-eight-year-old team lead get the same coaching the executive team gets. Real-time, in the moment, for the price of a couple of coffees a month. A$29, seven days free.
If you are the person holding the whole thing together on a Tuesday, it was built for you.
Next week, Part 2: why so many people at the top are such poor examples of it. The data is genuinely damning, the neuroscience explains nearly all of it, and it is not the story you think it is. Small spoiler — it is mostly not that they are bad people. It is that we built them this way.
Know someone who has been quietly leading brilliantly with nobody noticing? Forward this to them. It might be the ninety seconds that changes their week. More at leadershiphq.com.au.
Sonia McDonald | CEO, LeadershipHQ | Founder, Worksparks
Comments
