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In Episode 5 of the Leadership and Wellbeing podcast, Hayden Fricke was thrilled to be joined by Dr. Liz Walker, CEO of RSPCA Victoria, to talk about the importance of finding balance in leadership. With over eight years of experience leading Australia’s oldest and most recognisable animal welfare charity, Liz has faced numerous challenges while striving to create a high-performance culture. She shared how she has navigated trials in her personal life while leading her team to success and the strategies she has employed to balance her role as a CEO with her own wellbeing.

Letting Go of Perfection

Liz spoke vulnerably about navigating a marriage breakdown while raising four children and fulfilling the demands of her leadership role. She emphasised the need to manage the chaos and let go of the pursuit of perfection, choosing instead to set realistic expectations and focus on what truly matters. This thinking aligns with key concepts in cognitive psychology: that our feelings are directly impacted by our thoughts and beliefs. If we want to feel better, we must first change our thinking. For Liz, this meant letting go of perfectionism and embracing the mindset that “good enough is okay.”

The Strength of Support Networks

A critical component of Liz’s ability to thrive has been her support network. Both in work and personal life, she deliberately cultivated a circle of trusted friends and colleagues. This mirrors decades of psychological research showing that the most important factor in leading a happy and fulfilling life is the quality – not quantity – of our relationships. Strong social connections aren’t just a nice-to-have; they’re vital to resilience and performance.

Leading with Self-Awareness

Liz also shared how she engages in regular self-reflection. This ancient concept going all the way back to Socrates’ – “Know Thyself” – has become a cornerstone of modern leadership development. Self-awareness is not something we magically wake up with; it’s cultivated over time through deliberate introspection and curiosity. For Liz, asking herself tough questions has not only helped her grow personally, but enabled her to lead a healthier, more supportive workplace.

Empowering Others to Perform

Liz is passionate about empowering her team. By fostering a sense of accountability and focusing on the greater good, she has built a cohesive and resilient team that can solve problems without relying on her to provide all the answers. Her leadership approach aligns with Heifetz and Laurie’s Adaptive Leadership model, which advocates for exposing teams to challenges, supporting them through discomfort, and enabling them to become their own problem solvers.

Practicing Gratitude

One of the most heartening aspects of our conversation was Liz’s commitment to gratitude. She makes time to appreciate the small moments of joy—a practice shown to enhance wellbeing, improve sleep, and boost mental health. Amidst the daily pressures of leadership, Liz’s mindset is a powerful reminder that we all benefit from noticing what’s going well.

Key Takeaways for Leaders

Don’t aim for perfect—realistic expectations are more sustainable.
Build a strong support network and lean on it.
Make self-reflection a regular leadership habit.
Empower your team to step up and share the load.
Focus on what’s going well—gratitude is a leadership superpower.

Liz’s insights are not only inspiring—they’re practical. They’re a reminder that leadership is not about doing it all; it’s about doing what matters most, in a way that is healthy, sustainable, and human.

For more, listen to Episode 5 of the Leadership and Wellbeing podcast – https://haydenfricke.com/leadership-and-wellbeing-podcast/

Connect with Hayden:

Websites: haydenfricke.com | steople.com.au
LinkedIn: Hayden Fricke

By Audrey McGibbon, Co-Author, GLWS

“Is wellbeing a fad?”

We were asked this question recently and our instinctive response was “We hope not!”. Not given how much positive change we have seen come about through the recent focus on wellbeing. But, thinking more about it, it’s a fair question. Wellbeing/wellness programs and initiatives have popped up like mushrooms all over workplaces – and in some quarters, this could feel a little like ‘jumping on the bandwagon’. But our true response is a firm no – that like many other ‘themes’ of recent times (diversity, psychological safety, even engagement), wellbeing is an essential ingredient in creating a workplace culture where people do their best work, are creative and innovative, collaborate effectively and perform sustainably at a high level to meet organisational objectives.

There probably are people within organisations addressing wellbeing as a fad, perhaps implementing a few ‘lunch ‘n’ learns’, supporting a ‘get fit’ campaign and encouraging healthy eating at work. Nothing wrong with any of that, but they are unlikely to achieve lasting change in behaviour. Or, for that matter, any of the desirable outcomes from seeing a real uplift in wellbeing – such as reduced absenteeism, increased engagement, innovation and retention, and sustainable high productivity and performance. (If you are yet to be convinced that these are the outcomes that investment in wellbeing can bring, then please ask and we can guide you to the evidence). That’s because these programs, by and large, are not very ‘sticky’ – and, without fundamental shifts in how the leadership of the organisation engages with wellbeing, are doomed to under-achieve, if not fail.

For wellbeing to stick, and for organisations to see the benefits, it needs to be embedded in the expectations and behaviour of all leaders.

Wellbeing as a core leadership capability

We all know that initiatives in organisations have to be supported from the top to stand a chance of getting off the ground, surviving and achieving their objectives. With wellbeing, we would like to see this go one stage further – indeed, we believe this is fundamental to realising the cultural shifts required to truly embed wellbeing.

It’s time to view wellbeing as an essential leadership capability.

Organisations expect leaders to have well-developed skills in people leadership, emotional intelligence, stakeholder relationships, strategic thinking, problem-solving and so on. In this day and age, shouldn’t we also expect leaders to be capable of developing wellbeing?

And by developing wellbeing, we mean:

Attending to their own self-care,
Attending and promoting ‘other-care’ for the people they lead,
And being champions of wellbeing across their organisations.

Here is our attempt at a fuller definition of ‘enabling wellbeing’, and we offer this up as a gift to stimulate your minds on what might work in your own organisation: “Making purposeful and well-informed choices to optimise wellbeing for self and others, role-modelling wellbeing as a priority, embedding reliable disciplines and influencing positive change in the system for others.”

How your organisation can enable Wellbeing

To make wellbeing an essential skill, it needs to be documented within your organisation’s frameworks and integrated into performance reviews.

We propose you:

Update your organisation’s leadership capability framework to include wellbeing as a
clear and explicit expectation.
Redesign or augment your leadership development initiatives to include leaders’ development of this capability as a core component of every leadership development program, at all levels of leadership.
Build engagement in your wellbeing strategy to a point where you can set wellbeing KPIs as part of every leader’s performance targets.
And finally, evaluate performance and reward leaders for their success in enabling wellbeing. After all, what gets measured, gets done. The world is changing. Leaders are under more pressure to perform and respond to rapid organisational, social and technological change than ever before. The best of the best will understand, model and uphold positive wellbeing practices in the workplace.

Leaders who role-model and prioritise the wellbeing skills and behaviours taught to them will become an organisation’s most powerful enablers of improved employee wellbeing and all the possible benefits that come with it. But it’s only strong leadership, behavioural and cultural change driven by wellbeing data that will deliver.