Learning to lead with purpose: ANZSOG’s 2025 Emerging Leaders Program

The fast pace of public sector change, and greater expectations on government, mean leadership roles are becoming even more challenging. 

A lot of this pressure falls on new and emerging public sector leaders, making the step up to a leadership role one of the most difficult in a public sector career. 

ANZSOG’s Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) began in 2024, specifically to meet demand from public servants moving from operational to more senior management or leadership roles.   

Led by experienced facilitators, A/Prof Paul Atkins, Dr Jill Charker, and Jason Ardler PSM, the 2025 ELP will focus on the mindsets and personal qualities required to be a leader who can build strong teams, collaborate, manage change and build a strong sense of purpose. Participants will emerge with a concrete personal improvement plan and the skills to catalyse meaningful change in their organisation. 

Leading by enabling others

Associate Professor Paul Atkins joins the Emerging Leaders Program this year and says that emerging public sector leaders are required to make the difficult shift  from being technical experts focused on their own roles, to leaders who create value by enabling others. 

A/Prof Atkins is a social and organisational psychologist, facilitator, speaker, mediator, coach, and researcher. He developed the ProSocial suite of learning experiences at ProSocial World, a nonprofit organisation he founded that focuses on enhancing cooperation and trust in mission-driven groups globally. 

He says that leadership is not a position, it’s a behaviour. 

“This shift to leadership creates a sort of ‘fight or flight’ response in people that can really reduce their creativity and innovation. Despite their best intentions people in those roles find themselves reacting in ways that don’t necessarily serve them well and don’t serve their people well,” he said. 

 “What we’re trying to do in the whole program is to embody and implement a form of leadership that is about mobilising people together – not about authority-based or control-based leadership. Even in a hierarchical system like the public service you can still have self-determining, engaged teams.” 

ELP Presenter Dr Jill Charker is an experienced Commonwealth Government Deputy Secretary and private sector consultant. She is currently Deputy Coordinator General, Resilience and Recovery, at the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).  

“Leadership typically involves bringing a team or group of people with you, through change, to reach a goal or objective. It’s quite different from managing within existing scope, roles, processes or boundaries,” she said. 

“It requires grappling with ambiguity, negotiating the authorising environment, leading people through change, and learning.  These are meaningful shifts that emerging leaders need to make as they move into leadership roles.” 

ELP facilitator Jason Ardler PSM, a former NSW senior public servant and academic and co-founder and director of Aboriginal-owned and operated consultancy Thirriwirri, said that new leaders in the public sector were being pulled out of their comfort zones and having their identities challenged by their new roles. 

“I know that I went from ‘it’s just about me doing my job’, to it’s now about me getting the best out of others. I’m the one who’s fronting up to the minister’s office and the secretary’s office trying to sell the reform agenda, I’m the one who’s creating the structure. I’m the one who’s controlling the narrative. I’m the one who’s in the spotlight. And that’s a pretty significant change.” 

Leading with purpose and dignity 

The craft of public sector leadership is complex, and requires a focus on creating purpose and treating people with dignity, both of which can help to create organisations that can deal with complexity and setbacks.

A/Prof Atkins said that it had been clear for decades that getting high performance out of teams required engage people in the decision-making, and bring them along in terms of purpose and intention.

“So why do people not do it? It’s because we don’t tend to process and acknowledge the fears it raises. That type of leadership is a risky business. It actually exposes you to risk. We all know we’re supposed to share power, but we don’t do it because it is punishing in the short term,” he said.  

He said the first module of the program was about the idea of leadership and of sharing power – and helping connect participants to the longer-term drivers of leadership and purpose. 

Further modules cover issues facing emerging leaders including: how to have purposeful conversations, psychological adaptability, and creating shared purpose and identity in teams. He will take participants through ProSocial’s eight core design principles which are based on research about what drives successful collaboration. 

 “The Principles are explicitly designed around that idea of creating an environment where people trust that they can work on behalf of the collective,” he said. 

“I want leaders to be able to look at a situation and see it from the point of view of a system. Leaders need to do the things that ensure performance, like tracking, giving good feedback and managing conflict, but doing them from a place of asking what does the system need, and what’s working for the system 

He said that creating and maintaining a shared purpose was key to being a consistent and effective leader, and building trust within teams. 

“People have to understand their role is not simply to pass on commands from above. The role of a really good leader is to create a space where you’re buffering your team from that kind of pressure, and trying to connect people to purpose.” 

“We can talk about purpose being the leader, not the individual. So, our purpose is the arbiter for whether something’s good or bad.” 

Mr Ardler will lead a session focusing on the importance of organisations and leaders treating others, and themselves, with dignity. 

“When our dignity is honoured, when our inherent value is acknowledged, we feel good about ourselves and we can flourish. But on the other hand, if our dignity is denied, if our value is denied, then that creates suffering,” he said. 

“Beyond the workplace, and I spend a lot of time talking about it in the context of First Nations’ Affairs in this country, dignity violation can bring real suffering at the individual, community and population level – suffering that manifests as disadvantage and dysfunction. 

“In organisations, the consequence will be low morale, low productivity, less innovation, absenteeism, greater employee turnover.  

Mr Ardler is a proponent of the work of Donna Hicks, who developed 10 essential elements of dignity based on her work on international conflict resolution, which he will use in his session. 

“It is about giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they’re coming from a good place. It is about asking how do we make people feel like they belong? That they’re part of something that’s bigger than themselves,” he said. 

“Are we treating people fairly and equitably? Are we recognising them for their contributions? When we do inadvertently violate somebody’s dignity, do we take accountability for that? And most importantly, are we committing to changing harmful behaviours?  

“But the number one essential element is acceptance of identity. Which says that we all have this inherent value. And more than that, that our race, our gender, our religion, our disability if we have one, our sexual preferences, these things are really fundamental to the way we see ourselves. And we should be able to express in an authentic way without fear of being judged negatively, being excluded, being humiliated.” 

He said that the ELP would try and ground leaders in a sense of purpose that would help them through the difficulties of leadership. 

“Purpose is greater than fear. Purpose is that thing that can hold us steady when things are rocky and uncertain and we can draw strength and conviction from it,” he said. 

“If you’re not grounded in that sense of purpose then you’re operating on emotion, you make decisions based on how you feel in the moment rather than having that sense of true north and where we’re going. 

Practical ways to improve leadership

The ELP will focus on giving participants practical skills to improve their work as leaders and as collaborators within a broader system. 

Dr Charker said that public sector work was always shaped by multiple perspectives, including ministers’ and the views of stakeholders and the community. 

“The public sector leader needs to maintain a dual focus on what they are leading and delivering, but also where it fits into those broader needs and agendas.  This can only be achieved through collaboration and building effective working relationships within their organisation, with their Minister(s), and more broadly.” 

“I would hope that ELP participants will have strengthened their reflective skills to enable them to systematically and regularly reflect on how they lead, how they engage with their team, their manager and their other stakeholders, and be intentional about the changes they are leading.  I would also hope that they will have gained valuable learnings from other ELP participants which they can choose to apply to their own work,” she said. 

A/Prof Atkins said that ELP participants would be given the chance to identify one area of their own leadership they wanted to focus on, and engage in some goal-setting around it.“It’s essentially a mini-action research project, articulating what really matters to you, developing a plan for what you’re going to do differently and trying to get that to be fairly specific, paying attention to the barriers that arise, both personal and external. Then in the final session participants will share with one another what happened in terms of their personal leadership challenge.” 

Mr Ardler said that as well as a focus on treating people with dignity he wanted participants to come away ‘spending time thinking about where they’re spending their time’ 

“Are they doing the things that are really feeding their purpose or are they doing the urgent or the easy? Are they avoiding the hard stuff?” he said. 

The 2025 Emerging Leaders Program begins on 29 April and will consist of an online orientation, a three-day in-person intensive in Brisbane, followed by two online sessions.   

Applications are now open and ANZSOG will again work to select a cohort that is at a similar point in their leadership journeys, both to ensure the relevance of the content and to build a network that can support each other through their careers. For more information on the ELP including how to apply for 2025 click here.