When she can, Kate Roffey escapes to her farm to make furniture. Not the type of furniture that comes in a flat pack with an allen key and an assortment of screws and nails, but the real deal – furniture with dovetails and tongues and grooves. Kate’s dad was a builder and she learned the art from him – When you build something, she shares, you need to be able to visualise how it will all come together in one perfect piece before you even join the wood. It’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle.
Listening to Kate talk about her passion for woodwork and the process behind designing the perfect cabinet, finding the right timber, selecting the best tools that will work with and not against the grain, and then investing her time to focus intensely on crafting something beautiful gives me a privileged insight into Kate’s personal playbook for developing and delivering the right business strategy to produce sustained business excellence.
Kate is perhaps currently best known as the first woman President of the Melbourne Football Club, the oldest professional sporting club in the world and the first AFL Club to have both AFL and AFWL premiership teams. Having sat on the club’s Board for 9 years, she never expected to be President, but after listening to her describe her journey from ‘there’ to ’here’, I’m honestly surprised that she isn’t running the country.
At University, Kate trained as a Sports Scientist and worked with our most elite athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport. However, she found the experience of dealing with just a ‘piece’ of an athlete, while other specialists dealt with others pieces, frustrating – I wanted to treat the whole person. And so I studied psychology. But then I realised in my early 20s that I didn’t really want to do that either.
From there Kate describes her professional journey as a ‘career by chaos’. Others have called her the ‘galloping pony’ – because I was always racing off to the next thing with no real idea of where I was going.
Generally speaking, Kate was racing off to find what she describes as ‘the door with the gold star’ – I never had a straight career path that I was following. When you look at your future, there is a big long hallway of doors and at the end is THE door. THE door with a big gold star on it – the Top of the Pops door. I call it the ‘Corridor of Opportunities’. But the problem was that I kept getting distracted by the other doors on either side of the corridor. I’d see a door and I’d open it.
After deciding sports science and psychology were not the doors she wanted to linger behind, at 23 Kate packed a backpack, took $600 in travellers cheques and set off to the land of Anna Karenina (her favourite book) with a one way ticket to Russia and with thoughts of exploring Mongolia and China until her money ran out. She travelled for 3 years. From teaching horse riding in New York, driving dog sleds in Sweden taking tourists on ice fishing safaris, sometimes sleeping rough, stowing away on a boat in Greece, being escorted from a train on the Czech border by machine gun for failing to have a visa, and witnessing extreme poverty and death on the streets of Calcutta, Kate retuned to Australia a ‘decent person’ at the age of 27 – I gained so much perspective for how incredibly lucky we are to live in Australia.
Today Kate knows that being a decent person and a great CEO and leader means you need to get out of the way and let your team deliver. Her career by chaos has seen her spearhead the re-development of the Melbourne Tennis Centre precinct, an experience she describes as ‘amazing’ and which allowed her to travel the world to visit other elite sporting precincts and then bring her learnings back to help craft the strategy that would deliver what is now arguably the best sporting event in the world – the Australian Tennis Open.
I drive past the Tennis Centre now and I am so proud of what we delivered. You don’t have to be the CEO to make a major contribution, and that’s how I feel about the Tennis Centre. My goal when I work as a leader in any organisation is to ensure we are the very best we can be. We need to see how we can jump ahead, not simply how we can catch up.
From her Tennis Centre role, Kate learned how sport can be used as a platform to shape an entire city into a major international tourist attraction. City Shaping became a clear passion and Kate next took a role as the CEO Committee of Melbourne to work with the big end of town, the arts, and philanthropic groups on the strategy to ensure Melbourne stays ahead of the pack as the world’s most liveable city. She left that role to take on the challenge of working for the City of Wyndham to provide an out of the box strategy to help shape one of Australia’s fastest growing municipalities.
While at Wyndham, Kate opened another door along the ‘corridor of opportunities’, working with a team to bid for one of only 2 new A League Soccer Licences, bringing together her skills and passion for commercial and legal negotiation, sport and city shaping. It is no surprise to anyone who knows Kate that the A League bid was successful, with Wyndham securing a licence, along with a world class sporting precinct that incorporates a 15000 seat stadium, 5000 seat secondary stadium, elite training facilities and administration headquarters.
Other doors opened include a life time of governance work and volunteering. Kate states that she goes where she feels she is most needed, as opposed to what might look best on her CV. She chose sitting on the Board of Victoria University over the boards of other, perhaps more prestigious universities, because she lives in Melbourne’s West and she felt that the West and Victoria University needed her help more – I have an overwhelming desire to do something useful. I have always picked the crusade.
A life long champion for women, gender and equality, Kate is happy to fight the fight, but would love to see everyone step up – Not everyone can be the CEO. Not everyone can be the President of the club. There are only a few of those jobs going. But you don’t have to be in a leadership role to make a difference. Anyone can push the boundaries and make a difference. Go and support a woman’s game of sport or buy an annual membership.
Today, Kate is sitting with me at MSAC where she is the CEO – leading the strategy for another major city sporting venue with a key role in city shaping, attracting tourists, and providing opportunities for the community. Her recipe for successful leadership in this role, as in all her roles, is pretty straightforward: It starts with culture – everything is driven by the culture of the place. Set the plan. Stay on course. Don’t compromise on behaviours. Don’t let the little things bug you. Get everyone on the same path and remove the big obstacles out of their way. Recognise that it takes everyone, hundreds of people, to contribute to climbing the mountain. My idea of success now is very different to what it was years ago. My idea now is that one day I won’t come into work and no-one will realise I‘m not here. That is success for me. I’m here to do myself out of a job.
It might have been a career by chaos, but there is a clear theme running through the doors Kate chose to open – a place where she can think outside the box, exercise her enormous capacity for strategic thinking, and where she has free reign to plan, design and deliver something of enormous significance in a way that will stay, and remain, ahead of the curve.
When you build a building you measure in centimetres, Kate says, but when you build furniture, you measure in millimetres.
And when you build a magnificent career, you measure it by your legacy.
