#80 Care underpins everything, Melissa Reynolds, CEO, State Trustees
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
- What caring in the workplace means for Melissa
- A wealth of experience and a deep passion for delivering better outcomes for clients, especially in complex, regulated industries like financial services and utilities.
- A leadership style fosters collaboration, empathy, and high performance.
- What it takes to lead with care and purpose.
RESOURCES
Transcript from the interview
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SPEAKERS
Graeme Cowan, Melissa Reynolds
Graeme Cowan 00:01
Today’s guest is Melissa Reynolds, and she is the CEO of State Trustees based in Victoria, and as you’ll hear, they provide a very wide range of services, often for underprivileged people and those that could be experiencing mental health issues. I first worked with Melissa 10 years ago, when she was the Executive General Manager of NAB and I helped deliver a series of workshops around Australia where we trained every branch manager on personal and team resilience and how to master your moodometer, as you’ll hear. Melissa has had a wide range of roles in Westpac, NAB, as I said, AGL and now in this current role. And she really loves this current position, because it’s very, very purpose oriented, as you’ll hear. Melissa also has a very, very good self care strategy. She really deliberately practices things that boost her mood, on the on the EMU, domita, and in her personal life as well, you hear a ritual she has with her family every night, which helps people to focus a little bit about, you know, what’s great about life? Melissa also describes how she and her leadership team go about promoting psychological safety across the organization, and tells a very interesting anecdote around that also building a real sense of purpose and inviting team members across the whole group to reflect on why they’re proud of working for State Trustees, really simple things that I think have a profound impact. I’m sure you’ll enjoy Melissa’s tips, particularly around the self care. I really love that. And you’ll hear a latest thing she’s done with self care, which is very, very interesting. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it’s a real pleasure to welcome Melissa Reynolds, to the caring CEO. Welcome Melissa.
Melissa Reynolds 02:05
Thank you, Graeme, great to be here.
Graeme Cowan 02:08
Melissa, what does care in the workplace mean to you?
Melissa Reynolds 02:12
It’s a great question. You know, when I think about care in the workplace, I think about it as being at the absolute center of the organization, and for me, it shows up in many ways. It really underpins the way in
which you design and deliver services to your clients. It underpins teamwork. It underpins how we have reputation in our standing in the community, and it’s absolutely central to the strategy and our priorities. So often, I think care in the workplace gets considered as a soft skill, and it’s things that we feel, but I actually think that really care in the organization gets demonstrated in many, many ways. It’s about caring enough that you’ve got a mission that our our organization can align around. It gives meaning to the work that we do. It’s about caring enough that our people know what the priorities are and where the company is going, that we’ve got processes in place and boundaries and clarity for people. So it’s much more than a soft skill. I actually think care in the workplace is a strategic leadership strength, and it’s very integrated into culture, meaning, strategy, purpose and priorities.
Graeme Cowan 03:35
Yeah, that’s a wonderful description. And I read once that Theodore Roosevelt, you know, once said, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. And it is that fundamental human need, isn’t it to feel that people around us want to support us, have each other’s back and and have a sense of belonging. You know, we can’t change that. We’re human. We really need that. You’ve had quite a interesting career, Melissa, in terms of the organizations you’ve worked with. And I read once. I don’t know if this is true, but you started as a bank teller. Is that? Is that correct?
Melissa Reynolds 04:11
Did indeed a long time ago. Look, my career started when I was in high school, really, I worked in the paper shop that my mum and dad ran. And so my my career has always been built around customer service, and I feel that even today, as a CEO, my job is still primarily in customer service, just in a very different way. So, you know, my journey began when I finished school and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And I think it was my dad that suggested getting a job in a bank was a good thing for a free young girl to do, and he knew the local bank manager pretty well. So I got an interview, and next couple of weeks, I started, not quite as a teller. I had to be promoted to a teller, but I did a job, which was a proof operator. In those days, all the checks used to come in, used to have to read the checks. And of course, you know that job? Job doesn’t exist today. We’ve got machines that do it for us, but I spent probably the first five years of my career working as a teller in a bank, and I did my degree by night, and I worked in the bank by day. So I ended up spending the next 15 years or so in banking, in all sorts of roles. I moved to Sydney, and I worked in head office, and I ran the internal communications for the retail bank there, I worked as a product manager designing everyday banking accounts. I was at the forefront in the 90s of technology, when we were introducing telephone banking, and later involved in the rollout of Internet Banking. So it goes to show how old I am, but I can. I continued my study, and I did a Masters of commerce, and then I had the great opportunity to move to Western Australia, and I moved to Perth, and I was working on the integration of two banks at the time, and that was very exciting and very new. And it was also where I was appointed, really into my first executive role as head of marketing for the newly merged entity. And then in 2000 I moved to Melbourne, so I have moved around a little bit, and I stayed a few more years in banking. And then around about 2006 my role was made redundant, and I was pretty restless to do something different. And in fact, I had grown up in financial services, and I felt, probably, in truth, I was probably a little bit bored with it at the time, and I needed a change. And so, as it turned out, I got a senior role with census white pages, and that was absolutely fascinating. I stayed there for about seven years, and it was actually just on the brink of digital search. So it was fascinating leading a paper based organization whose products were yellow
and white pages and a huge transformation, turning, you know, that paper based organization into to digital. So it was also the time I stepped way outside of my comfort zone. I’d grown up in sort of product and marketing and communications roles, and it was the first time I moved into a sales leadership role and ran my first P and L and, you know, fantastic timing. It was in 2008 just at the GFC, and the first thing clients wanted to do was actually cut their advertising spend. Wow. It was an incredible journey of resilience, actually, for our staff, because we had one of the most successful white pages businesses in the world, and then we had a a workforce that suddenly went from feeling amazing to feeling, you know, almost incompetent. And so it was. It was an incredible journey of resilience in leading them at that point in time. So
Graeme Cowan 07:47
what sort of things, sorry, just going to say, what sort of things did you do to address that? You know, pain of uncertainty and disruption, where it had been pretty plain, say, sailing. What were some of the strategies you bid to address that.
Melissa Reynolds 08:01
Well, I think the first thing was really around digging deep and having confidence in the products that we were selling and and really having confidence in the proposition that we had. So that was the first thing. The second thing was, you know, we did a lot more coaching with our leaders and provided a lot more support around them so that they could actually understand what they could control and what they couldn’t control and and actually help our clients through what they were experiencing at the time as well, which was a high degree of uncertainty. And so it was as much about, you know, providing confidence to our clients as it was about providing confidence to our people, yeah. And, but certainly it was not, you know, it was not a time where you could stand back. And I think these experiences teach you how to really lean in and be very hands on with your people and provide them, you know, the support that they need. Yeah,
Graeme Cowan 09:00
yeah, yeah. And what was your next move after that?
Melissa Reynolds 09:04
Well, after I spent a number of years at census wide pages, I left and went back into banking and spent a few more years in banking. I ran the branch network for NAB. That was around 750 branches, and we had about 7000 staff. And I think that was where you and I first worked together, Graeme, when we were rolling out the moodometer, and we were also introducing the concepts around your one thing. So that was where we were going through a big change journey and and recognizing the impact of that change on our people, you know, you were able to come in and provide some fantastic skills for them at the time. So I left NAB to become the chief customer officer at AGL, and then I had a career break just before COVID, actually, and I. Bit of a hiatus during that period. And I think at that time, I sort of moved into thinking very deeply about what I wanted to do. And you know that that career break just before COVID turned into a slightly longer career break, because just before COVID, the executive market sort of dried up, and so I was in a situation where I was probably out of work for a little longer than I had anticipated. But at that time, I sort of changed directions and went down a professional director’s path, and I was on the board of a number of organizations, and after a few years, really
realized that I had missed terribly the executive role and the energy and the leadership, and so that brought me to State Trustees, and that brought me, then to being the CEO of state trustee. So, you know, you can see that my career has had sort of lots of different twists and turns. And I often think that careers are a bit like snakes and ladders either they never always go up. But I think so long as you’re continuously learning, you embrace new challenge, it’s such an opportunity for both professional and personal, personal growth.
Graeme Cowan 11:12
Yeah, I was an executive search for a long time. I always were very interested in, you know, the direction people went and why they chose certain roles. It tells you a lot. And you know, as you say, it’s never a perfect path. You know, there’s always setbacks, there’s always changes. You know that that really happens a lot, but I think also it’s, it’s not a lot of people go across as many industries as you have done. And I think each time you go across an industry, you’re sort of outside the comfort zone. And you know, that’s where, if you try new things, you might find something relevant in your past that is relevant in a new industry. Sometimes not, but it’s, it is a matter of trying, and it’s really a reflection of today’s marketplace, isn’t it, where nothing’s 100% certain. You know, we have our best prediction of what might work, but and it may work, but it’s never guaranteed anymore. There’s always things that aren’t aren’t anticipated. It’d be great for people just to hear a little bit about State Trustees and what you do in that organization?
Melissa Reynolds 12:24
Yeah, thank you. Look, it’s interesting. State Trustees is quite a unique organization. We’re a Victorian government, government backed organization, and we provide financial and legal services for people in moments of need. And so we really serve a very diverse client base. On one hand, we serve clients that are appointed to us because for reasons of mental health or illness or some other reason they don’t have the capacity to look after their financial affairs. And so we get appointed to do that for them and work with them. And so we deal with some of Victoria’s most vulnerable clients in you know, who who come with some very complex needs. And on the other hand, we provide agency for clients who are looking to get their affairs in good order for later in life, when they might lose capacity, or for when they pass away. And so therefore we do wills, power of attorneys, we manage deceased estates, we do trusts, we have a charitable arm, and we also have a range of professional services, which includes legal and tax and investments. And so it’s a very diverse set of services that we provide across a very, very diverse client base.
Graeme Cowan 13:44
Yeah, yeah. And you spoke before about being really customer focused. How can you do that when there’s so many different types of customers? Do do the requirements differ or or largely the same.
Melissa Reynolds 14:01
What’s been very they’re very different. It’s a great question, and certainly one of the you know, most wonderful things about working for this organization is the incredible sense of passion and purpose that our people have. But one of the things that I really wanted to amplify when I came into the role as CEO was the voice of the client, and to really ensure that our client voices were at the center of every decision that we made. And so some of the rituals that we have put in place include bringing a client
story to every meeting. And so that’s very much role modeled by the executive. We have a voice of client moment every week when we meet and we hear the story of that client through, you know, what’s been happening for them. And sometimes it’s a celebration of the work that we do, and sometimes it actually enables us to go, Well, how could we have. Done better has, you know, all parts of the organization been working together for the benefit of this client, so really amplifying the voices of our client in everything that we do. The other thing I did was put in place a mandatory culture goal for every employee in the organization, and that was to spend time in another business unit or another team and see the client’s experience from a different perspective. And the reason for that is that delivering a client outcome is not something that one person can do, and it requires everybody to link arms, to come together. It’s very interdependent, and we can only do that if we actually can see that experience through somebody else’s eyes, and so ensuring that each of our team members, even if they’re in a client facing role, spends a time in another team and really understanding the client experience from a different perspective. So every one of our clients is different, but it’s a way in which we demonstrate care for our employees, because they you know, it brings a collective sense of belonging and purpose, and only through that, then can you really deliver that very human centric client service for the many types of individuals that we serve.
Graeme Cowan 16:25
Yeah, with that, you know, Voice of client. How does it actually happen? Does some one person present an avatar, or how does it occur?
Melissa Reynolds 16:35
How do you Yeah? So sometimes, sometimes it’s, it’s just simply a story. So, for example, we had and they told through our consultants, you know, we we changed the name of the flight so that it’s anonymized and private. But, you know, could be an example like this last week at our executive team, the story that came forward was a story about a client who whose name was Brenda. We had just moved Brenda, who’s about 97 from her home and into aged care, and she was really missing her garden and her flowers, and so we called the aged care facility that she had just been placed in, and we said, Look, is there anything that we can do to help make Brenda’s life happier, and they told us that she had really missed her her flowers and her gardens, but she’s also quite bedridden, so she can’t get up and sort of move around. So we said, well, what if we were to send her flowers every week? And so every week in the aged care home, Brenda gets a beautiful Bucha flowers, and it’s something that she looks forward to, and brings a real sort of twinkle and and spark to her her face. So that story was a very simple one, was told through our consultant, and when we reflect on that, we go, well, that’s more than just doing your job, and that is, you know, moving the person from one location to the other as our requirements. But it’s going that extra step. It’s actually understanding what would make a difference for Brenda in her life at this point in time. Yeah. And so it’s, it’s stories like those. Sometimes it’ll be a story that we, we get through a client complaint that we unpack and say, Well, how could we have done that differently? Where did the system fall down and what could we have done differently? So they take very, very different expressions, but mostly they are stories that our people put forward because they’re really proud of the difference that they’ve made.
Graeme Cowan 18:39
Yeah, I love that we have some helpful resources that you can find. At, we care 360, five.com.au, the first is our mental ill health calculator, which is a quick and simple way to work out what poor mental health costs your organization in lost productivity and employee turnover. You will also find our building a mentally healthy culture checklist, which shows how to launch a great initiative and keep that momentum going. These resources can be found at WeCARE, 360, five.com.au, with this role, it’s obviously quite different to work in a bank or AGL or census. How did it strike you when you started? What did you notice about the culture?
Melissa Reynolds 19:32
One of the things that I was reflecting on when I sort of took a career break was I’ve always been somebody who was driven by one, learning and two, a deep sense of purpose. And having spent all of my career in really big organizations and major brands, I think I got to the point where I was really looking for an organization that was very. Are deeply centered in purpose, and it is one of the things that I love most about my role, and that is the purpose of the organization. And what struck me about the culture here was that really deep sense of purpose and care that all of our staff bring to work every single day. And therefore, you know, amplifying that, bringing it to life, has been a real joy, yeah, but it’s certainly very unique, not only in what we do, but how we how we go about doing it, and very, very different culturally from most major corporations. And I think you know, as you go through your career, you look for different things at different times. And this was certainly the time in my career where I wanted to take all the skills and experience that I had learned in some really complex settings and bring them to an organization that was really deeply human, centered and and, and purpose driven.
Graeme Cowan 21:04
Yeah, I noticed there’s a bit of a common theme across a number of your roles, and that’s about digital transformation. And, you know, changing from, I guess, the slower, more hands on to, you know, the more digital, the more apps, the more everything. When you manage that process and you have for a number of occasions, how do you keep in mind the role of people who may not be needed when the when the transformation is completed?
Melissa Reynolds 21:40
I think it’s about, I mean, when you think about any change, whether it’s a digital transformation or anything, organizations are, you know, they’re living things they they need to continue to change in order to survive. And so if I think about whether it’s banking or energy or even the way that we deliver services today, at State Trustees, there is always going to be change, and it’s really important for our leaders to understand why the change is occurring and how that change relates to a better outcome for a client, and how it’s going to make the organization better in the long run. And so there are always going to be a personal impact, but in that is also opportunity, because it means people have got the chance to learn new skills or do new things or have their own career opportunities. And so, you know, ensuring that we’ve got leaders who understand the why of the change, who understand the impact of the change, and who have the skills to not only embrace the change themselves, but to lead others through it is a really critical component of any successful transformation. Yeah, there is always a people impact. And so that’s where I think things like setting up wellbeing, you know, transparency and assistance for people in terms of how they transition through that change becomes really important to the change being embraced.
Graeme Cowan 23:27
Yeah, yeah. And with you know that change, there’s obviously a toll that it plays on you as well. How do you what do you do to practice self care? What? What keeps you in the green zone on the moodometer?
Melissa Reynolds 23:43
Yeah. Look, I think there’s a number of things which I’ve practiced throughout my life. I mean, firstly, very physically. I, you know, the thing I love to do is work out with weights. I try and move every day. I love the outdoors. I stretch. I try and get a good night’s sleep. I eat well. So taking care of my physical self is a very important part of my self care strategy. Mentally, i i try to unplug every night, and if probably late last year, I actually bought a sauna. And so that’s my new place to unplug in 65 degree heat. And so 30 minutes in that a day or every second day is a fabulous way to unwind. I can meditate, I can listen to a podcast. I can journal if I feel up to it, and I get away from it all. So it’s my own little box, literally, but it’s just a wonderful mental break for me. The other thing I try and do, probably a couple of times a year, if I can, is go on a retreat where I am completely a nobody. I’m not a Mum, I’m not a wife, I’m not a CEO, I’m nobody, and I can just sort of unravel and rebuild. And I find that a really nourishing thing to do. So there’s a number of things that I tend to try and do to to. To self care, there’s probably a few. You know, I’m, I’m quite a spiritual person, so I’m very much guided by my faith and I love, you know, prayer and meditation. My family and my friends are a great support to me, and I get a lot of nourishment from them. But I find one of the other self care techniques is actually about having something to look forward to every day. And sometimes, for me, that’s as simple as my morning coffee. Sometimes it’s just as simple as looking forward to Saturday night and sitting on the couch with the kids and watching a movie. And sometimes it’s a bigger thing to look forward to, like, you know, a family holiday or something. So I find if you can have something to look forward to every day, that’s a really important part of of self care as well.
Graeme Cowan 25:49
Yeah, it’s a very holistic approach that you’re taking there, which is sensational and looking forward. You know, they say that actually looking forward to something great is even bigger than the actual event, but that makes it all the more better, does it? It makes it such incredibly important to look forward to. My wife and I plan to walk around Mont Blanc in August. And you know, we’re preparing our walking now, but you know we’re also, you know, watching videos on YouTube about walking around and so we’re experiencing it already, not the blood, sweat and tears yet, but you know, the amazing sights along the way.
Melissa Reynolds 26:26
It’ll be beautiful. It will be I think the other thing we do is we practice gratitude. And so, you know, my family has a ritual where every night, when we have dinner together, we just have a moment of gratitude. And everybody who’s at the table says something that they’re grateful for. And look, sometimes that’s as pedestrian as you know, hey, I’m, I’m, I’m grateful for my dog. When my daughter was little, it used to be almost like the whole ecosystem. I’m, I’m grateful for the rain that you know, watered the plants that you know, made the food that’s now on my table, so like, Jenny was old by the time we got through hers. But it’s a really important practice, and in fact, it’s something that we do at our
executive team every week as well, is we just go around the room, we say, look, what are we grateful for? I mean, lots of teams will celebrate their wins for the week, and we do that too. But gratitude actually opens up and puts you in a very different space. You call it the Green Zone. I agree with that, and it’s incredible. Just what our what our people will say about gratitude, you know, what they’re grateful for, not only you know from a work point of view, but actually what they’re grateful for in their lives. It’s a beautiful practice.
Graeme Cowan 27:38
Yeah, it really is well proven to make a difference. And we humans have a negative negativity bias, and so we naturally think of the things that go wrong, unless we have a deliberate prompt like you’re describing to recognize what’s going going right across your group. You know you’re servicing some very disadvantaged people. And how do you, I guess, build you’ve talked a number of occasions about building that purpose. But how do you also build psychological safety, where people do feel free to make suggestions on how things could be improved. They can challenge ideas that I think makes sense, and they can offer ideas and, you know, be heard. How do you do that across an organization?
Melissa Reynolds 28:27
There are two parts to that, and I, and I find employees wanting to suggest new ideas is quite different to wanting to raise problems and concerns. And so for new ideas, we encourage people to sort of think about better ways of doing things. And we have a bright ideas initiative where anyone can contribute an idea, they sort of pitch it like, bit like Shark Tank to a panel. And, you know, subject to that being all sort of sorted, then it can move into pilot and implementation. So we’ve got a really nice and fun way of being able to create, you know, energy around new ideas. But when it’s around raising concerns and problems, I think it is a bit different, and it’s it can often be a bit scarier for people. So how do we go about creating sort of psychological safety? Well, when I first came into the CEO role, I went out and visited with all of our people and all of our sites, and I really wanted to hear honestly what was working and what was not working. And I shared them a story about the corn flake. And what I described was, you know, the hardest job in the organization is being the CEO. And the reason for that is people think that, that you only want the good news stories. And so if you think about what a corn. Flake is, you know, it’s a pretty nondescript, sort of not particularly interesting flake of corn, and it comes in a cardboard box. And so often problems will start out like a corn flake, but by the time they go through the layers of the management team and up the hierarchy, and finally, up to the CEO, they’ve been so sugar coated and so sugar coated and so sugar coated that the corn flake looks nothing like a corn flake. It resembles more a fruit loop. And so I said to the team, I want us to deal with corn flakes. If I don’t know the corn flakes, I can’t help because I don’t know that there’s a problem. And I think that just provided a language and an environment where I was, you know, opening up, quite candidly, my appetite to hear what wasn’t working as well. So we are really trying to build a culture where it is safe for people to speak up. And I think that that starts with leadership. It’s about, you know, being candid when things are not working, not with our accountability but but certainly without blame, and even when things are not going as well as what they could be, it’s being open and honest about that and helping our people understand through uncertain times What’s ahead of them with some degree of certainty. So, you know, there’s a number of things that we do. I do skip level meetings with all of my direct reports. And so across the entire year, I meet with all of our senior leaders, one on one. And when I’m out and about, meeting with all of the various people across the organization. I meet with them team by team,
by team by team, and so that’s a real opportunity for my learning. I call them sort of CEO learning sessions. And once again, in those small groups, it creates a really safe environment for people to tell me about what’s going on in their team, what’s going on for them, and I get tremendous value out of those sessions. I learn a lot, and then I can go and put in place things that might be helpful to them. So there’s a whole range of different things that we do in order to create a safe to speak up culture, but it’s always a work in progress. These are often difficult conversations, removing stigma, creating a sense where there’s no judgment, just active listening. All of those sorts of things. Are practices that actually help make it safe for employees to say what’s on their mind.
Graeme Cowan 32:38
Yeah, I remember you once telling me that you did a counseling course and be interested to know a little bit about that and why you chose to do that.
Melissa Reynolds 32:50
Yeah, look, I think it’s, it was one of those things that, again, sort of post or just coming out of COVID and and when I was going through some changes in my life, around career, and you know, I had witnessed, particularly through that whole COVID period, so many people in my circle going through difficult times, you know, broken relationships or death, grief, loss. And I was also dealing with my own stuff, and so I wanted to be better skilled and equipped to be able to manage my own sort of situation, my own pain, but I also really wanted to be better supporting other people. And so I all of my education had been, you know, I did a bachelor of economics, I did a Masters of commerce, I did an advanced management program at INSEAD in France, and a lot of that is around leadership and strategy and business and so doing the counseling course was something purely for self interest, and its basis, it’s around empathy, active listening and being non judgmental. So I found that these skills have been incredibly important in the work that I do and in leadership. So all of these sorts of things are very essential, I think, in terms of being a caring CEO. So applying the counseling basics in the workplace has meant really taking a person centered leadership approach, and so I would practice and use those skills every single day in my work and in my home, and I think again, just the principles of of counseling, it promotes psychological Safety, because when leaders can listen without judgment, then employees are more likely to speak up. It also helps support mental health and wellbeing, because as a CEO, I’m very aware of the mental health issues and the impacts that they have on our people when it comes to things like stress and burnout and life balance. And so forth. So whilst I don’t think CEOs need to be counselors, for me, adopting the core principles of counseling has, you know, definitely helped in terms of team dynamics and trying to create a more human workplace. It’s just been one of the things I’ve loved doing, and I’ll continue to to do, you know, sort of add on subject. So I’ve, I’ve got a couple of extra things I’m doing and majoring in, you know, in the years to come. So, yeah,
Graeme Cowan 35:28
great, great stuff. One of the previous people I’ve interviewed is bob chapman, and he runs a very successful company in the US called Barry. Why Miller? He’s the author of a book called everybody matters. And he just really reinforces what you’ve just talked about. And he said, You know, when he first started his journey, he thought you showed you care by doing stuff. You don’t have to do stuff. And then he finally realized that you show your care by listening with empathy. And you know, we all have a desire to be heard, don’t we?
Melissa Reynolds 36:01
It’s absolutely right. And I think, you know, I think sometimes earlier in our careers, we can be so busy getting to where we want to go, that that we do a lot of doing, and we don’t be a lot of being. And I think that that is a natural sort of maturity that occurs, but there’s so much more awareness around the need to be heard and seen, then I think they were, you know, even 20 or 30 years ago.
Graeme Cowan 36:28
It’s ironical, isn’t it, because with social media, we’re supposed to be better connected and better heard. But it doesn’t happen. Or maybe it was at first, but it certainly hasn’t turned out that way we can’t rely on it, that’s for sure. It’s been absolute pleasure catching up. Melissa, you know we were reflecting before we came on air, that it was about 10 years ago that I worked with all your bank managers at NAB around the country, building their personal and team resilience. It was a wonderful experience doing that, and at that same time, we had both through just coincidence, just completed the Kokoda track.
Melissa Reynolds 37:07
We had, wow, that was, that was an amazing experience, that’s for sure. Talk about resilience.
Graeme Cowan 37:13
Yeah, it was very, very, very humbling. And I had the, I guess, the pleasure of taking my son on the track. And he was about 20, I think, at the time. So who’s the, you know, the age of those young soldiers? And just really realized what a massive sacrifice they made, unbelief, when you get to that symmetry at the end, it really, really brings it home, doesn’t it?
Melissa Reynolds 37:38
Oh, it certainly does. And look for me, I was never into a lot of the Australian history, so I learned a lot in going over to Kokoda. And of course, there’s the physical challenge. It’s so hard and takes such perseverance to complete it. What surprised me was my own reaction and how sentimental I became. And it’s, you know, just moments where you realize the sacrifices that others have made for peace that really is. It was an incredible experience, one, one that is will always stay with me. I don’t have a desire to do it again, but it was one of those really, really special things that I had the great fortune of being able to do.
Speaker 1 38:22
Yeah, and we both agree we don’t want to do it again. Exactly,
Melissa Reynolds 38:29
exactly. I’d rather be hiking somewhere else. You’ll find me anytime where I’m not working. I’m very happy to be hiking the hills somewhere else, but I’d much prefer an Alpine location than back in the depths of the jungle again, that’s for sure.
Graeme Cowan 38:44
I always fit you for the same question, Melissa, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give, I guess that first role you had, you know, when you first entered the bank? What? What advice would you give that person?
Melissa Reynolds 38:56
Well, it’s funny you ask that, because I’ve got a 20 year old daughter at the moment who is just doing an overseas exchange, and I wrote her a letter as she was getting on the plane, and it was almost like, you know, giving advice back to my younger self. There’s probably three things I would say is, first of all, you don’t need to have it all planned out. You know, careers will unfold and new opportunities will present themselves. Just be yourself, be true to yourself and always keep learning.
Graeme Cowan 39:29
Yeah, wonderful, wonderful lessons. Thanks so much for being part of the caring CEO, Melissa, it’s been wonderful connecting with you again.
Melissa Reynolds 39:37
It’s been a pleasure to be with you today, Graeme and all the very best.
Graeme Cowan 39:42
Thanks for joining us today. We hope you’re inspired to strive for a culture of care that also leads to great results. If you’ve enjoyed this interview today, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform, and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss an episode. We also welcome any comments. If you’re interested in seeing details about our scalable WeCare365 Mental Health Training Programs. Please visit us at wecare365.com.au, our goal is to make these programs accessible, practical and ongoing. You can also find me, Graeme Cowan on LinkedIn, and I’d love to hear from you. And finally, if you’ve come across a senior leader who has impressed you and you think they’d be a great guest, please email us at support, at wecare365.com.au, thanks once again for listening today.
