A LinkedIn newsletter by Sonia McDonald ❤️ and LeadershipHQ
I’ve spent 35+ years studying leadership. Teaching it. Coaching it. Watching it up close in boardrooms, site sheds, cockpits and kitchens. Here are The 100 Best Leaders in Australia Right Now…
So here’s my list. 100 leaders. Not ranked — leadership isn’t a leaderboard. Not all CEOs, either. Some run billion-dollar companies. Some run a shed in Armidale. All of them lead with something I care about deeply: courage.
Some lead organisations I’ve had the privilege of working with. Some I admire from a distance. All of them are shaping Australia right now — and every single one has a lesson in them.
Here we go.
The ones I’ve worked with up close
1. Mike Morgan — Senior Vice President & Managing Director APAC, Insight. Leads 600+ people across five countries with zero ego and total clarity. Clears roadblocks. Coaches hands-on. That’s the job.
2. Steve Lambert — Managing Director & CEO, Seymour Whyte. Stepped into the top job in January after a decade building the business from the inside. Steady. Deliberate. Exactly right.
3. Marc Kenney — Managing Director, Mettle. “Good people doing good things together” isn’t a slogan at Mettle. It’s the operating system.
4. Catherine Malouf — Co-owner, The Calile. Came back to the family business after two decades away and helped lead it onto the world stage — twice named among the world’s 50 best hotels. Empathy as strategy.
5. Stephen Rue — CEO, Optus. Fronting up. Owning the hard stuff publicly. That’s what rebuilding trust actually looks like — not a slogan, a slog.
6. Vanessa Hudson — CEO, Qantas. Inherited turbulence. Chose repair over spin. The brand is coming back because the leadership did first.
7. Peter Tompkins — CEO, Downer Group. Steadying a national essential-services giant through its reset years — unglamorous, vital work.
8. Frank Calabria — CEO, Origin Energy. One of the hardest jobs in the energy transition, done without pretending any of it is simple.
9. Cos Bruyn — Managing Director, Fulton Hogan. Infrastructure at massive scale, humility fully intact.
10. Carolyn Evans — Vice Chancellor, Griffith University. Leads a university like a community, not a corporation.
Courage under fire
11. Paul Scurrah — Managing Director & CEO, Fiji Airways. Made a Member of the Order of Australia this year. Led Virgin through its darkest chapter with his humanity intact. Now leading a national carrier — and still the same person in the room.
12. Christine Holgate — Group Executive Chair, Team Global Express. Knocked down publicly. Stood back up and rebuilt a $4bn logistics business. Grow, stop, protect — and never forget the protect.
13. John Sams — CEO, KPMG Australia. Days into the job with a mandate for tough calls and real accountability. Promising courage is easy. Watch what he does with it.
14. Dave Emerson — CEO, Virgin Australia. Took the airline back to the public markets — quietly, competently, without the theatre.
15. Simon Trott — CEO, Rio Tinto. A WA farm kid now running a global miner. Grounded is an understatement.
16. Nuno Matos — CEO, ANZ. New country. Big bank. No honeymoon. Leading through it anyway.
17. Andrew Irvine — CEO, NAB. Talks to customers like a human being. Radical, apparently.
18. Anthony Miller — CEO, Westpac. Pace and discipline in equal measure.
19. Matt Comyn — CEO, Commonwealth Bank. The steadiest hand in Australian banking. Has been for years.
20. Michele Bullock — Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia. Makes the hardest calls in the country — then fronts up and explains them in plain English.
The builders
21. Melanie Perkins — Co-founder & CEO, Canva. Rejected more than 100 times. Built one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Rejection is redirection — she’s the proof.
22. Mike Cannon-Brookes — Co-founder & CEO, Atlassian. Uses the balance sheet to move the climate needle. Skin in the game, always.
23. Jack Zhang — Co-founder & CEO, Airwallex. Said no to the easy exit. Kept scaling a global fintech from here.
24. Robin Khuda — Founder, AirTrunk. Built a data centre giant from scratch and delivered one of Australia’s biggest ever tech exits. Then gave big to get more women into STEM.
25. Chris Hulls — Co-founder & CEO, Life360. ASX-listed, globally scaled, family-first product. Conviction pays.
26. Tim Doyle — Co-founder & CEO, Eucalyptus. Rewiring consumer healthcare — and unafraid to say the quiet parts out loud.
27. Sam Hupert — Co-founder & CEO, Pro Medicus. A doctor who built one of the ASX’s great global software stories. Quietly. Over decades.
28. Sam Prince — Founder, Zambrero. Every burrito funds a meal for someone doing it tough. Purpose baked into the business model itself.
29. Naomi Simson — Co-founder, Big Red Group. Built RedBalloon, backed hundreds of founders since. Still one of the most generous mentors in Australian business.
30. Janine Allis — Founder, Boost Juice. From kitchen bench to global brand. The blueprint for a generation of founders.
The operators
31. Leah Weckert — CEO, Coles. Runs one of the country’s biggest workforces under permanent public scrutiny. Composure is a skill.
32. Amanda Bardwell — CEO, Woolworths Group. Took the chair when the seat was hottest. Leading through it, not around it.
33. Rob Scott — Managing Director, Wesfarmers. Olympian discipline. Conglomerate scale. Long-term thinking in a short-term world.
34. Amanda Banfield — CEO, Nando’s Australia & New Zealand. Runs a beloved brand through a bold expansion — 25 new restaurants and 1,000 new jobs by 2028 — with warmth as the strategy, not the garnish.
35. Vicki Brady — CEO, Telstra. Leading Australia’s biggest telco through the AI transition with rare honesty about what changes — and what it costs.
36. Stephanie Tully — CEO, Jetstar. Low-cost carrier, high-trust leadership.
37. Shemara Wikramanayake — CEO, Macquarie Group. One of the most consequential leaders in global finance. Ours.
38. Meg O’Neill — CEO, Woodside. Leads through relentless scrutiny without flinching. You don’t have to agree with the industry to respect the spine.
39. Mick Farrell — CEO, ResMed. A global health tech giant run with Australian DNA. A billion people breathing easier is quite a KPI.
40. Nick Hawkins — CEO, IAG. Calm at the centre of every storm season.
Queensland’s own
41. Graham “Skroo” Turner — Founder & CEO, Flight Centre. Nearly five decades in, still turning up in shorts and still outworking the room.
42. Maha Sinnathamby — Founder & Chairman, Springfield City Group. Built a city. Literally. Vision measured in generations, not quarters.
43. Andrew Liveris — President, Brisbane 2032. Bringing global boardroom muscle home for the Games.
44. Bevan Slattery — Founder — Megaport, NEXTDC, Superloop and more. Keeps building the infrastructure Australia’s digital economy runs on. Then does it again.
45. John Wagner — Wagner Corporation. With his brothers, built an international airport in 19 months because someone said it couldn’t be done.
46. Paul Simshauser — CEO, Powerlink Queensland. An economist running the wires of the energy transition — literally keeping the lights on while everything changes.
47. Ros Baxter — CEO, Goodstart Early Learning. Runs Australia’s biggest early learning provider like the social enterprise it is.
48. Steve Baxter — Investor; former Queensland Chief Entrepreneur. Blunt, generous, and responsible for more Queensland startups than he’ll admit.
49. Anthony Ryan — CEO, Brisbane Economic Development Agency. From charity food vans to selling Brisbane to the world. Servant leadership, city-sized.
50. Ian Frazer AC — Immunologist. The Gardasil legacy: cervical cancer on track for elimination. From a Brisbane lab.
Women rewriting the rules
51. Sam Mostyn AC — Governor-General of Australia. Care and kindness as national leadership values. About time.
52. Robyn Denholm — Chair, Tesla. An Australian chairing one of the most scrutinised boards on the planet.
53. Danielle Wood — Chair, Productivity Commission. Makes economics human. Rarer than it should be.
54. Deanne Stewart — CEO, Aware Super. Manages the retirement savings of a nation’s teachers and nurses like it’s personal. Because it is.
55. Mirja Viinanen — CEO, IKEA Australia. Flat-pack furniture, deeply human leadership — and a masterclass in leading a global brand locally.
56. Mia Freedman — Co-founder, Mamamia. Built Australia’s biggest women’s media company from a lounge room — and gave thousands of women their first platform.
57. Kayla Itsines — Co-founder, Sweat. From Adelaide PT to global fitness empire. Consistency compounds.
58. Cyan Ta’eed — Co-founder, Envato. Bootstrapped to global scale, then built again with purpose.
59. Ming Long AM — Company director. One of our most respected boardroom voices — and one of the bravest on inclusion.
60. Diane Smith-Gander AO — Company director. Governance heavyweight. Says the thing others won’t.
Purpose and impact
61. Ronni Kahn AO — Founder, OzHarvest. Turned food waste into a national movement. Proof one determined person is enough to start.
62. Hugh van Cuylenburg — Founder, The Resilience Project. Gratitude, empathy, mindfulness — delivered to millions of kids and grown-ups who needed it.
63. Bernie Shakeshaft — Founder, BackTrack. Boys, dogs, and second chances. Some of the best leadership in the country happens in a shed in Armidale.
64. Rosie Batty AO — Family violence advocate. Turned unimaginable grief into national change. Courage has a face.
65. Taryn Brumfitt — Founder, Embrace Collective. Changed how a generation sees their own body. Former Australian of the Year, still going.
66. Craig Foster AM — Human rights advocate. Uses every platform he has for people who have none.
67. Audette Exel AO — Founder, Adara Group. Runs businesses whose entire purpose is funding development work. The model the rest of us should study.
68. Turia Pitt — Author and mindset coach. Rebuilt a life the hard way and now teaches the rest of us how. Resilience personified.
69. Layne Beachley AO — Founder, Awake Academy. Seven world titles, then a second act helping others back themselves.
70. Rachael Robertson — Antarctic expedition leader; leadership author. Led 18 strangers through a dark Antarctic winter. “No triangles” belongs in every workplace.
Minds shaping the nation
71. Michelle Simmons AO — Quantum physicist, Silicon Quantum Computing. Racing the world to build a quantum computer — from Sydney.
72. Georgina Long AO — Co-Medical Director, Melanoma Institute Australia. With Richard Scolyer, turned world-leading science into national inspiration. Her research is saving lives at scale.
73. Fiona Wood AM — Burns specialist and inventor. Spray-on skin came from relentless curiosity plus deep care. Leadership in a lab coat.
74. Fiona Stanley AC — Epidemiologist. A lifetime spent making children’s health everyone’s business.
75. Doug Hilton AO — CEO, CSIRO. Leading the nation’s science through its toughest funding conversations with optimism intact.
76. Alan Finkel AO — Former Chief Scientist. Still the clearest explainer of the energy transition we have.
77. Megan Davis — Constitutional lawyer. Whatever your politics — intellect, conviction and grace under a national spotlight.
78. Tom Calma AO — Elder statesman of Indigenous education and policy. Decades of patient, persistent nation-building.
79. Amantha Imber — Founder, Inventium. Making the science of how we actually work impossible to ignore.
80. Rachel Botsman — Trust researcher and author. An Australian teaching the world’s biggest institutions what trust actually is — and how fast it’s earned and lost.
The wisdom keepers
81. David Gonski AC — Company director and philanthropist. The mentor’s mentor. Half of corporate Australia owes him a coffee.
82. Catherine Livingstone AC — Company director. From Cochlear to CBA to the boardrooms that matter — rigour with humility.
83. Jennifer Westacott AC — Chancellor, University of Wollongong. From public housing to the nation’s top business advocate. Never forgot where she started.
84. Elizabeth Broderick AO — Founder, Champions of Change Coalition. Changed how powerful men use their power. Globally.
85. Ita Buttrose AC — Media leader. Six decades of firsts. Still teaching us what backbone looks like.
86. Kim Williams AM — Chair, ABC. Defending independent media with intellect and steel.
87. Julia Gillard AC — Chair, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. The post-politics playbook: less noise, more impact.
88. David Thodey AO — Company director; former Telstra CEO. The gold standard for humble, curious CEO leadership — now shared generously across boardrooms.
89. Ann Sherry AO — Company director. From running Carnival to chairing for impact — power used generously.
90. Wendy McCarthy AO — Trailblazer and mentor. Don’t be too polite, girls. She wasn’t. Thank goodness.
The next wave and the voices
91. Vikesh Ramsunder — CEO, Sigma Healthcare. Pulled off the Chemist Warehouse merger — one of the boldest corporate plays in years.
92. Andrew Abdo — CEO, NRL. Grew the game on every measure while keeping the main thing the main thing.
93. Kemi Nekvapil — Coach and author. Power, defined properly. Her work changes rooms.
94. Ash Barty AO — Former world No. 1. Proof you can walk away at the very top and still lead. Maybe especially then.
95. Cathy Freeman OAM — Olympian. Quiet leadership. Generational impact. One lap that still unites us.
96. Thomas Mayo — Author and advocate. Kept showing up after the hardest of public defeats. That’s leadership.
97. June Oscar AO — Community leader; former Social Justice Commissioner. Decades of fierce, practical advocacy for women and communities.
98. Nova Peris OAM — Olympian and former senator. First in so many rooms. Opened the door behind her every time.
99. Bran Black — CEO, Business Council of Australia. The bridge between boardrooms and Canberra at a moment that needs one.
100. Dylan Alcott AO — Founder, Dylan Alcott Foundation. Changed how Australia sees disability — with a grin and zero patience for pity. The full stop this list deserves.
The thread that ties all 100 together
It’s not charisma. It’s not title. It’s not even talent.
It’s courage. The courage to front up when it’s ugly. To hand over power gracefully. To build slowly when everyone wants fast. To say the unpopular thing. To come back after the knockdown.
First comes courage. Everything else follows.
(And before you ask — no, I’m not on the list. My job is to shine the light, not stand in it.)
Now — over to you. Who did I miss?
Drop one name in the comments and tell me why they lead. I’ll be reading every single one. 👇
