Crisis exposes the gap in Australia’s leadership training

If you are in the C-suite of a major national company, you have to be ready for crisis.

Not interested in crisis. Not vaguely adjacent to crisis. Ready.

That means ready to speak, ready to reassure, ready to explain what is known, ready to admit what is not known, and ready to carry public trust when the organisation’s systems have just fallen over like a deckchair in a southerly.

Michael Ackland, Telstra’s chief financial officer, found himself in precisely that position after the company’s national outage disrupted phone and data services, affected Triple Zero calls, interfered with regional train services and left businesses scrambling. Chief executive Vicki Brady was overseas on leave, which made the situation trickier. But it did not make the obligation disappear.

This is the point too many organisations seem to miss. Crisis communication is not a decorative extra. It is not something to be outsourced to the media team while the executive hides behind a fern. It is core leadership work.

If the CFO of one of Australia’s most important infrastructure companies is called to stand in front of the nation, the public should see control, clarity and command. Not polish for its own sake. Not theatre. But steadiness. Because when people cannot make emergency calls, cannot run their business, cannot get home by train, or cannot pay for essential services, the person at the microphone becomes the company.

We have seen this movie before, and it was not improved by the sequel.

The Optus outage still sits in the national memory as a case study in what happens when critical infrastructure fails and leadership communication fails with it. I still raise a giggle — admittedly, a dark one — at the image of senior executives unaware of the scale of an outage because, apparently, their own phones were caught in the same net. One does wonder who, in the planning meeting, looked at the emergency contact tree and said, “Yes, excellent. Let us rely entirely on the thing that may collapse.”

But behind the comedy is a serious question: are we doing our best to lead Australia?

The answer, increasingly, appears to be no.

We have a leadership development problem hiding in plain sight. We promote technical experts into senior roles, pay them handsomely, put them in charge of systems that millions of people depend on, and then seem mildly surprised when they struggle under the bright lights.

Let me break it gently. You are not taken over by aliens when the cameras go on. Pressure reveals preparation. If the voice collapses, the body squirms, the eyes dart, the breath disappears and the answer wanders around the paddock looking for a gate, that is not simply “media nerves”. It is a performance failure. And at senior level, performance is part of the job.

The word “performance” makes some executives nervous. They confuse it with fakery. It is nothing of the sort. In leadership, performance means the disciplined ability to bring yourself to the moment so others can trust you. It means holding your body still enough to signal control. It means breathing through the sentence so the message lands. It means answering the question asked, not the question you wish had been asked. It means understanding that, in crisis, every hesitation invites suspicion.

Ackland’s interview had the right broad intention, but too little command. There was not enough verbal discipline. The explanation of Brady’s travel movements needed to be short, factual and final. Instead, it created drag. The more an answer wriggles, the more the audience wonders what is underneath it.

That does not mean anything was hidden. It means the communication created the wrong perception. In a crisis, perception is not a side issue. It is the weather system.

Then came the language problem.

In a crisis, people do not want corporate mist. They want three things. First, a clear apology. Not a “regret any inconvenience” apology. A real one. The word “sorry” still matters in Australia. Ask Kevin Rudd.

Second, they want a plain account of what happened, including what is known and what is still being investigated. Third, they want empathy for the human consequence. Not abstract “customers impacted”. Actual people. The parent stuck in Melbourne with small children and no easy way home. The café owner watching EFTPOS fail. The person trying to call Triple Zero.

Finally, they need future pacing: what will be done now, what will change, who is accountable and how the organisation will prevent it happening again.

Instead, too often we hear the old evasive vocabulary of institutional discomfort. Systems are “complex”. Events are “unfortunate”. Disruption is “regrettable”. None of this is wrong, exactly. It is simply inadequate.

“Unfortunate” is a dropped sandwich. It is not the right word for failed emergency calls.

This is where the broader failure becomes obvious. We have hollowed out serious interpersonal leadership development and replaced it with short webinars, passive digital modules and well-meaning little online boxes to tick between meetings. They may transfer information. They do not build human performance.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that participation in work-related training fell from 23 per cent in 2020-21 to 19 per cent in 2024-25. CEDA has also warned that participation in work-related training has declined by 14 per cent since 2007. Meanwhile, a current Senate inquiry into Australian university graduates has heard concerns about graduates lacking practical capability, communication and professional judgement.

That is worrying enough at graduate level. At leadership level, the consequences are far more serious.

Recently, I was asked about helping a team of leaders improve their communication under pressure. I suggested a substantial three-day live program. They wondered whether one virtual hour might do the job.

Of course. And perhaps one swimming lesson will prepare us for the English Channel.

We have confused exposure with development. Watching a module is not the same as changing behaviour. Reading about crisis communication is not the same as standing in front of a hostile room and learning how to stay balanced, breathe, think and speak. Human communication is not a download. It is a trained capability.

This matters because senior leaders are no longer judged only on strategy, profit and technical competence. They are judged on whether the public trusts them when the system fails. And the system will fail. Every company running critical infrastructure should assume that one day the lights will go out, the network will stall, the platform will crash, the data will leak or the phones will stop ringing.

On that day, leadership is not the glossy paragraph in the annual report. It is the person who walks to the microphone.

Telstra may now face significant regulatory scrutiny and potential financial penalties. But the deeper issue is not simply a telco outage. It is another warning that Australia has allowed a leadership gap to grow between responsibility and readiness.

We need leaders who can guide the national conversation when trust is fragile. Leaders who can tell the truth cleanly. Leaders who can apologise without sounding as though the legal department is pressing a foot on their throat. Leaders who understand that body, voice, breath and words are not “soft skills”. They are the public interface of accountability.

If we are going to pay senior executives millions of dollars to carry responsibility, we should also require them to carry the communication burden that comes with it.

Because in a crisis, the nation is not looking for perfection.

It is looking for someone steady enough to believe.

Let me hear your thoughts. 

Love,
Dr Louise Mahler