Developing the leaders of tomorrow 

By now you’ve probably realised (if you didn’t already know!) that Lisa is a firm believer in and advocate for collaboration, within the child and family welfare sector and beyond.  “My entire working life, I have never been afraid to share what I know. The true mark of a leader is ensuring others are set up for success,” Lisa states. 

Driven by a constant desire to expand her knowledge and challenge herself, Lisa was awarded a Doctorate in Business Leadership in 2019 for her thesis on an Evidence-Based Ethical Leadership Model for the Community Services Sector. 

“This is an achievement I am incredibly proud of and one I always hoped would benefit everyone working to better support vulnerable children, young people, and their families,” says Lisa. 

As part of her Doctorate, Lisa developed the Leadership PASS program, aimed at building stronger and more effective leaders across all sectors. “As a leader, I believe it is our responsibility to ensure the professional growth of those around us by investing in staff development. When they succeed, the whole organisation succeeds.” 

Introducing the Leadership PASS program to the OzChild Leadership Team in 2019 was just the beginning of Lisa’s vision to share her knowledge and build stronger leaders, significantly advancing business leadership. 

Over the past four years, Lisa evolved this program and expanded learning to include what is now known as the Evidence-Based Decision-Making Course for Human Services Leaders.  

“As part of our ongoing learning at OzChild we became very much an evidence-based organisation, our decisions and our practice became more evidence-based as our skills developed.” 

Being able to offer this course to all OzChild people and others in the sector, Lisa hopes to enhance participants’ skills in critical thinking, reasoning, identifying, and gathering the best available evidence, and critically appraising and applying it in practice. This ensures decisions are based on solid evidence rather than outdated insights, short-term fads, or natural biases.

“I believe everyone who comes to work wants to do a good job. As leaders, it is our duty to ensure everyone can thrive in their roles. Evidence-based decision-making is a valuable tool to help achieve this. What truly excites me is seeing OzChild staff incorporate evidence into their practice and develop innovative solutions to complex problems. Evidence-based thinking is now ingrained in how we talk and work across the organisation, and that is a wonderful thing.”