Stop Optimising Leaders. Start Creating Them.

Healthcare leadership
Written By Samantha Bowen

In just three months, 10,000 aged care staff walked out of the system built to support them. AIHW Quality Indicator data makes one thing clear: the people holding reform together are burning out.

You read that correctly. Ten thousand people. In three months.

You're not just managing care. You're managing exits, stress, rosters, compliance, and the fallout from a system under pressure. You're holding teams together while watching people walk out the door. You're expected to lead reform while firefighting staffing gaps.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, someone handed you a leadership development module and called it support.

What if the problem isn't that we don't train leaders? What if the problem is that we're trying to optimise them inside chaos instead of creating them through real support?

We're Optimising Leaders. It's Not Working.

Post-Royal Commission, leadership expectations in aged care exploded overnight. Governance, culture, consumer voice, clinical safety. The bar didn't just move. It was rebuilt entirely.

Providers responded with what they know: compliance-oriented training. Modules, policies, attestations, tick-boxes. If there's a new expectation, there's a new course to complete.

Even the sector itself warns that we must move "beyond tick-box training" to build real capability. But the default hasn't changed. When pressure rises, we add another module.

Here's why it fails.

  • Evidence shows that transfer from classroom to practice is the failure point. Leadership programs that ignore workplace context and relationships consistently underperform on return on investment. You can complete every module in the system and still have no idea how to handle a stressed team member, a rostering crisis, or a family complaint at 4pm on a Friday.

  • The Aged Care Leadership Capability Framework describes what leaders need: capabilities across self, others, purpose, results, context. But validation work notes the framework is "broad and general, lacking specificity to the complex residential aged care environment."

  • Translation: there's a gap. A big one. Between what's taught and what leaders actually face day to day.

The result?

In the Aged Care Workforce Survey 2022, one in ten people who left their last aged care job said it was too stressful. Supervisors and team leaders sit in the squeeze between staffing gaps, compliance pressure, resident needs, and no one asking, “How are you holding up?”

High workloads, work pressures, inadequate staffing, skill mix issues, and pay all erode job satisfaction and contribute to turnover. And the people managing that erosion? They're burning out too.

You cannot optimise a leader inside that churn. You create one. With support, modelling, and relationships that shape how they think, feel, and act.

The Royal Commission Didn't Ask for More Modules

The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety didn’t ask us to do more training. It asked us to lead differently.

To build cultures where governance, clinical safety, and dignity are lived, not laminated. To elevate leadership, culture, and governance as fundamental to reform. To make consumer engagement, clinical governance, and governing body accountability non-negotiable.

The Inspector-General of Aged Care is tracking progress on 148 recommendations. The pressure on boards and executives cascades to you. The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards continue shifting accountability to outcomes and leadership practice, not just policy documents.

And here's the reality of what you're actually leading through.

If you're in residential care, you're managing 24/7 rosters, minimum staffing requirements, and intense compliance oversight. Many homes are still struggling to meet legal care minutes. The day-to-day pressure on middle managers is relentless.

If you're in home care, you're juggling distributed teams, rostering across geographies, variable hours, and reform uncertainty. With the Support at Home program now delayed to 2025, many coordinators are leading teams through moving goalposts.

If you're in corporate or support roles (HR, learning and development, marketing, admin), you're leading people through constant change with no roadmap. The reform affects everyone, not just clinical teams.

The truth is this: you cannot "optimise" a leader inside that environment.

You create one. With support, modelling, and relationships that shape identity, not just competence.

Mentoring Isn't "Nice to Have." It's How Leaders Are Made.

Let's talk evidence.

Systematic reviews show that mentoring reduces stress and improves retention across healthcare. Programs where trained mentors support nurses using structured approaches show burnout reduction and improved mental health markers (Alatawi et al., 2023, BMC Nursing).

Longitudinal, relational mentoring shapes professional identity formation. That's how emerging leaders learn to "think, feel, and act" as professionals. Through role modelling, guided immersion, and aligned expectations.

That's identity-level change. Not module-level.

Here's why mentoring works when training often doesn't.

  • Leadership programs that aren't embedded in practice (no mentoring, no manager sponsorship, no transfer supports) consistently underperform on return on investment.

  • Cross-industry health leadership literature shows that ROI depends on design: integration with work, coaching or mentoring, and feedback loops deliver measurable organisational gains.

  • Content-only training underdelivers.

Mentoring gives you what compliance training can't: someone who's been there, who gets it, and who will walk with you.

The stakes are real.

Research consistently links nursing leadership with care quality: facilities with higher leadership capability report better consumer experience and lower turnover. Evidence shows that in nursing homes, person-centred practice is sustained when leaders model values, empower staff, and create consistent systems.

Turnover commonly costs 30 to 150 per cent of salary. For specialised clinical roles, it can reach around 200 per cent. That's a heavy drag on providers already under financial pressure.

Without strong local leadership, you get churn (thousands exiting quarterly), rising stress, fragile clinical governance, and widening gaps between policy intent and daily practice. Sector monitoring shows persistent non-compliance in parts of the market. Weak leadership and culture show up in standards failures and reportable incidents, with human and financial costs.

Remember the principle from the care worker induction pilot?

"The way we start matters. Training isn't just information. It's orientation to values."

The same is true for leadership development.

The first leadership experiences shape how people lead, just like first care experiences shape how people care.

What You Can Do Right Now

You don't need to wait for a formal program to start creating leaders differently. Here are practical steps you can take this week.

If you're an emerging leader or supervisor:

  • Start a 5-minute weekly reflection practice. At the end of each week, write down one moment you felt like a leader and one moment you didn't. Over time, patterns emerge that no module will teach you.

  • Build a peer support trio. Find two other supervisors (they don't need to be in your organisation) and commit to a 20-minute check-in every fortnight. No agenda. Just "How are you actually going?" It's informal mentoring without the paperwork.

  • Ask for feedback in the moment. After a difficult conversation or decision, ask someone you trust: "What did you notice? What would you have done?" Real-time feedback builds capability faster than annual reviews.

If you're leading an organisation:

  • Create manager sponsorship for development. When someone completes training, their manager should ask one question within 48 hours: "What's one thing you'll try this week?" Transfer happens in that conversation, not the course.

  • Make mentoring visible. If you have experienced leaders informally supporting others, name it. Acknowledge it. Create space for it. A mentoring culture starts when you notice and value the relationships already happening.

  • Measure what matters. Track whether supervisors feel supported, not just whether they completed modules. A quarterly pulse question ("Do you have someone you can turn to for leadership advice?") tells you more than a training completion rate.

If you're an experienced leader wanting to mentor:

  • Start with one question: "What's the hardest part of your role right now?" Then listen for twice as long as you talk. Mentoring isn't about having all the answers. It's about helping someone think through their own.

  • Share your mistakes, not just your wins. When a mentee faces a challenge, tell them about a time you got it wrong. It normalises struggle and builds psychological safety.

  • Check in on identity, not just tasks. Ask: "How are you feeling about being a leader?" or "What kind of leader do you want to be?" Those questions shape how someone sees themselves, not just what they do.

(Adapted from evidence-based leadership and mentoring research, including Hyphae’s Mentoring Program Research, the Aged Care Workforce Capability Framework, and ARIIA’s Leadership and Culture Implementation Resources.)

What If We Started Differently?

What if, instead of handing new supervisors a module, we gave them a mentor?

Not a course. Not a checklist. A relationship.

The 2026 public mentoring program is designed for anyone supervising, leading, or managing people in aged care. Clinical, admin, HR, learning and development, marketing, operations. Because leadership isolation and stress aren't clinical problems. They're system-wide.

Creating leaders also means reflecting the communities we serve, across cultures, languages, and lived experience.

Here's what makes it different.

  • Identity over modules.
    Longitudinal pairs and values work create leadership identity formation, not just skill acquisition. You're not learning to "do leadership." You're becoming a leader.

  • Embedded transfer.
    Mentoring is paired with on-the-job challenges, manager check-ins, and feedback loops. That's what ROI frameworks flag as essential. It's not separate from your work. It's integrated into it.

  • Quality-aligned.
    Conversation guides are mapped to the Strengthened Standards: governance, risk, outcomes. This moves you beyond tick-box compliance into real leadership practice.

  • Context-specific.
    Content is tailored for busy leaders. It’s manageable and actionable. Because the environment you lead in shapes what you need.

The 2026 Cohort: Three Ways In

For organisations:
Build leadership capacity and expand support networks for your supervisors and managers, without adding another compliance burden. Invest in the people holding your teams together.

For mentees:
Access a high-impact program that connects you with leaders who will support you, challenge you, and walk with you. You don't have to figure this out alone.

For mentors:
Reconnect with a new network, support emerging leaders, and invest in your own growth and development. Leadership isn't something you finish. It's something you keep building.

We're not optimising leaders. We're creating them. One relationship at a time.

Leadership doesn’t wait for permission.

Choose your next step:

🔹 Learn More 🔹 Register Interest 🔹 Join as a Mentor

Sources and Further Reading

Samantha Bowen
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Mentoring Is Leadership Infrastructure, Not a Perk