Building High-Performing Leadership at Mildura Airport
Client: Mildura Airport
Mildura Airport is a key regional transport hub in north-west Victoria, supporting both passenger travel and broader economic activity across the region. With a strong focus on safety, service, and community connection, the organisation plays a critical role in enabling regional connectivity while continuing to evolve its operations and strategic direction.
As part of its forward planning, Mildura Airport identified leadership as a critical enabler of its next phase, with a clear focus on strengthening alignment, capability, and consistency across the executive team.
Challenge:
As Mildura Airport prepared for its next phase of strategic planning, there was an opportunity to further strengthen how the executive team worked together to lead the organisation.
While strong foundations were already in place, the executive team identified a number of focus areas to further strengthen their next stage of growth:
- Strengthening alignment on leadership behaviours and expectations
- Translating strategic intent into practical, day-to-day leadership practice
- Continuing to strengthen consistency in how leadership is experienced across the organisation
Importantly, the focus was on building on existing strengths, creating an even more aligned, confident, and cohesive leadership approach.
Approach:
Change Playbook partnered with Mildura Airport to design and facilitate a focused executive leadership session as part of their strategy day.
The session was designed as a practical and engaging leadership conversation, grounded in Mildura Airport’s context and priorities. It created space for the executive team to step back from day-to-day operations and align on how they lead, both individually and collectively.
The workshop blended reflection, discussion, and structured activities to:
- Explore individual and collective leadership strengths
- Examine how leadership is experienced across the organisation
- Identify patterns in communication, decision-making, and leadership behaviours
- Challenge assumptions and build shared understanding
- Translate insights into clear leadership expectations and priorities
Leaders worked through facilitated conversations that explored how leadership shows up in practice, particularly under pressure, and where greater consistency and discipline would further strengthen impact.
The session deliberately moved beyond reflection into action, with the executive team aligning on a small number of leadership priorities and defining what these would look like in practice over the next 12 months.
Outcome:
The session enabled further alignment across the executive team and established a clear, shared foundation for leadership moving forward.
Key outcomes included:
- A shared view of high-performing leadership, aligned to Mildura Airport’s strategic direction
- Clear leadership priorities to guide how the executive team works together and leads the organisation into the next phase
- A common leadership language to support clarity, accountability, and collaboration
- Practical, actionable next steps to embed leadership behaviours across the organisation
Importantly, the work positioned the executive team to move into their broader strategy discussions with clarity, confidence, and a unified approach to leadership.
It also established a strong foundation for embedding consistent leadership practices over time, supporting ongoing organisational performance, employee experience, and growth.