Katie spent her 20s focusing on athletic high performance as a triathlete. She was relatively late to pursuing sporting excellence, not starting in the sport until my early 20s. This was the late 90s early 2000s and triathlon was still a relatively new sport. This meant there wasn’t a tried and true training book, so the sport was very open to experimentation and discovery. Lots of innovations in cycling came from triathlon and a willingness to try different things.
In the context of sport, however, you don’t want to be reckless with your experimentation, as it’s in the pursuit of peak performance. So you want there to be solid reasoning and evidence behind different methods and training approaches. This unique combination fuelled her love for trying new things, but also helped her to realise and appreciate the importance of evidence and data. This approach also fed through the sport, with triathlon being one of the first sports to truly adopt heart rates based training, track watts, etc.
As Katie approached the end of her career as an athlete, she started coaching. And realised she was much more fulfilled and happier supporting others to the be their best, than pursuing her own personal best. In fact, you could say that she is at her best when she is helping others.
So, thinking about long term career, she decided to pursue learning and development and became increasingly focused on leadership development, due the exponential impact that leaders have on the lives of others – leadership and stress. She did a lot of very fulfilling and wonderful work, working with senior leaders in some of Australias’ largest organisations, but became increasingly frustrated with the lack of organisational transformation that we could deliver working with leaders as individuals.
The reality is that leaders work in teams, work is done in teams, and teams is the unit of capability and change. This stimulated a curiosity and interest in what makes a great team, and how can we build great teams that make organisations great places to work.
Katie and her partner in life and business, Danny, along with her father, Michael, have worked to turn this passion, into a data driven business that helps to turn teams into Top Teams and in turn, create high performing businesses.
