Building better bosses: Inside the new era of data‑led, human‑centred leadership development

In conversations with HRD, Rentokil's HR director Pacific, Robyn Thomas, and Ord Minnett chief people officer, Aleta Keating, shared how they are building leadership capability across dispersed, complex and highly regulated environments. Their stories reveal a clear shift away from one‑size‑fits‑all programs toward deeply contextual, data‑informed and relationship‑driven approaches.

Rentokil is one of those companies you start noticing only once you know it. With around 60,000 employees globally and just over 3,000 across Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, it operates in three main areas: pest control, hygiene, and indoor plants. It is a classic services organisation where the proposition lives and dies with frontline people.

Thomas oversees the entire people function across the Pacific. Her remit stretches from HR business partners and generalists in all the major cities, through recruitment, payroll and HRIS, to learning and development. That L&D background, she said, has shaped everything about how she thinks of leadership.

“In a services industry, your people are everything,” she explained. “You’re not selling a product; you’re selling the way your people show up. If they’re not happy and they’re not treating customers well, you really don’t have a business.”

For Rentokil, leadership development begins at a global level but only comes to life when it is translated locally. The company has a central global talent team that focuses on the top layers of leadership and succession.

Crucially, however, there is no monolithic, globally mandated leadership program. Instead, the company adopts what Thomas describes as a “pick and mix” model. Global provides the core modules and resources, then each region selects what it needs and adapts it to local realities. Senior leaders are typically comfortable working in English, so much of the cross‑border leadership work at that level can be standardised. But once you get closer to the frontline, she insists, context becomes everything.

“What a frontline leadership program looks like in Australia might need to look completely different in India,” she said. “You’re dealing with different languages, different cultural norms, different ways of working. If you try to roll out exactly the same thing everywhere, it just won’t land.”

In the Pacific, Thomas’ team has built a structured leadership journey that runs from emerging leaders right through to senior leaders. Technicians with leadership potential are brought into an emerging leaders program. Local service managers participate in frontline leadership development. Mid‑level leaders have a dedicated pathway. Senior leaders step into more strategic development activities, often in partnership with global. Layered around that are targeted talent programs for specific high‑potential cohorts.

On paper, it sounds like the kind of architecture many HR leaders are familiar with. The difference, Thomas argues, lies in the way it is delivered.

Why face‑to‑face still matters

Thomas began her Rentokil journey as global leadership development manager, a role that once saw her flying around the world running leadership programs in person. That experience has left her with a strong conviction: technology is a powerful enabler, but it cannot wholly replace local, in‑room work.

“There’s a lot of great tech out there now,” she said. “But there’s just something about having people physically together, talking to each other, role‑playing hard conversations, working through real scenarios. You lose too much of that if everything is centralised and online.”

She is equally clear that leadership development has to be anchored in the lived reality of the workforce. In a predominantly blue‑collar environment, she has no time for glossy but abstract frameworks designed far from the field.

“Be a decent human, treat people well, and you’re most of the way there. That language really resonates with our people because it feels real, not corporate.”

For global HR leaders, her advice is to view head office not as the author of a single, universal program, but as the provider of infrastructure. Central teams should focus on platforms, systems and a library of high‑quality, modular content. Regional teams should have the autonomy – and the expectation – to adapt, localise examples, and deliver significant portions of leadership development face to face.

Turning engagement data into targeted leadership action

Thomas and her team have been working with a global engagement survey that includes a dedicated line manager index. This is a cluster of questions focused entirely on the quality of an employee’s direct leadership experience: the extent to which their manager coaches, provides feedback, supports development and creates a positive environment.

Alongside that, the survey asks a simple retention‑related question about whether employees intend to stay with the company for at least the next 12 months. When the team analysed the data, the relationship between these two measures was stark. Where employees rated their line manager poorly, they were significantly more likely to express an intention to leave.

“There’s a really strong correlation between how people feel about their leader and whether they see themselves staying,” Thomas said. “It’s not exactly a surprise, but having the data makes it very hard to ignore.”

Rather than defaulting to a generic “fix your managers” program, the Pacific business is now running a more nuanced, targeted process. Any line manager whose index falls below a defined threshold sits down with two people: their own manager and an HR representative. Together, they walk through the results, the team context, and the specific strengths and gaps that are emerging. Out of that conversation comes a tailored development plan, supported by regular check‑ins and resources.

“Some of these leaders have already been on programs,” Thomas said. “The answer isn’t always another course. Sometimes it’s coaching. Sometimes it’s practical support. Sometimes it’s about feedback they’ve never quite heard this clearly before. The point is to treat it individually, not as a mass problem.”

Line managers sit at the junction of engagement, performance and retention. Leadership development strategy is far more compelling when it can be tied directly to those outcomes, and when interventions at manager level feel specific rather than one‑size‑fits‑all.

Growing leaders in a regulated, high‑stakes industry

Where Rentokil is a blue‑collar, safety and hygiene‑focused services business, Ord Minnett operates in the rarefied world of private wealth and financial advice. Yet the leadership challenges Keating describes echo many of Thomas’s themes.

Ord Minnett is 100% Australian‑owned and has been a presence in the market for decades. Its core business is private wealth advice, supported by research, corporate finance and institutional equities. With around 500 employees across Australia and a small Hong Kong office, its largest cohort by far is financial advisers.

Keating’s role encompasses everything people and culture related: recruitment, development, engagement and the broader cultural fabric of the firm. She has witnessed first‑hand the impact of Australia’s recent regulatory crackdown on financial advice, including the ASIC inquiry and the establishment of rigorous FASEA education and exam requirements.

Where once the path to becoming an adviser was relatively unstructured, it is now closer to the professional journey of a lawyer or accountant. That has dramatically altered both the supply of advisers and the way firms like Ord Minnett think about their development.

“The number of advisers across Australia has dropped dramatically,” Keating said. “We’ve gone from tens of thousands down to somewhere in the low teens of thousands. That creates a real responsibility for organisations like ours to grow the next generation properly.”

Ord Minnett’s answer has been to treat adviser development as a long‑term leadership pipeline rather than a narrow technical accreditation process. The firm has a formal Professional Year program aligned with ASIC requirements, where new entrants work under the supervision of established, highly experienced advisers. Once they pass their exam and appear on the adviser register, they enter a three‑year Associate Adviser program.

Over those three years, the focus moves well beyond compliance. Associate advisers receive intensive support in client relationship building, communication and presentation skills, commercial judgement and the firm’s own “Ord’s way” of doing business. At the heart of it all sits mentoring from seasoned advisers who have spent years guiding clients through market cycles and life events.

“You don’t just get registered and head out on your own,” Keating said. “We spend years really building them up, giving them the leadership skills and client experience they need to thrive.”

The structure itself is not new; the organisation has operated some form of this model for around a decade. What has shifted in the past year and a half is the level of intentionality and visibility. The programs have been refined, the mentoring expectations clarified, and the stories of successful associates brought to life through internal content and videos.

For HR leaders navigating other regulated industries, Keating’s approach offers a clear lesson: when accreditation pathways become more demanding, they can feel like a burden. But they also create a natural spine around which to build rich, leadership‑oriented development journeys that benefit both the profession and the organisation.

Mentoring as a two‑way, multi‑generational engine

Asked where she thinks organisations still underutilise their leadership capital, Keating does not hesitate: mentoring.

She pointed out that today’s workforce is unusually multi‑generational. Many organisations now employ everyone from early‑career Gen Z employees to seasoned professionals nearing retirement, with Gen X and Millennials occupying much of the leadership middle. At the same time, younger employees are arriving with more practical knowledge than ever before, including financial literacy and even basic leadership concepts taught in school.

“You’ve got kids learning about tax and budgeting before they’ve worked a day in their lives,” Keating said. “They come in with really transferable skills. Then you put them alongside people with decades of lived client experience. The opportunity in that mix is enormous.”

In her view, mentoring done well is never a one‑directional transfer of wisdom. Senior mentors offer judgement, networks and stories that cannot be found in textbooks. Mentees bring fresh thinking, insight into new communities and markets, and an ability to challenge “the way we’ve always done it.”

That dynamic, she argued, is as relevant in private wealth as in any other sector. Advisers have to build their own style and client base within the framework of the firm’s values. Mentoring allows them to absorb core principles while still shaping an approach that fits their personality and the communities they serve.

Effective mentoring, however, does not happen by accident. Keating emphasised the importance of commitment, clarity and chemistry. Mentors need to be genuinely willing to show up over time, not simply agree in principle and then vanish after two conversations. Both parties need a degree of structure – a sense of what they want to achieve, how often they will meet, and how long the formal relationship will last. And whoever is sponsoring the program, often HR, needs to invest time in matching and in checking that the relationships are healthy and productive.

“You can’t just create a mentoring program, pair people up and walk away,” she said. “You have to support it, coach the mentors, make sure everyone’s getting something out of it. Otherwise it becomes a tick‑box exercise.”

Interestingly, Keating also sees an important role for individual initiative. Employees, she believes, should not wait passively for HR to create a formal scheme.

“If you see someone whose career you admire, reach out,” she said. “Ask if they’ve got five minutes for a chat. You can create your own mentoring program for yourself. The people who take that kind of initiative are always the ones who impress me.”

A more human future for leadership development

Taken together, Thomas and Keating’s perspectives point to an emerging consensus among progressive HR leaders.

Leadership development is no longer about pushing cohorts through a single flagship program designed at head office. It is about building flexible, modular infrastructure that regions and business units can adapt. It is about grounding leadership expectations in plain‑spoken behavioural standards that resonate with the workforce, whether that is the “Ord’s way” in private wealth or a simple injunction not to be a jerk in pest control and hygiene.

It is also about using data intelligently. When engagement surveys show that how employees feel about their manager is tightly bound up with whether they plan to stay, leadership development ceases to be a nice‑to‑have and becomes a core retention strategy. Targeted, person‑specific support for managers who are struggling becomes as essential as any other business intervention.

Most of all, though, it is about relationships. In both organisations, mentoring sits at the heart of how future leaders are shaped. Experienced professionals are encouraged and supported to pass on what they know. Younger employees are invited to bring their own perspectives to the table. HR’s role is to scaffold, match, coach and measure, not to control every interaction.

For HR leaders wrestling with global complexity, regulatory pressure and shifting workforce expectations, there is comfort in that simplicity. The tools, platforms and frameworks will keep evolving. Yet the deepest impact still appears to come from familiar, human fundamentals: real conversations, tailored support, practical learning in context – and leaders at every level who remember, above all else, to be good people first.