A premiership-winning footballer turned CEO and a global talent leader reveal why performance is about environment, not just talent
When Jason King ran out for Manly Warringah Sea Eagles as a front-rower, winning was a weekend-by-weekend obsession. Today, as CEO of the club he once captained, his view of performance has stretched considerably further – and HR leaders, he argues, are asking exactly the right questions.
Manly has had a long and storied history. Forming in 1946, the club has won eight premierships and been home to some of the most recognisable faces in Rugby League.
2026 has been a tumultuous year for Manly. After finishing middle of the ladder in 2025, coach Anthony Seibold was looking to start strong in 2026 with three home games to kick the season off.
However, after a tough start to the year saw the team lose all three home games, Manly decided to part ways with Seibold.
The club brought in the highly respected New Zealand international Kieran Foran as interim head coach, fresh off his retirement from the NRL at the end of the 2025 season.
Foran entered the role with a bang, winning six of seven games and solidifying himself as a true contender.
Speaking to HRD at Employment Hero's Hero Exchange Leaders Luncheon in Sydney, Manly CEO Jason King noted that the early-season coaching change under Foran has brought a rapid cultural shift.
He believes that, in part, is thanks to belief. King recognises belief a critical driver of performance.
"It's been just a completely different environment. How do you instil that belief entirely across your organisation and get that coalition of people really seeing – really believing – in where they're going and where that company's going? Because they're going to be the ones that are crucially important to pulling it all together and making it happen,” King explained.
King and Kate Jolly, Employment Hero’s global head of talent, shared the stage at the event, where a room of senior HR and business leaders came together to unpack what separates organisations that scale well from those that stall.
Their conclusion: strategy and individual talent matter far less than most people think. The operating environment matters far more.
From weekend wins to long-term strategy
King's transition from player to CEO of a top-flight rugby league club has given him a rare vantage point on what leadership actually demands at different levels of an organisation.
"When I was playing it was very much a short-term focus – almost very operational. The focus is primarily on winning on the weekend. Whereas now, sitting in the role of CEO, there's far more you think about. There's a range of different factors, priorities and perspectives coming at you,” he said.
That shift – from the immediate to the strategic, from the individual to the institutional – is one that many HR leaders navigating organisational scale will recognise.
King, who was appointed CEO of the Sea Eagles in late 2025 after more than a decade in senior roles at the NRL, made 239 appearances across 14 seasons for the club and won the 2008 premiership. He co-captained the side for several years, winning the Dally M Captain of the Year award in 2012.
Yet for all the complexity that comes with leading a professional sporting club, King insists the fundamentals have not changed – and they translate directly into the work of building high-performing organisations in any sector.
"Whether it was in professional sport in that really intimate team environment or in my role now in more the sports business capacity, what undermines trust, in my perspective, is self-interest,” said King.
Building credibility through actions, remaining open to other perspectives, and maintaining trust as a non-negotiable – King frames these not as soft skills, but as the structural load-bearing elements of any high-performing team.
Don't just hire a star – build the system
Jolly, who has grown Employment Hero's talent function from two recruiters in one region to a team spanning six countries and hiring hundreds of people annually, takes a similarly unsentimental view of talent acquisition.
"A common mistake is that we often hire one sensational person thinking that, for example, if we get a David Beckham on the football team, all of a sudden we're going to dominate and it's going to be fantastic. But actually, we've not put a lot of thought into how we're enabling that person and setting them up for success,” Jolly said.
It is a point that resonates sharply in the current climate. As organisations contend with tightening labour markets and the creeping complexity of AI adoption, the temptation to solve performance problems by recruiting a single high-profile individual is strong – and, according to Jolly, largely misguided.
She drew a direct line from elite sport to the boardroom: athletes are routinely given physio support, rest periods and access to sports psychologists as a matter of course. The same logic, she argues, is rarely applied to knowledge workers, despite the expectation that they perform at their peak day after day.
"We're often happy to accept that athletes can only perform at their best if they've got physio, rest periods, maybe a psychiatrist – they've got all this stuff working in their favour,” she said.
“But often with businesses, we forget that and we just think, why aren't they performing? We haven't really set up the right environment or the right processes to enable that person to perform."
For Jolly, belief is particularly front of mind as HR teams grapple with AI-driven change. She sees the parallels between sport and business as especially useful for leaders trying to maintain high performance through uncertainty.
"Particularly front of mind for a lot of organisations at the moment is navigating a lot of change with things like AI," she added. "Thinking about how can we continue to have a high-performing business in what is a very fast-changing environment."
Leadership is still about people
Emotional intelligence, empathy and trust – the three pillars King kept returning to – are not new concepts to HR professionals. But hearing them articulated by a man who spent over a decade as a professional athlete and enforcer on the field and now leads a nationally recognised sporting club off it, lends them a different kind of authority.
"The subject matter can be a little bit different, but it is about the people," King said. "All those things are critically important around emotional intelligence, having empathy for each other – whether it's teammates or colleagues."
For HR leaders building performance cultures in environments defined by complexity, data abundance and rapid change, the message from both King and Jolly is consistent: the fundamentals of human performance do not change with the industry. What changes is how deliberately you build the conditions for them to flourish.
