Senior Principal
Leadership
How Enterprise Leaders Harness Courage and Catalyse Change
Indigenous community leader Shane Phillips is on an inspiring mission to transform his community from the inside out with his enterprise leadership mindset.
April 11, 2025
Enterprise leaders aren’t defined by their titles—they’re defined by their mindset and impact. You’ll find them in ASX-200 boardrooms, small businesses, social enterprises, and local communities. What unites these leaders is their ability to perform and transform at the same time: connecting across boundaries, uniting people around purpose, and adapting to constant change.
But while leadership roles are common, true enterprise leaders are rare. According to Korn Ferry research, fewer than 14% of executives consistently demonstrate the capabilities required to lead at this level.
The good news? These leaders can be developed.
This is the kind of experience Korn Ferry brings into our immersive leadership development work—giving future leaders a chance to step outside traditional business settings and experience what enterprise leadership looks like in action.
One of the most essential mindsets is courage: the ability to identify and address challenges—even when they’re uncomfortable, complex, or beyond one’s immediate control.
That’s exactly what Indigenous community leader Shane Phillips demonstrates. As CEO of the Tribal Warrior Association, Shane is driving lasting transformation in Redfern, Sydney—working across the community, police, and government to rebuild trust and change lives.
Through our immersion work with Shane, future leaders experience firsthand how courage, clarity, and enterprise thinking can catalyse a profound human impact.
Shane recently shared his leadership journey with Korn Ferry’s Susie Mogg and Adam Davids from First Nations Equity Partners.
Developing Leadership Skills from Within
Everything changed for Shane Phillips in 1984 when his daughter was born, and he reflected, “I don’t want to raise kids in this place”.
‘This place’ was Redfern, in Sydney’s inner south. In Phillips’ youth it was a neighbourhood associated with drugs, crime, and violence. During the 2004 Redfern riots, he saw a community that was brittle, disconnected, insular, and reactive. One that was consistently told what was wrong with it.
“I saw more death [in my youth] than I was meant to see in a lifetime,” said Phillips.
By the early 2000s, systemic oppression, economic marginalisation, and fractured relationships between Indigenous residents and the police had left the community grappling with crime and mistrust.
Phillips is a proud descendant of the Bundjalung, Wonnarua, and Guringai peoples, and CEO of the not-for-profit Tribal Warrior Association. In 2009, he set up Clean Slate Without Prejudice (CSWP), a groundbreaking boxing program designed to reduce youth crime and rebuild trust between Indigenous communities and the police. In 2013 he was recognised with an Australian of the Year Local Hero award.
After becoming a father, Phillips says he saw a role and responsibility to help his community to become part of the solution—not the problem. He wanted to focus on healing and give people structure, belief, and a sense of worth and belonging, and to help kids across the community feel seen and safe.
As CEO of Tribal Warrior Association, Phillips experiences the same complexities as any CEO and the same pressure to deliver short-term results. Countering the quick fix, he works across a broad ecosystem of stakeholders, bringing together the Indigenous community, the police, the government, and corporate Australia to create long-term systemic change.
With his team, Phillips takes care of the tasks needed to help the community now and benefit Indigenous people in the future. By performing and transforming, he’s amplifying impact.
Call-out quote: Thinking back to his younger days, he says, “There were lots of people doing amazing stuff, but they were all focusing on their own cause. We weren’t working together. We needed a community plan that took us from cradle to grave.”
Enterprise Leadership on the Ground
Korn Ferry’s research shows people don’t become enterprise leaders simply by stepping into a role with an enterprise mandate. They continually progress, with ongoing support and development.
By pivoting with agility between the need to perform and transform, Phillips shows it’s possible to do both across a broader enterprise and ecosystem.
Like all CEOs, he focuses on the operational elements of his business—“running a tight ship” with systems and governance.
Yet at the same time he is transforming a community, in line with a clearly articulated vision, and has found a voice for Indigenous leadership outside his local community. He can simultaneously disrupt tourism with cultural cruises on Sydney Harbour, and implement position descriptions for employees in his rapidly growing business.
Easing Tensions through Leadership Capabilities
Phillips is able to reframe the natural tensions between perform and transform as opportunities, including the tension between what his community wants to retain from its Indigenous heritage, and the demands of modern-day life.
Korn Ferry has identified four core Enterprise Leadership capabilities: visualise, realise, mobilise, and catalyse.
One that stands out as a particular strength for Phillips is his ability to mobilise his community and energise people, teams and resources. When setting up Tribal Warrior, he challenged the conventions on who would make up his Board by asking, “why can’t we skill up our community?”
He rallies his community around a cause and ensures everyone is aligned so they can execute it.
Mentoring Future Enterprise Leaders
Enterprise leaders invest time in their people. Phillips also runs a mentoring program for young Indigenous people across the Redfern community to build leadership capability and shore up his legacy.
He knows first-hand the value of that support, noting that had someone mentored him in his youth, he would have made different decisions—he would have “dreamed bigger.” He also believes in the power of peer mentoring. At the start of his transformation journey, Phillips participated in a men’s group where members of the community discussed how they could make the community safe and strong—and do things that went against the grain of the old way.
Collaborating for Change
The ability to work horizontally, with and through others in the broader ecosystem, is a defining characteristic of enterprise leaders. For Phillips and the community, the decision to work with the police was a major turning point. When Phillips set up his boxing program, he invited the police to box alongside young Indigenous people from the community–some of whom had been on the wrong side of the law.
Philips remembers the first day of the program. He felt worried. The community felt worried. A young boy arrived and saw a member of the police who he’d previously had a run in with. He was afraid of what he was walking into.
But Phillips was determined to see it through. He said, “We’re not going to talk about crime. We’re going to focus on boxing, training, the routine, relationships.” At the end of the session, everyone was exhausted, but for the first time they saw each other as people, not adversaries. After week two, the boys in the boxing program stopped offending.
It wasn’t easy for Phillips; he and his family were threatened. But he pushed on and found courage to continue. At a deep level, he felt and understood their trauma in a way the police didn’t.
“We were committed. We owed it to the boys’ families,” he says.
As he reflects on his journey, and the values that guide him and his community, Phillips demonstrates a strong awareness of self and impact. His approach is consistently one of inclusion. When he first launched Tribal Warrior’s cultural cruises on Sydney Harbour, the police would regularly stop and board his boat looking for drugs. He shifted that reaction, by inviting them onto the boat for “coffee and a feed.” The police became allies.
Embracing Enterprise Leadership
Korn Ferry’s Enterprise Leadership Framework provides a robust, research-based, multidimensional model, combining leadership capabilities, mindset and purpose, with direct links to strategic business impact. And for Shane Phillips, that impact is profoundly human. With courage, humility and authenticity, he is empowering people to grow, and enabling a community to heal.
Learn more about our immersive leadership development programs.
Key takeaways
- By performing and transforming simultaneously, enterprise leaders can connect, co-create, and multiply impact
- How Shane Phillips harnesses leadership qualities to unite his community
- The role of impact immersion programs in supporting continual progress as an enterprise leader.
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