As seen in Aged Care Today – Future-ready leadership:
Building capability that delivers impact
We are delighted to see ACH Group’s leadership journey featured in Aged Care Today magazine. In this article, Executive Manager People, Culture & Safety Cher Lopresti shares how ACH Group is building leadership capability across the organisation, creating a strong foundation for high-quality care, a positive workforce experience and long-term organisational sustainability.
Aged Care Today is the highly regarded magazine published by Ageing Australia for the aged care sector.
Building capability that delivers impact
In aged care, leadership is often viewed as a workforce issue. Increasingly, it is becoming a quality, culture and sustainability issue.
The way leaders show up each day influences how employees experience their work, how customers experience care and ultimately how organisations respond to growing complexity, reform and change.
At ACH Group, this understanding has shaped how leadership is approached across the organisation. By connecting organisational purpose to everyday decision making, leaders help ensure teams remain focused on delivering good lives for older people while meeting the quality, safety and operational expectations of a contemporary aged care provider. In this way, leadership becomes a practical driver of workforce performance, customer outcomes and organisational resilience.
Across aged care, organisations are investing significantly in leadership development. The challenge is ensuring those investments translate into meaningful outcomes.
Leadership capability is most effective when it is embedded in day-to-day operations rather than delivered through isolated development activities.
For ACH Group, this has meant moving beyond standalone leadership programs towards a connected leadership system that links capability directly to organisational priorities, workforce outcomes and service delivery. Over the past four years, more than 110 leaders have participated in leadership development activities each year, creating a strong foundation of capability across the organisation.
One of the most important lessons from this journey has been the value of clarity. ACH Group’s Leadership Capability Framework establishes a common set of leadership expectations while recognising that effective leadership can be demonstrated in different ways.
Leaders bring diverse experience from clinical care, allied health, operations, customer experience, finance and corporate services. Rather than prescribing a single leadership style, the framework provides guiding principles that align leaders to ACH Group’s culture, values and ways of working while enabling them to draw on their individual strengths and professional expertise.
Leadership development is structured around need rather than assumption. Different stages of leadership require different forms of support.
The framework provides a consistent foundation for performance conversations, development planning and succession pathways, creating greater accountability and clarity about leadership expectations. It helps leaders translate organisational purpose into everyday practice and reinforces the connection between leadership behaviours, workforce experience and customer outcomes.
For leaders stepping into new roles, early clarity is critical. Structured induction helps leaders understand organisational expectations, operating models and support networks, enabling them to build confidence and become effective more quickly. Leaders consistently tell us they value establishing peer connections early and understanding where to turn for support as they navigate the transition into leadership.
Ongoing capability development remains grounded in operational reality.
Learning is informed by workforce feedback and real service challenges, ensuring relevance and immediate application. This includes supporting leaders to manage performance, respond to change and navigate increasing regulatory complexity.
For experienced leaders, development extends beyond capability building to shaping organisational direction. Working across functions on strategic challenges enables leaders to contribute to innovation and service improvement while strengthening collaboration across the organisation.
As these initiatives mature, measuring impact becomes increasingly important.
Long term investment in leadership has strengthened ACH Group’s workforce. With a focus on career progression, turnover has reduced while attraction rates have increased year on year. Improvements in employee feedback and internal progression provide further evidence that leadership capability is strengthening in ways that matter.
For the sector, the broader lesson is clear. Leadership cannot sit alongside the organisation. It must be embedded within it. When purpose, expectations, systems and support are aligned, leadership becomes a powerful driver of workforce stability, organisational performance and better outcomes for older Australians.