Round #07 - Demons in the arena
Max Gawn
After five straight losses to start the 2025 season, watching Max Gawn, whom my drawing celebrates, dominate in the Anzac Eve clash against Richmond, earning himself another Checker Hughes Medal, you could see a leader who understands that there are no easy answers.
In the public domain, culture as it relates to performance is usually spoken of in absolutes, most often by people who have never taken responsibility for leadership, or ever been part of, or contributed to a team-based environment.
Melbourne Football Club has been at the centre of such cultural discussions in recent years, and, by extension, the spotlight has turned on the club's leadership.
What Captain Max Gawn, Vice-Captain Jack Viney, and I have in common is that we all walked into the Melbourne Football Club as 18-year-olds, and the club and the many great people around it would be central to our development, seeing possibilities in us that we were yet to see in ourselves.
Max and Jack were precocious footballing talents, and I, many decades earlier, was a green-as-grass budding administrator.
I would spend fifteen years at Melbourne, including eight as CEO, and it would provide moments such that I still measure all other experiences by, and I am forever grateful.
The Demons have given me many of life's most important lessons, and I have spent time looking for the right word.
I hope I have found it.
Perspective.
The Melbourne Football Club taught me perspective.
I learned that there are no guarantees and no ultimate formula for success. Hard work isn’t enough. In elite sport, we are on a perpetual quest to make hard work easier, so we can make space for even more hard work.
Yes, there were moments that only a club like Melbourne can give you.
So many layers. Never easy, but never giving up. The folklore that only the game’s oldest club can produce. ‘First and Forever’ was the calling and the responsibility. Boys becoming men, becoming heroes. Lyon, Stynes, Viney, both father and son, Neitz, and Gawn, some unlikely, others predestined. Finals, when we never expected them, missing out when we knew we should have. Close but never close enough. A vision for the game that it had yet to see for itself: women should have the opportunity to play the sport at the highest level, and the game, from community to elite, would never be the same.
But I also think about the mistakes I made. The errors of judgement, and at times, I let them define me. I now think differently.
If not for the full gamut of these leadership experiences, including my mistakes and setbacks, I have no message worth sharing.
They are a gift.
As always, it is about the friendships formed, the kind that can only emerge when trying to do something exceedingly difficult together.
Perspective.
Max, Jack and, of course, their coach, Simon Goodwin, achieved what generations of Melbourne leaders could not. Fifty-seven years on from their last, and in its 163rd year, the 2021 Demons won the Premiership.
And what a team! It was great to watch, and I did so with a little tear in my eye. The Demons played the game as it should be played, with a wonderful team ethos, playing with flair and for each other. There was joy and love, having been on a journey together, worked through some tough stuff, asked themselves the hard questions, and found the answers.
Yet, only months after their 2021 premiership triumph, when the champagne had barely stopped being poured, and the Premiership Cup was still touring the country, their culture came under examination. In the years since, they've been unable to shift this spotlight, with every setback bringing renewed focus.
Public discourse inevitably focuses on the coach – the blinding glare of the spotlight shining on Simon Goodwin. Appraisal of his coaching, opinions layered on opinions, became the subject of exhaustive media examination.
As a young coach, just a few years out from playing and doing his coaching apprenticeship as an Assistant Coach at Essendon, Simon sought to complement his development as a future senior coach. I was one of several people he spent time with during this time. He understood that there were dimensions to this role that went well beyond coaching a football team, and he wanted to understand the broader leadership expectations of the coach from a club perspective, not just a team perspective. In itself, it showed great insight and initiative.
During our time together, three key qualities essential for leadership stood out: coachability, competitiveness, and connection. He was great to work with.
A decade later, he achieved what the dozen Demon coaches who preceded him could not: winning the Premiership.
Former US President Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech comes to mind whenever I think about leaders doing it tough in our competition: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood."
The arena promises many things, but at no time does it promise to be fair. It's where these three leaders - Goodwin on the sidelines, Gawn and Viney on the field - continue to show up despite the setbacks of straight-sets finals exits in 2022 and 2023 and missing September action entirely in 2024.
This is what the role expects of them, and they never shirk.
The word 'toxic' has been the expression of choice when describing the team culture at various stages of Melbourne's recent journey. It is a word used for impact, as a means of inflicting maximum damage, and with little care for those who are being labelled.
It is a word deeply embedded in my psyche, used to characterise cultures I led as the CEO of AFL clubs when my performance was being judged, mainly from a distance and by people I had rarely spoken to, or never met. They most certainly had no first-hand experience of my leadership, but likely had spoken to people, past and present, who had worked with me, perhaps with an axe for them to grind, not without justification, the challenge of leading in a public domain.
For anyone other than a sociopath, it doesn't get much worse for a leader, yet it is a term that gets thrown around like confetti at a wedding. It sticks, a smell that can't be washed off, and it seems, even a Premiership won't inoculate you.
Those who have led in high-stakes environments know it is not a place for binary judgement. It is complex and intricate, building a culture to achieve the outcomes this group and all its uniqueness seek. The potpourri of personalities, behaviours, and human interactions that make this collective special.
There is a perception that successful cultures exist on some elevated stratum, where conflict, disagreement and negativity don't happen, everything works like clockwork, and everyone is in their happy place. This is a myth. Even the best cultures grapple with deeply challenging problems, fail to achieve their expectations, and disagree vigorously as to why.
Rarely is an organisation a monoculture. There are many subcultures, with variance in performance across them. The leadership challenge is to create alignment while respecting diversity, to build consistency without enforcing conformity.
The fact that Melbourne has struggled despite leaders of the calibre of Goodwin, Gawn, and Viney tells you how genuinely difficult culture-building is in this most unforgiving competition.
After five straight losses to start the 2025 season, watching Max Gawn, whom my drawing celebrates, dominate in the Anzac Eve clash against Richmond, earning himself another Checker Hughes Medal, you could see a leader who understands that there are no easy answers.
On-field leaders Gawn and Viney are insightful, highly competitive, proud and resilient, and they have an unwavering belief in and deep commitment to the Melbourne Football Club. They fully honour the role and all of its expectations. The last two weeks have reminded us what this leadership combination brings to the table. Together, they form a wonderful leadership yin and yang, and the possibility of a powerful cultural foundation.
I've come to think of culture as an experiment, and only through my errors did this penny drop. There were times I fell for the binary view of culture as an absolute—something achieved rather than cultivated. Listening to Goodwin, Gawn, and Viney speak about culture, with generosity and nuance, and carrying the full weight of responsibility on their shoulders, it seems they share a similar view.
Culture isn't an achievement to be unlocked or a trophy to be won, but an ongoing, intentional experiment that plays out daily across an organisation.
It is always a work in progress.
I think of 'culture as an outcome', but also, 'team as an outcome', at least a team capable of competing at this level of competition. Both must be earned through consistent effort and adaptation rather than simply declared into existence.
Culture is what we do, not what we say. It's defined by our behaviours, our choices, and our priorities – what we choose to celebrate, what we choose to reject, and everything in between. Watching Viney and Gawn's commitment to contest after contest, their communication with teammates, and their ability to lift those around them – this is culture in action.
I have learned that culture isn't some form of endowment you receive; it's something you have to work for, to learn. Like any skill that is hard to master, it's a process of constant iteration. You have to do the reps.
This was the culture Melbourne had when they won their Premiership. But a key lesson I learned the hard way is that no matter how good your culture and strategy seem at any time, all solutions are temporary.
The Melbourne culture of 2025 cannot simply be a restoration of 2021. It's not about winding back the clock or pining for days of yore. It must be something new, forged from both their successes and their failures.
The last two weeks suggest something is beginning to take shape.
Melbourne defends its culture not by choice but necessity, needing to focus on present opportunities after working incredibly hard for this window for over a decade.
The game doesn't promise to be fair, nor does it give up its rewards easily. As Roosevelt said, there is "no effort without error and shortcoming," but the credit belongs to the one "who spends himself in a worthy cause."
The coming weeks will tell us more about the current iteration of the Melbourne cultural experiment. But in the arena, where faces are "marred by dust and sweat and blood," where leaders strive valiantly and sometimes err, that's exactly where Simon Goodwin, Max Gawn and Jack Viney stand - not with "those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Play on!
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