The CEW Executive Leaders Program (ELP) is a five-day immersive retreat tailored for senior women executives ready to elevate their career trajectory and make a significant impact at the highest levels of leadership. Specifically designed for women in C-suite and non-executive roles, participants are given the opportunity to develop their executive presence and overcome limiting perceptions.

In 2024, Denisha Anbu had been looking into the process of becoming a Chief Executive Women (CEW) member when she came across CEW’s Leadership Development offerings. After connecting with Sarah Rowley, CEW’s General Manager of Leadership Development, she was advised that given she was in the c-suite at Sydney Water, she would be a great candidate for the CEW Executive Leaders Program.

Denisha shared with us her reflections, stand out learnings, and even her reservations, about investing in the Executive Leaders Program.

Reflections

The ELP came along at a really important juncture of my career. At this time, I was aware that I was being considered for an expanded portfolio in coming months. This new role would be completely different from where my core strengths and experience sat at the time.

For 20 plus years I’d worked in legal and governance, whereas this new portfolio was more of an operational remit. I’d be charged with leading a team of 1,400 people, covering a range of disciplines including operational field crew, network engineers, call centres, billing and metering, innovation, and labs.

I was still a little bit on the fence on whether I could take on this new role and I needed to validate for myself the potential my leader saw in me. With this in mind, the then MD of Sydney Water was supportive of me completing the CEW ELP to give me the opportunity to hone my own individual leadership style, and really own it.

I was a part of the 2024 February program, and spent one week at the residential, joining a cohort of women from very different disciplines and experience. The encouragement, support, and practical tips I received, not just from the facilitators, but the other women on the program with me was amazing. There was no ego or competitiveness, we were all there to encourage each other, which was really lovely.

Being in the c-suite is a different level of leadership with a different level of accountability, so the calibre of the other women in the cohort is one distinction that separates ELP from other leadership programs.

Being at similar points in our career, there was a shared understanding amongst us of some of the challenges we’d faced. Having that commonality of experience between us was necessary as the ELP requires you to, at times, be quite vulnerable and allow yourself to be open to the guidance and advice from your peers, so you must have a certain level of maturity to take it on board.

Learnings

The program itself was quite holistic. It addressed the soft and hard skills required in executive leadership, but also explored really practical topics from a variety of facilitators.  We covered practical lifestyle and wellbeing including topics like nutrition, as well as the value and strength in showing up as your authentic-self. The workshops with Dr Louise Mahler on executive presence and gravitas were a stand out for me, she really brought that part of the program to life, which helped give me the confidence to bring those executive level presentation skills to my role.

Throughout the course, there was an acknowledgment amongst us all as senior leaders, that you don't have all the answers all the time. You just need to have enough confidence in the skills and experience you do have, to face challenges that will be put in front of you.

There was also the recognition that we're not all the same and there's not one cookie cutter approach to what makes an executive leader. It's the differentiators that make us unique in our leadership, and we can, and should, really own who we are as individual leaders, which I found really affirming and transformative.

Reservations

For a very long time, I’d made a point of not getting caught up in networks that were solely focused on gender, or cultural diversity, or any other diversity markers, because I feel that those factors are not the most important or interesting aspects of everything that makes me up as an individual. I had actually been a little bit hesitant to participate in a women's-only program.

But I've changed my tune along the way, because in the upper echelons of corporate Australia, there is still such a vaccum of gender and cultural diversity.  So it was actually really nice to be in that setting of just women and have my own biases checked around just how good it could be, separate from any negative connotations I’d had in the past.

Investment

Participating in the ELP is a worthwhile investment and I do say this is an investment, because most people will need to have their organisation sponsor them. In a fiscally constrained environment where everyone's looking at dollars, you've really got to demonstrate that it's worth it. But I would definitely recommend ELP for the right leader.

This is not a course that you just attend for the week and then get back to business as usual and forget about it. You’ve got to continually look back at what you've learned and put it into practice.  I was realistic that there could be the potential for me to struggle with that once I started my new busy portfolio, so I was intentional in investing in continuing the work I started with Dr Mahler. This ensured I would have some of the ELP learnings front of mind, and basically there would be no excuse for me to not continue to put in the work!

Denisha's Advice to Anyone Who Has
The Influence to Nominate Women in The C-Suite to Attend the ELP

CEO’s are often judged on the legacy they leave behind, and succession planning is so much a part of that. If you want to look back on your career and think about all the people that you supported to live up to their full potential, you need to provide them with the tools to have the self-confidence to believe it for themselves.

I had a lot of support from my then MD to step into my new role, but sometimes it didn’t matter how many times he told me that I could do this job, I still had that little bit of apprehension.

By giving me the opportunity to do the Executive Leaders Program, I came out of that week of immersive learning with the validation and clarity, that succeeding in this new role wouldn’t be about how much I knew, but how well I leaned into my unique skills to lead people and bring them along the journey to deliver our enterprise strategic outcomes.

If you are in a position to sponsor women in your c-suite to attend this program - Your return on investment will be leaders who come back with renewed confidence, clarity, and gravitas, and whose contribution to the strength of the executive teams at your organisation, will be part of your legacy as a CEO.

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The FY27 CEW Executive Leaders Programs Enrolment Calendar is Open Now

To learn more about the CEW Executive Leaders Program, visit our website, or reach out directly to Sarah Rowley, General Manager of Leadership Development: srowley@cew.org.au