Robyn Petrou

While she can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, as a leader in financial services for a quarter of a century, Robyn Petrou is most definitely a “super” woman.

During her extensive and successful career, Robyn has seen the financial industry grow and prosper, providing her with opportunities to move from her start in superannuation to a lengthy career as a senior executive.

In 2009 Robyn was appointed the CEO of Energy Super, the Brisbane-based industry super fund. She remained there as a successful leader for more than a decade ultimately helping deliver and drive the eventual merger with LGIAsuper in 2021.

After the successful merger, the two funds continued to operate under their existing brands. Robyn stepped down from her role and used the milestone as an important time to consider what she wanted to do next and explore other opportunities.

As part of this change in direction, Robyn engaged Executive Performance Partners to assist her in proactively taking ownership of her next career challenge.

Watch Robyn’s full interview here: Robyn Petrou

Our Scorecard for Success

Robyn connected with the team at Executive Performance Partners where they established her tailored Scorecard for Success. Robyn outlined four main objectives:

• Explore, challenge and develop a future career plan.
• Challenge and create career tools such as branding and marketing oneself to new roles, industries or careers.
• To be guided and challenged in creating useful resources to support the next move.
• Have real-life, practical output that is tangible and useful in moving to the next phase of her career and incorporates all achievements from the past.

First connecting before she left Energy Super, Robyn met with the team regularly during a six-month period that saw valuable results.

“When you’ve been in the same industry for quite some time, I knew that it was time for me to do something different, but I just didn’t know what it was,” Robyn said. “And having someone to help me work through that has been really good. Most of my career moves, were from taps on the shoulder and so I had little experience in applying for roles.”

Robyn was able to challenge herself and dive deep to consider what was required and how to achieve what she wants from the experience. In doing so, she has seen positive results that have ultimately guided her to understand what the future holds.

A notable result Robyn witnessed was the increased sense of being prepared for the next step and understanding what exactly was needed for the process. Applying practical prompts given by the team at Executive Performance Partners, she was able to produce tangible resources to support and guide the next phase.

Robyn’s confidence continued to increase as she was able to build her CV and elevator pitch about what she wanted from the future, creating a feeling of clarity about where she was going and what she wanted to do.  The prompts provided to Robyn were tailored to ensure these tasks were able to be completed, as she initially requested, ‘A key goal for me is to be able to produce a practical output’.

Robyn notes the results originate from being constantly challenged, guided, held accountable and tasked with matters she probably would not have done either due to inexperience or uncertainty.

These were practical, short-term tactics that provided all the information she needed to move to the next phase of looking for her next role. These are the results Robyn hopes to achieve in the next year:

• Securing a role within an industry that aligns to her core skill sets and values
• Establish a deeper understanding of herself and her focus
• To sell herself more confidently
• Make an impact on the people she serves, ensuring she’s making a difference to the end deliverer – the end person is not a shareholder, it is the client.

Robyn says:

“Andrea (at Executive Performance Partners) has certainly adjusted her style to suit me. I am sure that she’s not the same with me as she is with everybody else.

She has provided me with tangible results and benefits. There is an end output, and that has been the focus for me in this relationship. Andrea and her team are a bespoke group of people who will work with the individual and will identify together what that person is going to need, and then provide tangible outputs.

Every meeting I had with the team I felt a sense of understanding that has allowed them to challenge me to reflect and develop goals and a clear understanding of who I am and what I offer as a leader with clear outputs that reflect this.

They will wrap themselves around that person and deliver what that person needs based on who they are. They quickly grasp your level of understanding of career development and progression steps. They know the risks in the recruitment process and the benefits of a personalised approach to developing a career that maybe different to the past. They will do some simple things such as give me some feedback on my website or covering letter. They will connect me with people in the industry. Basically, they have built a program based on what they’re seeing I needed at the time and what I will need in the future.”