Board
Council appoints new Chair and Directors to Empire Theatres Board
Toowoomba Regional Council (TRC) has appointed a new Chair and Directors to the Board of Empire Theatres Pty Ltd following
May 20, 2026
Spring has started, and with it comes the annual wave of advice about planting, blooming and fresh starts. I love my garden, but gardeners know something leaders often forget: growth usually begins with what you are prepared to cut back. Spring is not only a season for new things, it is also the moment to prune hydrangeas, citrus and anything else that will not grow well without space. That is also a useful frame for leaders this year.
Doing more with the same
The economic backdrop is not dramatic, but it is unrelenting. Growth is moderating. Inflation has proven stubborn, and interest rates have stayed higher than most planning assumptions allowed for. Wages growth has slowed. Very few organisations I speak with are being handed additional headcount, and quite a few are being asked to absorb more with what they already have.
The instinctive leadership response to that pressure is almost always additive: a new initiative to lift productivity, a new framework to improve alignment, another dashboard, working group or cadence of check-ins to make sure nothing is missed.
I understand why. Addition is visible. You can announce it, put it in a board paper and point to it in a performance review. Nobody has ever been promoted for the twelve meetings they cancelled.
But the cumulative effect is clear: busy organisations get busier, while the people expected to deliver more are left with less of the one resource that actually determines output: uninterrupted attention.
This is why pruning is harder than it sounds. Almost nothing in a mature organisation is there by accident. Every recurring meeting, approval step, report and committee was, at some point, someone’s sensible response to a real problem.
The trouble is that the problem changes and the response remains. Much of what senior teams are carrying was designed for a different economy: cheap money, growth at close to any cost, or temporary hybrid-work fixes that quietly became permanent. It is not that these mechanisms are bad. It is that they were built for conditions that no longer exist.
Removing them carries a political cost that adding never does. Someone sponsored it. Someone’s role is partly defined by it. Cutting it can look like retreat, or like a judgement on a colleague. So it stays, and the next good idea is layered on top.
In my experience across sectors, the same items come up again and again:
This distinction matters enormously, and it is where a lot of leaders get it wrong under cost pressure. Slashing is indiscriminate. It takes a percentage off everything and damages healthy growth alongside dead wood. Every organisation that has ever imposed a flat cut across all functions has learned this, usually about eighteen months later when the capability it needed has gone.
Pruning is deliberate. A gardener cuts back to live growth, at a specific point, for a specific purpose – shape, light, airflow, a stronger structure next season. The plant loses volume and gains vigour. Plants love pruning!
Applied to an organisation, that means three disciplines. Be explicit about what you are protecting, not just what you are removing. Cut back to something, not to nothing. Every removal should free up a named resource for a named priority. And be public about it, because a leader who visibly stops things gives everyone else permission to do the same. Otherwise your people will assume the old expectations still stand and simply add the new ones on top.
Take any standing commitment on your team’s calendar – a meeting, a report, a process, a project – and ask: if this did not exist, would we build it today, at today’s cost, for today’s problem?
If the answer is no, you have found something to prune. If the answer is yes, you have just reminded everyone why it matters, which is worth doing anyway.
The point of cutting back is never the cutting. It is what the plant does with the room it gets back. Leaders who do not prune will keep asking their people to grow without giving them the space to do it.
Deborah Wilson is a leadership and career strategist, and a Principal and Shareholder at OnTalent, a Queensland-based executive search and leadership advisory firm.
She works with boards, chief executives and emerging leaders across government, government-owned corporations, not-for-profit and commercial sectors — leading executive and board appointments, designing leadership development programs, coaching senior executives through career transition, and speaking and facilitating on leadership.
Deborah has spent her career on the appointment side of the table, which shapes how she sees both organisations and the people who lead them. She holds a Master of Organisational Leadership, is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and has served as a non-executive director across a range of organisations.
Phone: +61 403 779 746 Email: [email protected]
Toowoomba Regional Council (TRC) has appointed a new Chair and Directors to the Board of Empire Theatres Pty Ltd following
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