June 2026
What Future Leader Program mentors don’t do
As mentors for Consult Australia's Future Leaders Program, Egis Australia Managing Director Rowenna Walker and Aurecon Chief Operating Officer Scott Powell aren’t telling future leaders what to do.
The opportunity to spend meaningful time with someone who has led a global engineering firm, run a major consultancy, presided over industry boards, overseen billion-dollar projects or shaped industry policy is rare.
But that’s part of the package for Future Leaders Program participants.
A defining feature of Consult Australia’s program is direct access to industry mentors, who support participants as they work in teams on real-world, multidisciplinary projects. These mentors share insights that extend well beyond technical expertise.
The value of mentoring is well established. A 2024 survey found 98% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs, reflecting the role mentoring plays in leadership development, employee engagement and organisational performance.
Over his two and a half decades with Aurecon, Scott Powell has progressed from undergraduate engineer to Chief Operating Officer, giving him a front-row seat to how leadership works in practice.
Rowenna Walker, a former President of Consult Australia, is Managing Director of Egis in Australia, leading a 1,000-strong team across 17 locations. For Rowenna, mentors help participants to build the personal and leadership capacity to navigate uncertainty.
Adaptability, resilience and self-awareness – qualities that define effective leaders – are forged through lived experience, she says. “I often counsel mentees to not be deterred by tough situations. When something doesn’t go well, we gain experience that we would not otherwise get when we ‘played it safe’ or take the easy route.”
Learning to lead is fundamentally a human skill that can’t be acquired through textbooks and is not a “perfect science,” Scott adds.
“Leadership is about taking people where they ought to go, not necessarily where they might want to go.” The direction and destination may change, but the responsibility remains the same: understanding what the future demands and preparing people to succeed in it.
The Future Leaders Program is far from a one-way exchange, the mentors both emphasise.
“The thing I love most about being a mentor in the Future Leaders Program is observing how our next generation of leaders think about challenges and go about solving them,” Scott says.
“I get great satisfaction from challenging mentees and seeing them learn and reflect. It is very rewarding to see people develop before your own eyes,” Rowenna adds.
The next Future Leaders Program will be held in Brisbane in September. Applications are now open.