A crash course on leadership provided by the Australian Defence Force based at Lavarack Barracks put North Queensland Toyota Cowboys leaders to the test late last year.

The Lavarack Barracks Army Leadership Experience was developed to take participants out of the comfort zone of their regular working environments and place them in high-pressure situations with the aim of improving leadership skills.

Cowboys chief of operations Micheal Luck spoke of the experience following the severe weather event that hit Townsville, and the commitment shown to the Townsville community by local Defence personnel.

“There are many leadership principals the ADF displays, which was made even more clear in Townsville recently, and I think there is no better crash course on how to put leadership skills to the test,” Luck said.

“It was really valuable for us to be able to go out to a place like the Lavarack Barracks and experience state-of-the-art facilities and to access the knowledge they have.

“We’re all pretty comfortable and confident when we’re sitting in an office in our own environment, but the purpose of this day was to take us outside of that.

“It revealed what teamwork activities we have in place that are effective as well as areas we need to work on.”

Luck was one of the leadership group, made up of Cowboys CEO Jeff Reibel, Cowboys head coach Paul Green, community general manager Fiona Pelling, chief marketing officer Jacqui James-Eggins, head of membership and ticketing Sharon Cunningham, and head of corporate and consumer partnerships Dean Payne.

Payne said that “it was all based around leadership - not only to grow individually as a leader, but to grow as a leadership group.

“As an individual there are so many things the army do all day every day that we can implement into our daily work and way of thinking.

“We were placed into role-playing scenarios which gave us an idea of what they would face in a third world country and put us in those situations to show us the best ways of getting information to troops in high pressure situations. There were some really good lessons to come out of that.”

Being based in Australia’s biggest garrison city has allowed the Cowboys to form a strong relationship with the Australian Defence Force and the club regularly takes up leadership development and personal development opportunities at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville.