CPO Leadership Matters: An Interview with Kate Berry, G'day Group

With more than 25 years’ experience in senior people and culture roles, Kate is a highly credentialed and purpose-led leader who aims to create environments where people can perform, thrive, and feel a sense of belonging. Her focus is on coaching and energising teams to lift performance and deliver value across the enterprise. 

Our CPO Leadership Matters series highlights the complex and far-reaching position of Chief People Officers, as their role in the boardroom becomes increasingly prominent. Through the voices of top people leaders, we discover how the CPO can align the people function with commercial objectives and transform conventional practices into strategic assets. 

Since joining the group in 2017, Kate has helped steer the company through a period of rapid growth and diversification and is now responsible for supporting the organisation’s national tourism workforce of 2,500 staff. 

As the organisation has evolved, Kate has also led the delivery of organisation wide system transformation. This includes overseeing the recent rollout of new workforce and learning management systems to streamline operations, improve employee development outcomes and enhance reporting and compliance. 

A passionate advocate for female leadership development, Kate has championed the implementation of a dedicated program called ‘Connections’, which offers future female leaders mentoring and expert guidance to support their career growth. 

Outside of G’day Group, Kate is Chair of the UniSA Business Advisory Board, Vice President of the Board for See Differently for the Royal Society for the Blind, and a Member of the People & Culture Board Subcommittee for AnglicareSA. 

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Kate to hear her inspiring story, her passion for the role, and the insights she’s gained along the way. We were fortunate to receive her thoughtful advice and her invaluable tips for aspiring Chief People Officers navigating the path to leadership.

What advice would you offer to aspiring CPOs who want to build a meaningful career and make a lasting impact? 

Be authentic and work in organisations whose purpose aligns with yours. Understand the business deeply: bring your commercial lens and be clear on the culture and employee experience you want to build.

And most of all, be curious. Adopt a growth mindset, seek out strategic assignments and build networks that challenge and extend you. The ability to ask the right questions and stay open to change is what will set great CPOs apart in the future. 

As Chief People Officer of a complex, customer-focused organisation like the G’day Group, what are the big leadership questions you’re currently exploring? 

We’re spending considerable time on strategy right now, particularly around how we scale with efficiency. We have a support office, numerous sites across Australia and adjacent businesses including tech. We’re focused on how we’re organised, how we lead across that breadth and where we can drive efficiency.

Another focus is our operating model: whether we’ve set our people up for success with clear accountabilities, roles, decision-making rights and guardrails. We’re also scenario planning for the next three to five years, ensuring we have the leadership depth and succession planning in place. This ties into our capability review: assessing what’s mature, what needs investment and how we allocate resources accordingly. It’s about building the right systems, people and leadership capacity to support continued high performance and growth. 

Reflecting on your career journey, what inspired you to pursue the CPO role, and how has your view of great people leadership evolved along the way? 

I’ve always been fascinated by leadership capability: what makes someone effective and inspiring. Over time, I’ve seen the shift toward human-centred leadership. We now expect leaders to be authentic, to connect with purpose, to coach others and to be courageous in decision-making. It’s not about ego; it’s about team performance, doing the right thing and leading with empathy. 

What drew me to the CPO role is the ability to shape the organisation at an enterprise level, aligning culture with strategy and working closely with executives on people challenges. It’s a privileged position and I genuinely believe culture is the enabler of business performance. 

How do you approach building a people and culture strategy that enables business growth while creating a positive and engaging team member experience, particularly across a regionally dispersed and customer-facing workforce? 

We’re deeply focused on alignment: clarity of purpose, vision and values. That’s been especially important as we’ve grown our footprint. We’ve invested heavily in selecting and onboarding the right leaders at site level, supporting them with training and recognising great performance. 

Listening to our people is central: understanding what they need from our support office and making sure our culture is lived consistently, even in remote or newly acquired locations. Integration is key, and we’ve developed resources to guide people through what ‘good’ looks like here.

What have been some of the key challenges and opportunities in leading cultural and workforce outcomes in a distributed environment? 

Consistency is the biggest challenge, particularly in delivering a consistent employee experience across diverse and remote locations. That directly impacts customer experience, which we track closely through NPS and quality reviews. 

Our approach is to define the employee experience we want to create, then build systems around onboarding, coaching, leadership capability and respectful workplace behaviours. We’re also building emotional intelligence across our leadership cohort, ensuring our culture is not only defined but enacted at every level. When the culture is right at a site, it shows up clearly in customer satisfaction. 

How do you personally balance the strategic demands of the CPO role with the operational realities of managing people outcomes in a fast-paced, complex business? 

It takes deliberate planning. I structure my time and set a clear rhythm across my team, peers and stakeholders. I’m intentional about where I focus: strategic initiatives like AI enablement and operating model design are non-negotiable priorities, but I also remain close to operational risks that may have reputational impact. 

I also coach my team on this: helping them move beyond day-to-day delivery to take ownership of projects that drive real enterprise value. 

Looking ahead, what workforce and leadership trends do you see having the biggest impact on the future of tourism and hospitality? 

We’re seeing intergenerational differences around expectations of work: flexibility, wellbeing, productivity and growing regulatory complexity. The implications of AI are another major focus: where it fits, how people feel about it and what skills are needed going forward. 

In our sector, we want tourism and hospitality to be seen as a career, not just a job. That means offering progression, job security and purpose. We talk a lot about bringing Australia closer, there’s pride in what we do and it’s attracting talent. But we need to keep investing in our EVP and making it real. 

How can CPOs position themselves to lead effectively through these changes and play a stronger role in shaping business strategy? 

CPOs should be at the strategy table. Our lens on capability, workforce implications and change is critical. We coach leaders to be transparent and to bring people along on the journey.

It’s also about inspiring change: talking about purpose, articulating the ‘why’ and helping people navigate uncertainty. We need to invest now to future-proof our organisations, whether it’s org design, AI enablement or workforce resilience.