Alex Vallentine, CEO Judo Australia

Alex Mednis & Cass Simonetti, Australian Sports Professional Association
Alex Vallentine, Judo Australia
 

Bonus content

Each CEO has bonus content available to ASPA members that is not found in the book. The philosophies below are sourced directly from the interview, however each interview contained so much great content we had to put together an excerpt. Note that the content of the interview differs than the philosophies.

Interview

Alex always loved sport growing up, playing rugby throughout school, university and a brief stint overseas. But management was always his passion, stemming from his studies at university.

You studied sports journalism. What drew you to that?

I knew that I had to go to the University of Canberra, even though I was from the mid-north coast of New South Wales, because they had the best sports program, and still do in my opinion.

I did sports journalism, but also just threw on sport management as a backup. The journalism piece came from watching 'Sports Tonight'. I wanted to be on the show, and host 'Sports Tonight' with Bill Woods and Tim Webster. Do you remember that?

(laughs) Yeah, yeah

Luckily, I didn't go down that path because it doesn't exist anymore!

In any case, even though I thought I was pretty good at the journalism side at university, I quickly realised that I was much better suited in the management side.
 

And through Hockey ACT and Volleyball ACT, you ended up at Sport Australia, or the Australian Sports Commission as it was more correctly called at the time.

Yeah, I was really lucky to head up the sport partnership management team, looking after all 63 funded national sporting organisations. We provided the advice and support to them required to deliver success and make sure they were spending government funding wisely.

Sitting in that chair, you literally see every good and bad thing that happens in sport. 
 

And people say government jobs aren't fun!

(laughs) I learned more in the first year of that role then I ever had before. It was a really important experience for me. 

Judo Australia is my current role, delivering our organisational activity through this important Tokyo 2020 Olympic cycle, and I was going to move on to my next challenge in the period after the Olympics, which I'd already told everybody out there. But now that's likely to be extended by a year to get to the postponed Tokyo Games in 2021.

Fair enough with COVID hitting sport! That's obviously in itself requiring a bit of a resilience, right? You have a master plan for your life and you say, "this is what's going to happen." And while a year might not sound like a long time, suddenly the economy falls apart, the world changes, international travel stops... what do you do then?

I'm a very organised and well-planned person. I think it was probably 2018 when I started communicating my plan to finish this role at the end of the Tokyo Olympic cycle. Everybody knew that my departure was coming and it was very well planned, I was going to complete my tenure, our Chair was then going to usher in a new CEO for six months. 

Structured succession planning. But now we're re-evaluating how we're going to do that.

One of the challenges that a CEO has in a smaller sport is that business continuity and resilience of handover.

Yeah, definitely. I'm not sure what the exact tipping point is between organisational size and succession plans, but we've clearly identified a few sports in Australia that are at a size where there is no CEO succession within.

That's just not going to happen. The way you can account for that is to put a plan like the one we had in place. Look at that longitudinal vision and put some goal posts in place. They might change, and you can adjust the plan - but at least there is some kind of structure.
 

How does that impact internal progression? It must be hard to hire people, knowing that they may not have a clear way of climbing that ladder.

In a smaller organisation, you might only have three or four employees. In some cases it's unlikely any of them are ready yet to take on a CEO role, and so you are right - there is no progression to CEO.

I'm a big believer in building people. Everyone in our organisation, after their first month, I'm sitting down with them and having the conversation, "Okay, where's your next role? And how can I help you get there?"

Does that hurt you as an organisation when you feel like you're losing people with such potential, but you have nowhere else to funnel them?

All you can do is plan for it. You certainly hate to lose good people, but if you develop them well, you may work with them again, and again, at different organisations. You tend to often take staff, and even boards and volunteers, with you across organisations, and so having that network of people you trust and have helped develop is really important.

How does that change with volunteers? 

It's a good question. I think there is a difference between a career paid administrator and a volunteer.

I think if you're a key volunteer in a sport, then you're often passionate about that sport. You can get a role and be in that or various roles for life. And they're the people we need in judo, and that we need in a national sport. So, we need those people. Those long-term committed volunteers are the lifeblood of sport.

But if you got somebody in a professional role that was happy with where they were and happy with the salary and all those things, and they want to stay there forever, that's great. But what you need to do is (A), make sure they're continuing to develop as a professional, and (B), that their potential to become stale, which happens to all of us, doesn't take away from organisational performance.

Even in my case I know that within another year or two, this organisation would be better served by a new CEO, with fresh ideas, and some renewed energy. And that happens at every level, from membership coordinator, competition manager, whatever it may be - all the way to the CEO. 

To come back to your previous question, if they are happy to stay there and you're happy to keep them there, you must ensure that they're not just doing the same thing every year because they need to keep reinventing themselves as well for fresh ideas.
 

Great point. How do you reinvent yourself and keep that passion for sport alive?

I think sport is the best industry in the world, to be honest. Even if you're in a coalface, customer facing role, it's not often in other industries that you get to go once a year to a national tournament, or every weekend to an event - to be involved with the administration, but also soak up the sport.

You're not just in the office 40 hours a week ...

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