Shane Knight, CEO Dragon Boats NSW

Alex Mednis & Cass Simonetti, Australian Sports Professional Association
Shane Knight, Dragon Boats NSW

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

Shane always had a passion for sports business, and though the early part of his career included roles in various industries, he found his way back to sport. 
 

We’re told you got two weeks into a science degree at UTS and decided you didn't like science. 

(Laughs) Pretty much. 

If I had my time back, to be quite frank, I wouldn't have gone to university. I would have saved that money or I would have put it elsewhere. I would have put it into more mentoring and coaching.

I would have gone to more seminars and done a lot more ‘short courses’.

Usually we save the advice for the end, but let's get into it now. What advice would you give to a younger person unsure about university? 

Challenge the norm. You don't have to do what everyone says you have to do. Just because there's university available doesn't mean you actually have to do it. There are a lot of other ways. Just explore it and try things. The only way you're going to be able to achieve something is to actually have a crack at it!

Thinking through your journey in sport, did you always want to be a CEO?

Yeah, I think so. I worked out pretty young that I enjoyed leading. You are always going to report to someone at some stage, but I actually enjoy leading a team. I always envisaged becoming a CEO eventually. 

Fortunately, it panned out that way. I've been able to learn skills that I probably wouldn't have been able to, had I gone to a bigger sport and gone through a more traditional pathway. You learn different things when you’re exposed to different organisations of varying sizes, and working previously at Surf Lifesaving, it was a bigger organisation and I did learn a lot there. Now I'm working in a much more nimble, smaller organisation, and I'm learning a hell of a lot of skills here.

It sounds like you clearly had a passion for sport in a participation sense. Did you find when you transitioned to a more administrative professional role within sport, that your passion or your interest in sport, assisted that, or was there some sort of disillusionment when you started?

That's a really good question. Something I grapple with when I talk to younger people is that when they think about sport, they think about all the highlights, and not realising the obstacles that sport has on the way.

I think at the start of the journey it was the passion of sport that got me through. It's still the passion for sport of course, but now in a different way. It's now seeing other people enjoy the sport, and that I’m having a lead creating their pathways for the future. 

What started out as just a simple passion to get into sport has probably transitioned more into certainly more of that administrative, development side in creating something for others. 

Can you clearly recall the moment that you decided that being a CEO in sport is what you wanted to achieve?

From an aspirational sense I have always aimed higher than what is probably realistic, and maybe once I wanted to reach being the CEO of the NRL. At the moment I don't want to do that anymore - it's too much limelight! 

What was your first month like as a CEO at Dragon Boats NSW?

You come in with an assumption that certain things are done, and there's a level of assurance there. In reality a lot of sporting organisations simply don’t have all the policies and/or procedures in place. This is especially true when you go from a larger, well-resourced organisation to a smaller one. 

When I first came in, I had grand goals to attract commercial partners and do all these really cool campaigns - but the reality is I had to actually understand the business first. Really get into how it runs, who the key players were, and really solidify those foundations.

I have a lot of respect for everyone before me, because they'd laid great groundwork, but it's my job to continue that, before I can get the ‘long term’ fireworks cracking. 
 

How do you balance getting the short-term vs long-term vision done?

In many sports, they often look at the paid staff to get things done. If something's not getting done,  the volunteer philosophy used to be, "Oh, the staff, they should be doing it, they're getting paid for it." 

In a small sport, it can be even more challenging because you've still got to run the sport, with many of the same issues you’d see in a larger organisation, but you have substantially fewer resources. One thing that I'm implementing here is creating more voluntary working groups, such that there is a sense of ‘buy-in’ from the members. That’s worked incredibly well.
 

Is communication tricky across those working groups? It's quite common for change management to be very tough when dealing with volunteers. 

Yeah, you're dead right. It's about communicating those messages and highlighting some of our learnings, so people can see where we came from and where we are going. There's a resilience piece here too. A lot of members don't like change and that's actually a really hard factor to deal with. It's very much about storytelling to bring people along that journey with you. 

How have you found the initial ‘buy-in’ from the working groups? Was the level of engagement quite high, or did it take some time for people to get onboard?

The biggest challenge I actually found was keeping them motivated and steering them in the right way. It was crucial to create the right template and the right project plan, and to take them on that journey and check in with them regularly. That kept them in focus and kept them alive.

Those tools sound essential for having a clear idea of how to proceed.

Yeah. First we needed to ensure we had a clear remit of what we're trying to do and how we want to achieve it. Then we set the right expectations. It’s also important to acknowledge that we're not setting the world on fire to begin with, but we're trying to build towards that. All these...

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