Featuring Floss Roberts AM
Persistence is often presented as an individual leadership quality: keep going, push through, refuse to give up.
For Annette “Floss” Roberts AM, resilience looks more relational than that.
As Executive Director of Royal Life Saving Society Northern Territory, Floss has spent decades working across an enormous geography, including remote and regional communities where effective water-safety programs require much more than technical expertise.
They require relationships, cultural understanding, adaptability and trust.
When Floss first confronted the scale of the work, she remembers feeling overwhelmed. The organisation was under-resourced and the challenge seemed immense. Her husband’s response was pragmatic: she was going to do it anyway, so she might as well get started.
And she did. But determination alone has not defined her approach.
One of the strongest insights from her experience is that good intentions do not automatically produce good outcomes.
Floss recounts an occasion when two swimming instructors travelled to a local waterhole after hearing that children swam there. Unaware that their route crossed a sacred area, they inadvertently caused offence to Traditional Owners. The response was not to defend their intentions. The organisation apologised, learnt from what had happened and followed the appropriate cultural protocols before returning to the community.
It is a powerful leadership lesson. Being committed to a cause does not make a leader infallible. Working with communities requires humility, and the willingness to recognise when our own knowledge is incomplete.
Floss’s work also challenges the notion that leadership must adopt a single style.
She can operate with government and senior decision-makers while remaining deeply operational and connected to people on the ground. When trying to secure attention for water safety, she thinks carefully about the person she is meeting and how the issue might connect to what they value.
The purpose remains constant; the approach adapts.
For Floss, that purpose ultimately comes back to access and safety. She reflects that she herself may never have learnt to swim had her parents been required to pay for swimming lessons. That personal understanding informs a broader question: how do we make participation possible for children and families for whom cost, geography or circumstance creates a barrier?
This is resilience with a purpose beyond the self. It is persistence directed towards removing obstacles for others. And perhaps that is where resilience becomes leadership rather than simply endurance.
Leaders will encounter closed doors, mistakes, resource constraints and circumstances they did not anticipate. The question is not merely whether they keep going.
It is whether they remain curious enough to learn, humble enough to repair relationships when necessary and clear enough about their purpose to find another way forward.
Floss Roberts has spent decades doing precisely that — sometimes across long distances, sometimes through difficult conversations, and always grounded in the belief that access to safety should not depend on where someone lives or what they can afford.
About the series
Voices of Leadership, Extraordinary Impact is a collaboration between the Order of Australia Association and Menzies Leadership Foundation, bringing to life the stories and insights of Australians recognised for their contribution and service.
Hosted by The Hon Vicki O’Halloran AO CVO FAICD, former President of the Order of Australia Association (2023-2026), the eight-part series explores the lived experiences, values and leadership lessons of Order of Australia recipients and what their stories can teach us about leading in service of others.
