The Fund Executive Association Ltd (FEAL) 2025 Fund Executive of the Year, UniSuper chief executive officer Peter Chun, says the events of the past couple of years – including, memorably, Google Cloud’s accidental obliteration of UniSuper’s account – demonstrate why leaders need to be adaptable to rapidly changing circumstances.

Chun was named Fund Executive of the Year at FEAL’s annual conference and dinner in Sydney on 7 August. He says leadership is “always contextual, because the environment you’re operating in will shape how you need to act”.

Leading a super fund when investment returns are strong, membership is growing and services are operating smoothly is one thing, but it can all change in an instant, as Chun learned in early 2024 when he arrived at work one morning to find Google had deleted UniSuper’s account and members were unable to log in. The outage, which Google admitted was its fault, took about a fortnight to fully rectify.

“During a crisis, you need to show adaptive leadership which sometimes means making decisions with imperfect information,” Chun tells Investment Magazine.

“This can be difficult when you are in the fog of war, but you cannot stand still, you need to maintain momentum and communicate as clearly as you can.

“Leaders also need to remain calm and visible. I think it is important that you are focused on the need to over-communicate when you are leading an organisation that is facing a challenge.”

Scholarships

In other awards announced by FEAL last week, Tonya Lunardello, head of service operations and delivery at Equip Super, was awarded the Greg Bright Scholarship for Excellence in Member Communications, named in honour of Greg Bright, the veteran journalist and a co-founder of Conexus Financial, publisher of Investment Magazine, who passed away last August.

Elsewhere, former Hostplus senior executive Paul Watson received FEAL life membership; the MBS Masters Program Scholarship – September Module was awarded to Patrick Fitton, senior operations manager, transitions, at Hostplus; and the Michael Dwyer Leadership Scholarship went to Lisa Cumberland, executive manager governance, risk and compliance, BUSSQ.

Four years

Next month marks Chun’s fourth anniversary as CEO of UniSuper, which has had only four chief executives, including Chun, since it was formed in October 2000 from the merger of the Superannuation Scheme for Australian Universities (SSAU) and the Tertiary Education Superannuation Scheme (TESS).

A CEO is only a custodian of the organisation they lead, Chun says.

“It is paramount that the CEO leaves the organisation in a better place than how they found it. This is critical when you pass the baton to the next CEO.

“In my case, it is a real privilege that I follow in the footsteps of three former UniSuper CEOs – Kevin O’Sullivan, Terry McCredden and Ann Byrne – who each were also recognised with the FEAL Executive of the Year award over the past 20 years.”

Chun says a lesson from the Google Cloud outage was the importance of communication.

“You must have strong visible leadership to restore the confidence of your stakeholders during challenging periods,” he says, adding thatthe trick to leadership in steadier times is to avoid complacency.

“It is important to instil a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, with a strong focus on being proactive during these periods,” he says.

“Having clarity in terms of your vision and values helps create a strong North Star for any organisation.

“We have rallied around our ambition to become ‘the Netflix of retirement’, delivering hyper-personalised experiences for our members, because everyone’s journey in retirement is different.”

Effective leadership also builds and maintains trust, Chun says.

“Trust is the sum of competency and character. Competency is ‘do what you say you will do.’ Character relates to living our values which are genuine care, better together, passion for outcomes.

“As the CEO, one of the most important things I can do is set the culture and, in my mind, having a truly inclusive workplace culture is the secret sauce to high performance.

“Inclusion is the productivity dividend that all organisations are striving for.”