Built on Reputation

Why Sam Volker Believes Leadership Is Earned, Not Given

After senior finance roles across government and blue-chip corporates, Defence Australia’s Sam Volker says leadership is built on reputation: do good work, coach outcomes, embrace challenge and others will open the next door.

Sam Volker has built his career working across both government and the blue-chip private sector employers in roles central to the execution of the organisation’s strategy. He gravitates toward challenging roles that require bridging technical expertise with strategy, leadership and organisational communication.

Volker argues in favour of building experience by taking on the hard roles, through working across industries, and creating a legacy of building high performing teams.

“Every organisation is different, regardless of whether it’s private or public…whether you’re in fast-moving consumer goods, retail or banking,” he says. “Your ability to traverse industries depends upon your capability to adapt and identify the fundamental rules of racing in that respective organisation and industry, complemented with the ability to build quality teams.”

Meaning and Purpose

Volker’s formal title is First Assistant Secretary for Budgets and Financial Services within Defence Australia: a remit that covers the core finance functions across Defence, including; financial accounting, financial systems, group financial planning and analysis, tax, compliance, financial operations and external workforce reform. Volker oversees an integrated team of circa 400 across a 100,000-strong workforce with an annual budget of $61 billion a year and net asset balances of $142 billion.

The culture within Defence Australia, alongside its scope and scale, attracted Volker from the outset. 

“I work with some incredibly capable people in Defence and from a culture perspective, I really enjoy it,” he says.

“It’s fast, challenging, engages with risk and is a purpose driven organisation.”

Most importantly, Defence Australia’s ethos aligns with Volker’s own values.

“Defence is fantastic because of its scale and its sense of purpose. What we deliver is tangible and incredibly important to national security.” he says.

Volker is also drawn to the challenge of optimising a budget across a highly complex landscape.

“We need to support strategic decision making to ensure that funding is attributed to the highest priority outcomes. In my view, Defence does a very good job of ensuring that expenditure is optimised across a very complicated landscape.”

Building a Network

Volker’s path to Defence Australia came through numbers rather than a military affiliation. Growing up in Canberra, he pursued accounting at university after discovering an aptitude for maths.

“I knew I was good at numbers, and pursued a career aligned with my strengths,” he says.

“The interesting work came long after university finished.”

Over time, Volker realised that the numbers were just part of the equation and what mattered most to him was working with good people in an organisation striving to achieve its purpose.

Throughout his formative career years, Volker worked in senior finance roles at the London Stock Exchange Group, Unilever in London, and Coles head office.

The succession of roles was made possible, Volker notes, because others championed his career. In each of these organisations, I worked for and with some exceptional leaders.

“I realised that if you do a good job in a key role, particularly the hard roles that genuinely shift the needle in an organisation, people notice and will champion you,” he says.

“Central to this is building a high performing team around you”

“My work at London Stock Exchange Group led to my job at Unilever, which then led to my job at Coles.”

It was this cascading series of proactive recommendations that helped shape Volker’s career arc. “I’ve been very lucky to have people who wanted to support my career”.

“Early on in my career, I realised that your personal brand is really important,” he says.

“It means creating a brand based on strong leadership to achieve outcomes, the courage to step into challenging issues, building staff capability, uplifting culture, supporting the customer and, I’ll be honest – just being good to work with. All of these need to go right and are non-negotiables.”

Good to Work With

The latter attribute – being good to work with – was a trait he honed during his time at Unilever, where he worked with highly talented colleagues.

“Upon reflection, almost all of the people I worked with were excellent,” he says.

“They believed you won together, as opposed to individually. Their ability to engage with risk, and to talk about how to best deliver an outcome was impressive and formative.”

“When I look at my leadership approach, I’ve always asked myself, ‘if I enjoyed working with them, why would I operate differently to that?’. I continue to challenge my own style against that benchmark regularly to ensure I stay true to my values.”

Like many leaders, Volker’s management style has also been shaped by personal experience – his wife’s recurrent miscarriages before they were able to successfully start a family, the joy of eventually becoming a father, as well as grief over the death of several colleagues.

“These experiences helped me shape my leadership and the culture I set.” he says.

“Becoming a dad changed how I saw people. You become more attuned to what someone might be carrying outside of work, and that makes you a better leader. More patient, and more willing to support people through the hard stuff.”

“I’m still very driven, and still very focused on outcomes, but I have found a lot more tempering in both my style and being open and sharing with people about some of the challenges I have faced”.

“It gives you a lot more perspective and compassion.”

Contestability of Thought

Volker is a strong advocate of honest and open debate – which he refers to as “contestability of thought”. He believes that high-functioning teams need to encourage contestability to properly stress test important ideas and achieve the best outcomes.

“If I reflect back on some of my referees, even when there has been a difference of opinion on approach, they are consistently still advocates,” Volker says.

“I play the issue, not the person, and that way you’re both striving for the best outcome.”

Contestability is different from conflict, and is instead focused on optimising outcomes through the most effective strategy, Volker notes.

“Contestability of thought is so incredible when you can harness it in the right way, which is in an environment that facilitates the challenge of ideas and assumptions. We all go into an issue with imperfect knowledge and try to navigate the best outcome,” Volker says.

As a result, Volker says he has learnt to be comfortable with being uncomfortable: being open to learning and working through issues as they arise. Being humble.

He cites as an example the recent rollout of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system within Defence Australia, one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere when it went live.

“I had to get into levels of technical system knowledge that I had never encountered in my entire career,” Volker says.

“And it required me to feel okay about being uncomfortable. To pause and prioritise time to understand how the financial infrastructure all links together. In a system environment as large and integrated as Defence… it was very complicated.”

Build Experience and Capability

Volker’s drive to keep learning has meant that, early in his career, he rarely stayed in roles for more than three years.

“You should look to build your foundations in critical areas (financial planning and analysis, financial accounting, management accounting etc) and grow your experience from there. This requires moving roles, which may well be within the same organisation”

When asked what finance leaders should do better, Volker emphasised collaborating across teams such as HR, legal and procurement to enable better decision-making and alignment. “Finance people shouldn’t go it alone,” he says. “You should be shoulder to shoulder with your corporate colleagues.

He is also an advocate for communicating in jargon-free language. “Finance people often write for finance people,” he adds. “The quality of your outputs is driven by your ability to have the end user understand what the strategic objective is and what they need to do next.”

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Sam Volker will be presenting at Sydney CFO Symposium on Tuesday 18th August 2026 at the Sydney ICC

CFOs & Snr finance leaders register visit: www.NSWCFOSymposium.com