Janelle van de Velde

In her own words

While many people think I have had an unorthodox career, a dominant thread has been my involvement in transformational projects.

I started my career as an Executive Assistant to Chief Executive Officers (CEO) which provided an amazing apprenticeship. As an EA to a CEO, you get a seat at the table and you have the whole gamut of the organisation to learn from. I absolutely loved it and was taught about business by incredibly capable, experienced and gracious CEOs who appreciated I wanted to partner with them and contribute to the success of the organisation.

When I joined a start-up energy company, Linc Energy as their fourth hire, the CEO said to me: “I have never been a CEO before but ‘word on the street’ is you know what a CEO needs to do, so I need you to help me do what I need to do.” I progressed into stakeholder engagement, communications and marketing, governance and human resources roles and was appointed company secretary. Linc Energy became a global player opening 17 offices around the world and this is where I really developed my leadership and management capabilities, over close to 10 years. 

In 2016, for the first time in my career I took a step back and decided to do something for me. I hadn’t done any tertiary education out of school, having immediately entered the workforce. When I left Linc Energy, I identified that I needed to validate the expertise and experience I had acquired and did a Master of Business Administration (EMBA) at Bond University, completing 15 subjects in 15 months. 

I then got ‘tapped on the shoulder’ to work at Nitro Inc to prepare the organisation for its Initial Public Offering. Because I have a ‘never die wondering’ approach to life, I seized the opportunity. Working in the tech industry in San Francisco with a predominantly millennial workforce provided a learning trajectory on steroids. You can’t buy that experience and I was a sponge, leaning in, learning, and running with it. 

I continued with my education when I returned to Australia by attaining a Master of Laws in Enterprise Governance, again at Bond, and was Executive Director Shared Services at the Uniting Church before joining the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) in January 2022.

At this time, the NVHR has integrated South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and NSW with Queensland planning to integrate in March 2024.

Throughout my career I have focused on driving transformation, and it relates to my area of expertise, ensuring corporate services functions effectively in an organisation. Working with internal stakeholders is what excites me.

Safer together

As a country we gained a greater appreciation for the heavy vehicle industry throughout Covid and flood events, amplifying our reliance on the industry for our goods and services. The industry is here to stay, and we must make it more efficient and effective. The challenge our industry faces right now is the lack of harmonisation; in an ideal world we would be running a borderless country. And it is not only the harmonisation of law, but how we operationalise that law. It’s a long, slow burn and the issue is challenging norms and assumptions. 

Data will play a lead role in our work and our ability to acquire, collect, manage, and appropriately use it provides tremendous opportunity for our industry. We will be able to provide the tools for participants to make more informed decisions and it is an exciting opportunity. Our philosophy is to inform, educate and enforce to build safety and efficiencies, in partnership with industry.

The secret ingredient

To build diversity you must ‘walk the talk’. You need to ask what are those diverse skills and experience that would be helpful to have around the table and purposely recruit to achieve this mix. That is the secret ingredient.

The challenge for any business these days is attracting people with a blend of generalist and specialist skills, as both are required. You also need team members who are inquisitive and foster this mindset. Early in my career the CEOs I partnered with allowed my curiosity to keep percolating, and encouraged me to constantly learn, and question ‘how can we do this better?’ 

In my work, I always encourage my teams to explore ideas because there is not simply one way of doing things.

As Chief Corporate Officer at NHVR my focus is on developing our people, and evolving our systems and processes while scaling up. Within Corporate Services, we have shifted from being highly reactive, waiting for divisions to tell us what was needed, to now working in a business partnering model and being more proactive in delivering business needs. I always say: ‘if we are not enabling the business, we are not doing our jobs’.  That change in mindset is so critical when you are scaling at such a rate. My role is extremely diverse, comprising people, safety and culture; legal services; governance risk and assurance; procurement and commercial services; and finance. 

Taking people on the journey

My favourite advice is – take the people on the journey. And to do so you will need to get creative in your communication to ensure you consistently convey your purpose, harnessing a variety of  channels. At Nitro we used many forms of communication including podcasts, townhalls and blogs because people receive and process communication via different channels and formats. Again, there is not just one way.