From ‘eat the frog’ to ‘play in the grey’: Three leadership lessons

As Commbank’s Executive General Manager of small business banking, Rebecca Warren leads a team of over 700 employees who serve 27 percent of small businesses across Australia.

From embracing her ‘discomfort zone’ to striving for pace over perfection, here are three key leadership lessons she shared with a packed room and hundreds joining virtually at the FW Leadership Summit 2025.

1) Lean into discomfort

Warren believes leaders operate at their best when they operate within their “discomfort zones”.

“Early on in my career, I expanded outside domains where I had natural expertise, always keen to land something that I didn’t necessarily know how to do,” she said.

She now sees how this has served her incredibly well. She has learned how to move quickly into new subject areas and deliver results at pace.

On a day to day basis, Warren leans into discomfort by “eating the frog” – meaning she does the difficult, or hard, tasks early in the day.

“[Do the difficult] task first. You will build resilience and tenacity,” she said.

“When you tackle early in the morning these daily tasks, it sets a productive tone for the day and builds your confidence”.

2) Pace over perfection

Warren has a key question she asks herself when struggling to make decisions.

“Do you need more information or do you just not want to make a call?,” she told the FW Summit.

“Quite often, I find it’s the latter. In either case, taking action is vital because … making a timely decision is better than no decision.”

For Warren, being decisive has also helped her fight against perfectionist tendencies. She described herself as being “incredibly dogmatic” early in her career.

“Everything was black or right, black or white, right or wrong, and I think it’s the fear of being wrong that took me a long time to be able to act decisively,” she said.

“I’ve learned to play in the gray areas better.”

“Playing in the grey” allows her to embrace mistakes as learning opportunities and aim for pace over perfection.

“There are times where moving fast is far more critical than moving with absolute precision … recognising that balance has been key, I believe, to part of my success,” she said.

3) It’s a balancing act

Warren’s third key leadership lesson centres around compromise.

She told the FW Summit about the three main priorities that have kept her anchored throughout her leadership journey: Her family, her health and her career.

“I found it’s almost near impossible to be at 100 percent on all three, certainly at one time or for any long period of time,” she said.

So, Warren instead chooses when to lean into these different aspects of her identity, depending on what she needs to prioritise.

“As women, I feel like we’re sometimes told you can have it all. Perhaps conversely, we’re told we can’t have it all,” she said.

“My view is we can have it all, just not at once.”