The hidden value in developing older workers

There’s an increase in the rate of employment for older workers in developed nations. With workers staying employed for longer and workplace technology, thinking and practices ever-changing, is it time to invest in the professional development of your older workforce?

A recent study of OECD countries found that the employment rate for workers aged between 55-64 increased by 6% in Australia and 4% in New Zealand in less than a decade. Across the board, OECD countries are seeing more older workers remaining employed well past their 50s and 60s.

Given the shift we are experiencing in Australia and New Zealand, what are the benefits of addressing the development gap experienced by older workers?

 

Increased employee retention

When technology giant AT&T decided to upgrade company systems to keep up with the digital age, they took an inclusive approach. Instead of hiring new people who were familiar with new technologies, they provided training for all 280,000 employees. The result? They retained their loyal employees whose average tenure lasts up to 12 years.

Despite the common belief, older workers can and are willing to learn new skills. The key is to provide targeted training.

When you help your workforce to adapt to new technologies, you give them a good incentive to stay on the job. Not only does this mean retaining them, but also the knowledge, skills and understanding older employees have about your organisation.

 

Enriched work roles

In the context of our ageing society, older workers make significant contributions. Their active participation in the workplace means they share valuable benefits including:

  • Loyalty to the business
  • Commitment to organisational purpose
  • Well-established network of contacts

Supporting the development of older workers opens other avenues for them within the workforce. If they are enabled to move, not just upwards but also laterally, it creates employees with richer experiences.

Leaders should also explore whether developing older workers enables them to hold multi-faceted roles. It’s important not to restrict them to tasks that they have already mastered but not shock them into a completely different job.

 

Decreased economic pressure

The Australian Human Rights Commission reports that just a 3% increase in workforce participation for workers aged over 55 would boost GDP by up to $33 billion. The reduced pressure on the government to support our ageing population is vital for economic stability.

At an organisational level, developing older workers with the aim of keeping them active in the workforce, also adds up financially. Higher retention means less hiring costs and maintaining highly productive, and committed employees all positively impact the bottom line.

Are we too busy to innovate?

Managers and Leaders can make or break an organisation’s efforts to generate fresh ideas and evolve.

Innovation and creative thinking are common management buzz words that managers and leaders hear every day. To some, these words are frightening – the fear of the unknown – and yet to others these same words are embraced as opportunity. Innovation is defined as the ‘successful exploitation of ideas’ as opposed to creative thinking which is usually required at the front end of the innovation process.

Research from organisations around the world has shown that the single most important factor in the success of innovation and developing creative initiatives is having a leader and a team with the ability and passion to turn ideas into business reality.  Additionally, a leader must provide focus and ensure their people have a clear understanding of exactly what kind of innovation the business requires.

All too often innovation is viewed as ground breaking technological advances such as robots being responsible for putting half the Australian workforce out of a job – and of course these types of statements dominate media headlines. This kind of innovation scares people – as many commentators identified during the 2016 federal election campaign when former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull kept reminding the voters about innovation and economic change (to his detriment).

Rather, innovation should be focused on small, incremental changes to products, processes, services and customer experiences that assist organisations to become more efficient, productive and competitive. Creative thinking is helpful during this process to identify new ideas.

Surprisingly, among today’s managers and leaders the most common competency area of weakness resides in the development of creative and innovative thinking.  This ‘blind spot’ area has been identified by the IML 360 assessment
tool and is diagnosed in hundreds of
IML Corporate Member organisations around Australia.

Managers play a crucial role in sparking and encouraging innovation and creative thinking and their support and openness to ideas is vitally important. Research from NESTA in the UK found that 40 per cent of organisational innovation comes from the role of leaders in ‘modelling behaviours that encourage innovation’. Another 30 per cent is delivered by setting up the right team and having a talent pool motivated by innovation and incentivised to improve business operations.

It’s a well-known fact that the development of the iPod was a team effort; inspired and spearheaded by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and created and assembled by a team of engineers and designers – through hundreds of iterations and modifications. All good ideas are born flawed.

Barriers to innovation can usually be characterised into three distinct categories – risk aversion and fear of failure by leaders, hierarchical structure across staff levels, and lack of time to reflect on business processes. Notably, public sector managers highlight the first two categories as their biggest barriers to overcome (62%) while private sector managers suggest the third category is the biggest factor for reducing innovative outcomes (52%).

Of course, there’s always a lot of talk from government, CEOs and executive teams about the need for creative thinking and the requirement to cultivate a culture of innovation – but more often than not it simply doesn’t translate into action on the ground. Creating a culture where people feel safe to experiment with new concepts, are willing to share opinions and are empowered to frame new ideas is wonderful to preach from the ivory tower, but it must be followed up with action to eliminate barriers.

Further assessment results from IML’s small-to-medium sized Corporate Members suggest that insufficient or ‘distracted’ talent remains a major challenge to cultivate such cultures. This was confirmed by an interesting observation made from one organisation. A senior leader noted that employees in her organisation no longer have or make the time to reflect on improving business processes. Constant distractions such as social media, a 24-hour news cycle, access to everything on our phones and PCs and other ‘lifestyle’ commitments mean that all too often we no longer have the time to reflect and truly think about how processes can be improved. In other words, life is simply too busy to think creatively and innovate.

So, what are we to do as managers and leaders? For a team to innovate, a manager needs to ensure they have a number of team members who are innovators.

To identify the innovators inside a team, managers and leaders should look to identify people with three key characteristics:

  1. People who are open to ideas;
  2. Those who show problem-solving skills; and
  3. Employees who are highly motivated and use initiative.

Some of these skills can be taught through training, professional development and experience. Much of it is also achieved by the organisation’s leadership capacity and culture.

Research suggests leaders should adopt a transformational leadership style that is more inspiring and collaborative to generate a shared vision among employees. In a practical sense, many of the barriers to innovation and creative thinking are expressed through the limitations of a hierarchical organisation structure.

By Sam Bell FIML

IML’s general manager – corporate services and research

Speaking up without fear

Elizabeth Ticehurst and Hoda Nahlous investigate what part a ‘speaking up’
and ‘whistleblowing’ culture plays in rebuilding corporate trust.

In this current era where trust in corporations is low, there is a demand for organisations to develop an ethical corporate culture to control and minimise, to the extent possible, corporate misconduct. As a result, organisations are focusing on better understanding and improving their internal culture and practices. As part of this process, an effective ‘speak up’ and ‘whistleblower’ culture is becoming a prominent benchmark in measuring whether an organisation has a good corporate culture.

The benefits of ‘speaking up’

An effective ‘speak up’ culture is one where employees are encouraged to raise concerns and feel comfortable in doing so without fear of persecution. This requires the board and senior executives of the organisation to clearly articulate to staff what is ‘good’ corporate behaviour so that ‘bad’ corporate behaviour can be easily identified. In addition, it also requires an organisation’s leaders to encourage a culture of dialogue and openness so that employees feel that management is trustworthy, accessible and well-equipped to handle their concerns.

If ‘speaking up’ is embedded into an organisation’s corporate culture and is effectively managed, then it provides an opportunity for the organisation to deal with employee concerns in advance of these concerns escalating into any form of crisis.

What is a ‘whistleblower’?

‘Speaking up’ is sometimes fused with the term ‘whistleblowing’. Although a ‘speak up’ culture must also be a culture that encourages whistleblowing, ‘whistleblowing’ has a specific meaning under law. In particular, ‘speaking up’ often involves an employee raised concerns with respect to their own personal circumstances within the organisation. By contrast, a ‘whistleblower’ is an insider within an organisation, who reports misconduct or dishonest or illegal activity that has occurred within that same organisation.

Whistleblowing has often been associated with negative connotations, most prominently that it is used as a tool by aggrieved employees to make a ‘nasty’ complaint against particular individuals, or that it is an act of disloyalty to the organisations (or ‘backstabbing’ of any relevant individuals involved in the whistleblower disclosure).  However, effective whistleblowing is key to eliciting trust among employees as it demonstrates that the organisation actually wants to know and cares about any misconduct or dishonest or illegal activity occurring within the organisation.

In any case, the proposed amendments to the whistleblower laws look to enforce the implementation by certain organisations of internal whistleblower policies, and to further strengthen whistleblower protections.

The law

Currently, a whistleblower is protected under law if they:

  • are a current officer, employee, contractor (or employee of a contractor) of the company that they are making the disclosure about;
  • disclose the information to any of the company’s auditor (or a member of the audit team); a director, secretary or senior manager of the company, or a person authorised by the company to receive whistleblower disclosure; or ASIC;
  • provide their name to the person or authority that they have made the disclosure to;
  • have reasonable grounds to suspect a breach by the subject of their disclosure; and
  • make the disclosure in good faith.

Certain protections are afforded to whistleblowers under the law, including protection of information provided by the whistleblower and protection for whistleblowers against litigation and from victimisation.

Proposed changes to whistleblower laws

Late last year, the federal government introduced a Bill aimed at improving protection for whistleblowers in the corporate, financial, credit and tax sectors. The Bill proposes various changes to the current whistleblower protection laws, including a requirement that public companies and large private companies implement internal whistleblower policies. Notably, it also proposes extending protection to a whistleblower who makes a report to a journalist or politician in circumstances where they reasonably believe there is an imminent risk of serious harm or danger to public health or safety, or to the ‘financial system’, if the information is not acted upon immediately, and a “reasonable period” has passed since the whistleblower first made a protected disclosure.

The whistleblower’s right to confidentiality is a key feature of the Bill. If enacted, these rules would potentially lead to significant civil penalties, and even criminal charges, for individuals and entities who breach the confidentiality of a whistleblower, or who engage in detrimental conduct towards an individual because that person has been, or is suspected of being, a whistleblower.

The changes were to take effect from 1 July 2018, however, the Bill is still pending in Parliament at the time of writing this article (August 2018). In any case, there is an expectation that most (if not all) of the proposed changes will be passed.


Hoda Nahlous is a director and Elizabeth Ticehurst is special counsel –  Employment at KPMG law

 

 

 

Delivering a fantastic experience: Learning that gets results

Professional learning doesn’t have to be dull. Rewrite the rules and you’ll have happy, engaged team members that stick around, says learning and development specialist Samantha Mueller.

By Emma Mulholland

Anyone who has worked in retail knows the biggest challenge is attracting and retaining talent. That’s where Samantha Mueller, Head of Learning and Development at Fantastic Furniture comes in. Her secret? Delivering a fantastic experience from day one onwards. If you can delight team members from the start you’ll have skilled, engaged team members that want to stay and progress in the business. Since she joined the well-known retailer Fantastic Furniture in 2016, Mueller has focused on delivering learning solutions that are aligned to the business objectives and mission to ‘Make Life Fantastic’.

“I love the brand – it’s a fun, vibrant and dynamic place to be,” she says of the company, which has come a long way in its 30 years. What started out as a single stall selling plastic garden furniture at Sydney’s Parklea Markets now comprises 75 stores, two Australian manufacturing factories and more than 1,200 employees.

A brand refresh in March has played up the company’s fun, cheeky approach to the market and has brought significant changes, including plans to grow the business and a refresh of its employer brand and values.  But what could have been a challenging time for the team and business has instead been an opportunity to engage and innovate? Here, the Head of Fantastic Furniture’s Learning and Development team tells Leadership Matters how they pulled it off.

Collaborative approach

“I’m collaborative in my approach — I look for ways to involve others and leverage the diverse experience of our team,” says Mueller, who started at the Sydney office after stints at Dick Smith Electronics and international beverage behemoth Lion. “My background is in leading operational

teams but over time I’ve morphed into L&D roles. I’ve always been passionate about L&D because of the positive impact it can give individuals and the business. I’ve seen the impact when L&D is not a priority – it has a negative impact on engagement, turnover and growth.”

Investment in roles like Mueller’s are becoming increasingly common in the retail sector — a shift she puts down to the modern workplace, where employees are after more than just a pay cheque. “Just like customers, who want more value and a better experience from retailers, our people want more from us too: more input, more opportunities and a greater employee experience,” she says. “Businesses that aren’t focused on that are the ones that get left behind.” But strong engagement brings its own challenges.

In the case of Fantastic Furniture, where team members are encouraged to take ownership of the brand, any organisational change involves collaboration with the team.

“The brand refresh was not about changing direction but showcasing who we are and what we stand for,” says Mueller. “Our teams are extremely passionate about the business, so the change management approach was critical. We took every opportunity to seek input on decisions that impact the team. For example our marketing team flew retail team members to Sydney so they could be part of designing their new uniforms. Taking this collaborative approach enabled the team to prepare for change and contribute to outcomes that impact them.”

Learning that benefits team member and the business 

Before embarking on a new project, Mueller asks herself one question: how will this make life fantastic for the team and business? “With the rebrand, we reviewed our L&D programs to align core programs to business objectives. In the past two years we’ve rebuilt our induction and foundation programs with an emphasis on ensuring our team has a fantastic experience through every touch point.

“We launched our accredited training through ‘Fantastic eCademy’, enabling team members to complete their Certificate III in Retail and progress their careers within our business. We’ve also enhanced our online platform ‘Learning Lounge’ to improve how we communicate and deliver learning on a national scale. We’re focused on delivering solutions that benefit both team members and the business,” says Mueller.

Mueller’s team recently revamped the online (World Manager) platform which is accessible to team members via desktop and a smartphone app. The online platform is used to deliver learning and communications, as well as manage a peer recognition program. They’ve also created social forums for team members to share updates and provide feedback. “We’re leveraging technology to enhance the learning experience,” says Mueller. “For me it’s about creating something that our team want to participate in and be part of.”

Experience is everything

When in doubt, Mueller asks herself: “How will this create a fantastic experience?” For example, during a review of Fantastic Furniture’s customer service training, she let the retail teams take the reins, asking them: “How can we deliver a great experience for customers?” In the end, they came up with a ‘Fantastic Customer Experience Program’ that involves a unique six-step approach.

To launch the program, the regional area leaders came up with a competition, ‘Share your Fantastic Customer Experiences’. Team members were encouraged to post on an online forum about the fantastic experiences they were delivering to their customers. “Team members immediately began posting videos, sharing success stories, singing and acting out the Fantastic six process for engaging customers,” says Mueller. “The results were amazing. We got the highest usage and click throughs we’ve ever had on the forums and two months following the launch, Fantastic Furniture recorded its highest-ever net promoter score (NPS). Customers are having a fantastic experience in stores and NPS results are continuing to increase”. The benefits are ongoing. Engagement and posts on the forums have continued and the social sharing aspect has proven to enhance the teams learning experience.

Fantastic Beginnings

Mueller says that a fantastic onboarding and induction is one that is structured, personalised and well supported: “First impressions count and we’ve found that our ‘Fantastic Beginnings’ program helps new starters get up and running quickly because they know what to expect and what path they’ll follow in their first three months.”

On day one, new starters receive a Fantastic Welcome Pack, customised by their leader, which includes a guide to help them navigate their first three months. The leader also has a guide to support them with the onboarding and induction process.

“I’m a big believer in a blended approach so we’ve incorporated online learning with on-the-job activities and check-ins along the way,” says Mueller. “We utilise our platform to capture how people are tracking.” From there, the team member and leader have regular check-ins, so they have a chance to connect, share feedback and set goals.

Pathways to progress

When Mueller surveyed team members to find out what they wanted from L&D, one thing stood out: opportunities to learn and progress. And so the Fantastic eCademy was born: a nationally accredited, nine-month program. Over the past 12 months, 100 team members have completed the program, attaining a Certificate III in Retail. “What’s great is that our leaders, including CEO Debra Singh, get involved in the graduations and make a big effort to recognise the achievements of our team,” says Mueller. “Demand is such that over the next year we will look at adding higher qualifications to the mix, including Certificate IV or Diploma level qualifications.”

A clear organisational pathway makes it easy for employees to know what skills and behaviours will assist them in progressing to their next role. Recently Mueller, launched the ‘Fantastic Leadership Pathway’. The pathway has four defined levels of leadership – from The Ace (high potential team members and first-time leaders) through to The Visionary (those at general manager and executive level) – each level is identified by a particular set of skills and behaviours.

Team members are encouraged to take a proactive approach with their development and are supported with an online toolkit. The toolkit contains training resources and links to external sources, including leadership books such as Georgia Murch’s Fixing Feedback. “Two months after the launch we had more than 500 downloads, which is significant because it shows that both leaders and team members are proactively using it,” says Mueller.

“I’ve just launched ‘ACE Leadership’, our first national leadership program aligned to the leadership pathway. It’s a six-month program designed to support new leaders to raise their profile and take ownership of their personal brand. We’ve had more than 130 ACE leaders enrol in the program. I’m excited to support their journey and progression in our business.”

Measuring success

Mueller’s team will evaluate the leadership program over the coming year, assessing the participants’ career progression and the take-up among the company’s high-potential team members. Every project her team launches is evaluated to assess if intended outcomes have been met. Mueller’s team is fun and down to earth but also commercially focused. “It’s important to be able to demonstrate the value L&D adds to the business,” she says.

“We always look at the return on engagement and investment. For example, with our Customer Experience Program, we looked at participation and leader feedback, as well as our NPS, sales and upsells. We compared results before and after the program.”

Since Mueller joined Fantastic Furniture, employee retention has increased 14 per cent. When asked what makes her such an engaged member of the Fantastic Furniture team, Mueller doesn’t hesitate: “What really stands out for me is the genuine care, commitment and investment in people. I’m supported and empowered to deliver on our mission to Make Life Fantastic”.

Culture Club

Chair of the Canberra Raiders, Allan Hawke, says leadership and culture are critical to the club kicking goals.

By Anthony O’Brien.

Allan Hawke AC FIML is a former senior public servant and diplomat. He served as Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Paul Keating, led three major government departments including the Department of Defence, and was High Commissioner to New Zealand from 2003 to 2006, later adding Chancellor of the Australian National University to his list of credentials. For the past five years, Hawke has been Chair of the Canberra Raiders National Rugby League (NRL) team, where his unique brand of leadership is galvanising players, fans and the Canberra community to share a culture of success.

A winter’s night in Canberra can be inhospitable. But it takes more than sub-zero temperatures to dampen the spirits of the 12,000 Raiders fans who have turned out to barrack for their team. The gate count amounts to more than one in two of the club’s 20,000-plus membership, a figure that has doubled since Hawke took the helm and which he credits to the Raiders’ administration.

Hawke is justifiably proud of the growth in member numbers, and puts it down, in part, to culture. “Culture simply describes the way we do things around here,” he says. “It involves developing a set of shared and lived values about what it means to be a Raider.”

Results through people

Culture comes from the top, and the Raiders’ board has bucked the trend of most other NRL clubs by helping to crack the glass ceiling. Hawke, a long-time advocate of women in executive roles, explains; “One thing that has changed during the course of my five years as Chair, is that we now have two women on the Board. One is former group accountant, Yvonne Gillett. The other is former elite athlete and lawyer, Bronwyn Fagan.”

Combined with other leaders in their field on the current board, Hawke says he has “a good group of people”. Nonetheless, he is aware that having women on the board sends a clear message of inclusion to the broader community, and this, he believes, has helped to bolster the club’s female membership and participation. He’s recently been looking at the board’s composition and renewal and expects to add another female in the not too distant future, based on a particular skill set and aims in the longer term to achieve a ratio of 40 to 50 per cent women on the board.

However, one issue the board doesn’t touch is player selection. “You hire the Head Coach and the CEO to do that,” says Hawke. “You don’t second guess them by doing the job for them; it’s not the USA model where the Chair is also CEO and President.” This notion of giving employees the scope to effectively perform their role is at the heart of Hawke’s leadership philosophy. “I call it ‘results through people’,” he explains. “It’s based on a fundamental belief that unless you get the people side right, you cannot deliver and sustain high performance on the results side of the equation.”

Hawke’s views were formed early in his career when he moved from being a subject matter expert to having others report to him. Hungry for guidance on what it meant to be an effective leader, Hawke read widely and attended seminars. But it wasn’t enough. Finding the answers lay in self-reflection.

“I started looking for ways to maximise and optimise people’s performance and contribution to the job,” recalls Hawke. “I realised my role as a leader was to mentor, coach, and help people strive towards their potential and a continuing high level of performance. It’s all about bringing the best out in people; lighting the fire inside them rather than the all too prevalent control freak approach of lighting a fire underneath people.”

Indeed, Hawke is unwavering on the value of nurturing people: “If you get the people, the results will follow. If you spend all your time worrying about finances, results and the like, you’re just spinning your wheels; you won’t get the best out of people and you can’t create and sustain a high performing organisation.”

A sense of community

Hawke’s mantra on the value of people has seen player welfare become a cornerstone of the Canberra Raiders. Considerable support is given to help players invest in their future. However, they are expected to give back: “We’re interested in turning out good people,” Hawke says. “So our players are heavily involved in community-based activities, and that’s been very well received by the local community.”

Over the course of the season, the Raiders raised more than $70,000 as part of their game day charity fundraising for 12 local charities. And one of their first-grade squad, Sam Williams has been nominated for the NRL’s community award, the Ken Stephen Medal, in recognition of his ongoing role as an Ambassador for Ronald McDonald House as well as his personal fundraising and support for a young person in his home town, who was left a paraplegic after a backyard trampolining accident.

However, “community” can also be a very personal concept at the Raiders. Hawke cites the example of debutante Emre Guler, the first person of Turkish origin to play professional NRL. “His mother was given the honour of presenting him his first Raiders jersey,” says Hawke. “Anybody who saw that video clip would have been touched by the emotion of the moment. It was just extraordinary. It garnered so many positive responses, even from fans of other NRL clubs.”

Part of being a Canberra Raider is an expectation that players will embrace the club’s culture. Hawke notes, “I was a young player once and it’d be fair to say that I was no angel. And sometimes our players misbehave too. We have a reputation for helping people through their mistakes. But, if we feel they’ve really breached our culture, we move them on even though that has sometimes worked against us in terms of results on the field.” Despite this, Hawke believes the Canberra community supports the club’s disciplinary actions because “they can see that we are acting for what is right, not who is right”.

As head of the green machine’s board, Hawke admits it is a challenge steering the ship through Australia’s crowded sporting market. “We face competition, particularly from Australian Rules and soccer, which drives us to engage with the broader district to identify, recruit and develop talented kids through our junior development system.” He also  continually looks at ways the club can make a difference to its supporters – a focus that has yielded results. Hawke says:
“We are currently in the best position
we’ve ever been in, in terms of sponsorship, membership and financials, which should deliver us an assured future.”

An independent report pinpoints the value delivered by the Raiders to the ACT in the 2017 season at almost $15.5 million. According to Hawke, “The Raiders give back to the Canberra and district community in a way that no other sporting club does in the ACT.” That concept of giving back is broad. “If you look around the Rugby League, there’s a disproportionate number of coaches, administrative people and media commentators, who have all come out of the Raiders,” says Hawke. “We’ve also made a big contribution in identifying and developing talent that goes on to play with other clubs. Maybe there’s something in the Canberra water; maybe they leave us with lime green in their bloodstream and an imprint of the Raiders DNA.”

Sticking to a game plan

Being inside the club at a high level has changed Hawke’s own experience of being a Raiders fan. “I figure it increases your blood pressure,” he quips. Though he adds, “When you can see clearly what this team is capable of and you try and rationalise this against some of the close losses we’ve had in 2018, it’s a bit of a conundrum.”

Hawke says an area of focus has been the players’ resolve to stick with a game plan. “In the past, they were unsure about how to handle adversity, and they would do things they would never do in the other 70 minutes of the game. These days they are executing what everyone has agreed on. The players have really come of age in that area as we saw in their last three games of the season, beating two of the top four teams at home and narrowly losing to the eighth team in Auckland, while remaining committed until the final whistle blew.”

Although 2018 won’t be the year the Raiders take out the premiership, Hawke says he will be “completely flummoxed” if the team doesn’t make the top eight in 2019.

Hawke continues to be passionate in his belief that through good leadership one man or one woman can make an incredible difference to an organisation. He stresses too the importance of life-long learning and says becoming a Chartered Manager sits near the top of his “To Do” list. (See managersandleaders.com.au/chartered-manager for details.)

How Booktopia adapted to industry disruption

As a manager for two decades in the book industry, John Purcell has led people through extraordinary change.

As an author, John Purcell is capable of amazing feats of imagination. But away from writing fiction, he’s been heading up Booktopia’s marketing and buying teams, and is now Director of Books, helping the online retailer become one of the fastest growing companies in Australia. In the past nine years, annual revenue has swelled from $4m to $114m (with a compound annual growth rate of 35% per annum). This year, Booktopia won the People’s Choice award at the national finals of the Telstra Business Awards, as well as the NSW Business of the Year award.

Starting small

“When I joined Booktopia, most of the staff were doing customer service and order fulfilment,” he recalls. At that time, Booktopia was a small operation. “A bell would ring every day and all of us – including the CEO – would go down to the garage and help load a single Australia Post van with books. They gave us three minutes in their schedule, so all of us would rush out there.”

Since those early days Booktopia’s personnel has multiplied from 25 to almost 200; and Purcell now runs a team of six people including a content team, merchandisers and buyers. But that culture of “rolling up your sleeves” has remained constant, he says.

Their culture has been guided by a very clear and simple business strategy, says Purcell. “Our CEO Tony Nash is single-minded about growth. He’s always been prepared to reinvest in the business so that when we needed a warehouse, or shelving, or automation, the resources were available.”

Beneath that overriding growth objective, managers are given the scope to develop their areas of the business. “There’s no micromanagement,” says Purcell. “We have a lot of ownership of our particular areas and that makes us feel that we are part of the business. I think that’s one reason our staff retention has been so high.”

Growing pains

Booktopia’s growth has been remarkable by any standards. It is the only company to be listed in the annual BRW Fast 100 eight of the last nine years. In September it was named in the Australian Financial Review Top 500 Private Companies. But growing at such a pace does present challenges for managers, Purcell admits:

“There’s never a stable environment when you’re growing so fast. We had a very fluid decision-making process and the danger was that teams could get overloaded and some projects perhaps wouldn’t achieve return on investment.”

To overcome this, Booktopia’s leadership team had to introduce more formal processes, explains Purcell. “For our growth to be sustainable, we had to develop our own corporate structure from within. What helped us was attracting people who had been in corporate environments. Every new person we hired brought knowledge and we would alter things accordingly.”

Alarm bells

Booktopia’s growth is all the more impressive when you consider the rollercoaster that Australia’s wider publishing industry has been riding. A decade ago mobile technology began seizing consumers’ attention and refused to let go. In 2011, high street bookstores Borders and Angus & Robertson closed their doors forever. All up, close to 200 bookshops closed around this time and the Australian book market fell by 20%.

Catherine Milne, Head of Fiction at publisher HarperCollins, recalls this time with a shudder: “They were dark days. Bookshops were closing, TV was suddenly accessible on mobile screens, social media was swallowing up people’s time and the Australian dollar was so high that – briefly – it became cheaper to buy books from overseas.”

Milne, who is publishing Purcell’s new novel, The Girl on the Page, says Booktopia helped the industry fight back. “It changed the retail landscape. After the closure of so many rural and regional bookstores, Booktopia was able to service all those Australians who can’t easily travel to a bookshop – not to mention many more who simply like the speed and convenience of online shopping.”

Question everything

As leader in an industry undergoing so much change, Purcell encourages his colleagues to stay up to date. “There are new products born every month from publishing presses. If you want to keep up, reading the right newsletters and social media is vital.

Reflecting on her own experience of leading through change, Milne recalls: “During rapid change you’ve really got to question everything; question your processes, question your methods. You have to ask yourself if what you did previously is still working today – and then be prepared to change when it’s not.”

“Our CEO James Kellow is incredibly good at setting very concrete goals for us that we can reach and then celebrating when we reach them. I think that’s the best way – to really focus on the things that you can influence, the things you can change, the things you can create.”

Kellow is one of the two leaders in publishing who Purcell admires most: “James and also Louise Sherwin-Stark [CEO at Hachette Australia] have made very strong and clever push to make sure they are publishing Australian stories,” he says. “In the past 10 years, it’s become clear that Australians are reading Australians, which is extraordinary because for most of our history we looked towards overseas literature.”

Separating fact from fiction

Purcell points out that neither of these leaders inspired ‘Julia’, one of the more memorable characters in his new novel, who is a terrible leader.

“Julia is the publishing director of my fictional publishing house and she’s a terrible leader because she’s all management and no product knowledge. She thinks only of the bottom line so her ability to inspire people in the business is nil, because she has absolutely no relationship with the books. All she sees is the numbers in the end.”

So how did Purcell’s real-life publisher feel when she read this? “There were times when I winced,” laughs Milne. “I thought ‘Is that the perception people have of publishing?’ Like any industry, there are certainly managers who prioritise profit above all else, but they are few and far between in publishing. In truth, you can only be a good publisher if you put the interests of the book and the reader first and if you invest the time that a book needs to get it right.

“I’m hoping that the mere fact I’m publishing The Girl on the Page is a counterpoint to the Julias of this world!”


By Andy McLean, Editorial Director of Leadership Matters.

*The full version of this article was published in the December 2018 edition of Leadership Matters.

Other life: The X Factor

Taking the helm as licensee of TEDxCanberra has been a rewarding journey for Wisdom Learning consultant Ingrid Tomanovits AFIML, on both a professional and personal level.

By Lisa Calautti

When Ingrid Tomanovits sat among the audience at her first TEDxCanberra event six years ago, little did she know she was about to embark upon a life-changing path.

Upon learning that the speaker and performer event was organised entirely by volunteers, Tomanovits made it her mission to get involved. Fast forward to 2018, and she is the TEDxCanberra licensee, where she oversees a volunteer crew, who spend more than 3,000 hours bringing an event to life each year in the nation’s capital.

The experience of organising has left Tomanovits grateful for those in the world who want to make life better for others. “One of the things that I love about TEDxCanberra is everybody on that stage is just an ordinary person who decided to pursue their ideas and take action to improve something,” she says. “It is really inspiring to me to see people who are relatable. You don’t have to be a business or industry mogul or a millionaire to have a positive impact on your world. That was the thing that stood out to me the most.”

TED originated in 1984 with the goal of spreading ideas via short and powerful talks, where Technology, Entertainment, and Design come together. Today, TED covers topics ranging from science to business to global issues. As one event in the global TEDx program, TEDxCanberra showcases the best-undiscovered ideas in the local community, which Tomanovits says is also about bringing people together to make things happen. Ideas on how to eradicate scabies, to schooling solutions for children suffering from critical or long-term illnesses, to starting a revolution of human kindness are just some of the talks that featured in the 2018 event.

Likening her work with TEDxCanberra to running a business in her spare time, Tomanovits’ passion is palpable. Her enjoyment at seeing the end result drives her, as she knows from personal experience that being in the audience can be life-changing. One achievement she is most proud of is securing more women speakers through taking a deliberate approach to finding and assisting them to prepare for the stage. Also, learning there are times as a leader when you don’t have all the answers has been a welcome lesson, she admits. “It might be contrary to a lot we are taught about leadership but, for me, it is about having the humility to know that I don’t have all the answers but I do know how to ask for help. I have found time and time again, if I am prepared to ask for help, it will be there,” she said.

5 Minutes with Brad Fenech

At just 24 years of age, Brad Fenech CMgr AFIML, senior consultant at Approach ICT, has already enjoyed a flourishing career in Canberra’s public and private sectors. He says the key to being a good manager is practising what you preach. we asked him to share six lessons from his career to date.

As told to Lisa Calautti

  1. Be yourself

“Build your own self. And what I mean by that is: it is all well and good to have role models but take bits and pieces from each as it is impossible to mirror one specific person. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses.”

2. Be uncomfortable

“Go outside your typical comfort zones. Take some risks. For me, that’s learning to be more creative. It forces you to learn more skills and talk to people. With that, you naturally find new ideas popping into your head at random times of the day or night.”

3. Take time out

“Something I have really committed to is meditation. And I can’t get enough of it. We are always on the phone, or a computer or some sort of technology, so there is so much going through my head. A good way to just unwind and collect my thoughts is through meditation.”

4. Be creative and innovative

“While I have found it challenging, these traits allow you to be one step ahead.  As a manager or a leader, if you aren’t practising these qualities, when it comes to your team you can’t expect your colleagues to do the same. It is basic psychology – practise what you preach.”

5. Be a good problem solver

“Two words come to mind – passion and confidence. Someone once said to me that life is all about finding problems that you enjoy solving. I guess the stereotype is that a problem is a negative thing but I am slowly coming around to the notion that they are not all negative. I try to find problems that I
enjoy solving.”

6. Be strong in your decisions

“This goes back to confidence for me. You make a decision and you might not be right, but you sure won’t be the last person to make a wrong decision. There will be naysayers but if you are comfortable with your decision and you have remained ethical and considered all the sources of information, then I don’t think there is anything more that you can do. As a manager or leader, it is important to be able to make a confident decision while remaining ethical. It is as simple as that – make a good example of yourself.”

3 Points of view: Hey, that’s not fair!

Fairness matters to staff and employees a lot more than  you might think. As a manager and leader, how do you ensure you are being fair and even-handed? journalist Nicola Field asked three experts .

Employees need to trust you if you are going to lead them. That means I not only have to be fair, but also need them to perceive me as being fair.

I make efforts always to have open lines of communication. Where possible, I explain the reasons behind my decisions. I involve my team in coming up with an action plan to solve specific problems. You need to be vulnerable sometimes with your team and share your own experiences.

I make a constant effort to treat everyone equally. The goal is always to align my actions with the shared purpose. The team should be able to see the link between the actions and the goals we share, even if it sometimes requires challenging old processes.

Leaders are not perfect. I try to be aware of, and take ownership of, my own biases and emotions. I admit when I have made a mistake and forgive others when they admit their mistakes.

Transparency is another crucial ingredient in both being fair and being perceived as being fair. My team knows how I make decisions. I am always upfront and truthful.

Ankit Sharma CMgr MIML – Project Manager, MMG Ltd


Transparency is critical to fairness. Especially with any reward, recognition and hiring processes. Ensure selection panels have diverse representation because while it is important to be fair, it’s also critical that it is seen to be fair.

If you have staff who are working harder than others, this needs to be recognised. If some employees aren’t contributing as much, seek to understand why. If you don’t manage a poor performer this can leave others disgruntled. Equity theory tells us that employees can be demotivated if they feel their effort is greater than what they receive in return, and they may seek ways to improve the level of fairness from their perspective. So leaders must take action. Listen to what’s going on in your team. If you are seeing first-hand or hearing from team members about there being unequal levels of effort, look at both sides of the story and work to find a resolution.

Michelle Gibbings CMgr FIML

Author of Career Leap: How to Reinvent and Liberate Your Career (Wiley)


Avoid the blame game. I have a personal philosophy of always looking at the problem, not the person. Fairness is about acknowledging that mistakes happen and encouraging employees to take responsibility.

For managers and leaders, fairness starts with transparent communication about expectations and consequences.

Be aware too of perception versus reality. Be sure you’re not spending time helping one particular employee more than others. Similarly, in any team there is almost inevitably one person who is super helpful, and another who just coasts along. It’s not fair to take advantage of those who work hard by overloading them – yet it can be an easy trap to fall into, until they’ve had enough and hand in their resignation. Instead, encourage the coasters to stand up and pull their weight – it’s not a case of picking on one person, or you as a manager trying to look good. What you are aiming for is the success of the team.

Coach the coasters to the point where they realise they need to pull their weight or reconsider whether they want to be part of the team at all.

Ken Murphy FIML

Founder, Ken Murphy Consulting


 

The Conversation: Awake to the call of leadership

Dr Daniel Jolley IMLa is no stranger to the fine art of decision making. As a consultant anaesthetist, he is called upon to demonstrate leadership and make life-saving decisions in an environment where split second timing can be critical.

Story by Nicola Field  //  Photography Peter Whyte

Dynamic decision making is the name of the game in an operating theatre. As Dr Daniel Jolley explains, “You try to be proactive rather than reactive.” Like all good skills, this comes with training. Anaesthesia requires a minimum five-year training period, often spent working alongside senior anaesthetists. Nonetheless, Dr Jolley observes that these days, the safety factor of surgery often hinges more on the decisions made by an anaesthetist rather than drugs, technology,
or equipment.

To learn more about how Dr Jolley rises to the leadership challenge – and why as a medico, he opted to undertake management and leadership training – IML CEO David Pich FIML met him in Hobart.

David Pich:   In leadership we tend to think somebody is in charge, and others follow instructions. But it doesn’t sound like that’s the case in an operating theatre.

Dr Jolley:   Australia is quite unique in that the position of the surgeon and the anaesthetist are on more of an equal footing. Coupled with the Australian willingness to challenge authority, members of the theatre team are less likely to be totally subservient to the perceived leader in the room. It’s interesting from a safety point of view – and this is something that’s been heavily studied inside the airline industry. There is a reasonably strong theory, for example, that Qantas continues to be the safest airline in the world both because of the exceptional training the airline invests in its pilots, but also because of the cultural tendency, in Australia, to challenge authority.

It’s the same in a theatre. It’s not uncommon for my aesthetic nurses to very carefully say, “Are you sure you want to do that?” So there’s a shared leadership role in the theatre environment.

DP:   Before you walk into the operating theatre, is there a briefing session?

DJ:   There’s been a big push over the past five years for a team meeting at the start. We have a brief discussion of every patient on the operating list so that the surgeon, anaesthetist and nursing staff can raise any concerns about potential problems and ensure everybody’s on the same page. You’re basically preparing for the unexpected, so that when the unexpected happens, it can be handled in a safe and effective way.

DP:   That’s interesting because a major focus for IML, at the moment, is the concept of intentional leadership. In order to end what we call ‘the chaos of accidental management’, you have to intend to lead. Are you saying intentional leadership is alive and well in our hospitals, and it cuts down the opportunity for accidents to happen?

DJ:   The surgeon is largely the default leader. But that leadership role can change very quickly in emergency situations, and when that happens, it occurs smoothly and without any real tension.

Where there’s say, a cardiac arrest, that’s an area that the anaesthetist is appropriately trained and expert in managing. The surgeon will look to the anaesthetist for direction on what to do next.

When I was a young trainee, I had a patient with a very nasty traumatic injury to the eye. The eye needed to be enucleated – that is, removed – because it had exploded from trauma. Pulling on the eye during the surgery can cause the heart rate to slow precipitously and even stop, which was what happened. It was the middle of the night, when not a lot of people were around, I did what I needed to do with the anaesthetic machine, gave appropriate drugs and then started CPR. We had a good outcome, and the gentlemen recovered well.

However, the feedback I received from my mentor – a very senior anaesthetist – was that I shouldn’t have been the one doing the CPR. I should have directed somebody else to do that. It was totally appropriate criticism because all medical staff are trained for CPR, and I needed to take a step back and direct them. Once I was on the chest I was very blinkered, and much more likely to be fixated on a smaller part of the problem rather than taking the big picture view.

DP:   At IML, we believe that reflection is often ignored in leadership. Leaders make huge decisions that impact lots of people, and then they typically don’t reflect on them. But that doesn’t seem to be standard practice in hospitals?

DJ:   It’s certainly something people are very cognisant of now. We’ve always had a focus on looking at why adverse events happen, and what we’ve done leading up to them. Then having a non-judgmental discussion about how it could be avoided in the future.

DP:   How do you stop yourself feeling vulnerable in those situations because, essentially, your performance is being judged?

DJ:   It’s a challenge. Anaesthetists have the potential to be self-critical. But there is a dominant culture among Australian anaesthetists of being a very social and supportive fraternity. So there’s always a lot of interaction and a supportive view.

DP:   You mentioned your mentor earlier. There’s an interesting statistic that only 21 per cent of CEOs of ASX 200 companies have a mentor. Whereas it seems in your occupation and your brand of leadership, mentoring plays a fundamental part.

DJ:   One of the challenges with the whole concept of mentorship is that sometimes we try to artificially force it on a situation. I suspect a true mentor is someone who finds you rather than you find him or her. That can be a challenge during medical training. You often spend only short periods in any one hospital or department, maybe six to 12 months at most, so it can be difficult to find a true mentor. However, most large departments encourage the development of mentor/mentee relationships to guide you through growth in non-clinical areas like leadership and decision making – things that are often forgotten in the midst of other professional growth.

DP:   One might expect that hospitals are full of accidental managers – people who, because of their technical skills, have ended up in management and leadership positions. What is the real situation in the medical profession?

DJ:   One of the challenges hospitals face is that there are lots of bureaucratic and organisational problems, which have largely been solved in the business world. There is a greater effort now to train, particularly medical staff, in both leadership and managerial roles so that they’re much less accidental and organic.

DP:   You decided to complete an MBA, and develop your skills in management and leadership. Why did you do that?

DJ:   When you reach mid-level seniority as a medical specialist, you often find yourself on various hospital committees, and making accidental managerial or leadership contributions in different areas. It’s very easy to be resistant to ‘management speak’. But I could see there was some real theory behind it, and I was doing myself, the hospital and my patients a disservice if I wasn’t open to learning more about that.

DP:   So, you went off to do an MBA at Deakin University, which is one of our accredited MBAs at IML. What did you learn?

DJ:   The Deakin MBA was very satisfying. It confirmed some of the things I suspected – that the organisational challenges, business challenges, finance and human resource challenges that impact day-to-day hospital life are far from unique. We have a responsibility to properly understand
these so that we can improve the way hospitals work.

DP:   What are some of the stand-out things  that you’ve taken from your MBA?

DJ:   Among the three things I’ve found most immediately relevant, Business Process Management taught me to look at the flow of information, staff, patients and associates, and how we create value. It blew my mind how complex all the processes are that our staff are undertaking on a daily basis. That means there are lots of areas for improvement and efficiency improvement.

The second area I thought was very interesting was Organisational Management and Human Resources. After completing the unit, you see that there is a huge amount of theory, both from the psychological point of view and behavioural theory, and I found that really useful.

The third area I found useful was Change Management. It’s all well and good to identify where there are problems, and then say, ‘Well, these are the solutions’, but implementing the solution is where everything falls down.

DP:   So would you recommend professional development in management and leadership for specialist medical staff?

DJ:   Definitely. The very nature of your specialist role means you have a position of leadership and you need to manage others. You might be lucky and do those well, but a lot of us don’t, and it’s our responsibility to learn to do them better.

In my line of work, where critical things are happening, you get the best performance out of your team when you’re calm and considerate in what you do. Internally, you may not be so calm, but projecting control and confidence is really important to have everyone else respond in a measured way in what could be a life-threatening event.

Leadership in 60 seconds

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat?

Twitter.

Phone, email or face-to-face?

Email.

Name a leader that you admire and why?

Michelle and Barack Obama together, as a team, because of the integrity
they have in the way they approach things. Obama was always referred
to as ‘no drama Obama’. That sort of quiet, confident, competence,
I really admire.

Your personal view on leadership?

One of the important roles of leadership is being able to communicate to the team the destination, what we’re trying to do, and the reason why we’re trying to get there.

Which three guests would you invite to dinner to discuss leadership?

Steve Jobs is number one. Not because I see him as a great leader, but I think he’d be a great dinner guest. Another person would be Julia Gillard to discuss her experience as Labor leader. I find the gender issues in leadership in Australia really fascinating. Mahatma Gandhi would be my third guest, to provide a different historical context on leadership and where it is now.

Advice for somebody just starting out in any career?

Don’t be too worried about getting the direction and the decisions right for where you’re going.  Focus a little more on decisions in a shorter horizon. You don’t know how your interests and skills are going to change.

What’s your personal resilience plan?

I really love running, trail running in particular, and also a bit of mountain biking – all of which are great here in Tassie.