Leadership Amplified by Dr Karen Morley

The key focus for our discussion was on how leaders can successfully navigate the increasingly digital world we inhabit. Alena started her career studying English, then moved to Economics and finally settled on Geography in her quest to understand why things are the way they are. Geography provides her with an interesting perspective, revealing how much our lives are informed and touched by where we live. Over time she’s moved into the technology side: she says we have a big data problem as we’re always collecting masses of geospatial data, and the big challenge is what to do with it, how to learn from it? Which is now her day job as Principal, Technology and Strategy, at Digital Twin Victoria. Alena counsels leaders unfamiliar with/suspicious or nervous about AI to take the time to become familiar with the technology tools. She reassures us that it’s easier than we might think. Her tip is to use a simple AI tool and ask it all your ‘dumb’ questions about other tech tools to build your understanding of what’s going on. Her three top pieces of leadership wisdom apply both to leading in general, and leading through technology: 📌 Relationships first – as a leader you have to build the bridge to your people, so psychological safety, reaching out to others, providing support and being empathetic are critical to leading well. 📌 Ask the stupid question – that way you can direct yourself through situations and information that is unfamiliar. There is so much change we’re always beginners so stay comfortable in not knowing and always asking. 📌 Leaders are great communicators, that’s they’re real strength, so use these skills to help technical teams to get cut-through for their work, and to help them understand what the organisation needs from them. 🤔 How does your placein your environment affect the way you lead?

This statement encapsulates much of my conversation with special guest Glen Sharman who is General Manager for MaxiTRANS NSW. He’s always been in the transport industry and has had the happy opportunity to have a diverse career across different working cultures, with global and local brands, working for large and small companies. Glen reflects that from a young age he had a diverse mix of people around him who were invaluable for providing him with advice and suggestions, which he greatly appreciated. He started his career in the transport and manufacturing industries and he’s maintained a lot of passion for it, he loves it. He says ‘I’ve never looked back’. Glen enjoys the creative, innovative side of things and tries to think outside the square. ‘Where are we now and where do we want to go.’ He describes himself as an early adopter, a disrupter. Much of our conversation focuses on a significant change that Glen’s business has recently been faced with – having to move a large industrial site at short notice – and we discuss his approach to the change. What stands out most is Glen’s commitment to collaboration with his team - having a strong collaborative foundation with the team meant that everyone was prepared to roll up their sleeves and make it happen. ‘I’m proud of our team.’ Glen says yes, it was stressful, yet ‘when you have to manage change, you have open communication and good dialogue with your team, a trusting and safe work environment, it can all come together really well. I truly believe we've done a fantastic job.’ Congratulations Glen! Three key things Glen recommends leaders do for their teams: 📌 Trust your people, have the confidence they'll do well without you looking over their shoulder 📌 Provide ongoing professional development and training for your team, it's an ever changing environment 📌 Self reflect, what did I do well, what could I have done better, and don't beat yourself up!

It can be challenging knowing what it’s like to work in a particular role, industry or organisation. Not knowing is one of the real impediments particularly for women moving into male dominated work. This is something that Donna Stace mastered very early in her career. Donna is an Operational Specialist in a Functional Safety Team at Rio Tinto. Growing up in The Pilbara as she did, she was exposed from an early age to various trades and to the mining industry, and that sparked her interest. She fed her interest by getting out and finding work experience and became known, which of course helped her immensely when she started looking for work roles. She went on to complete her Mechanical trade qualifications and over her career moved into operational leadership roles and has worked across a range of industries. Her approach remains a key part of the advice she provides to others, especially young women, to encourage them to find out more about joining trades as career options. She encourages women to get out and find work experience options, and to challenge the people doing the hiring – ‘make sure you find out about culture and leadership style, what they are like and whether they will suit you’, she says. She’s a great advocate for women in trades, becoming more so after returning to the maintenance area after many years and finding that the dial just hadn’t shifted. To do something about it, because she likes to be active, she co-founded Women in Rail. WIR continues to focus on increasing gender-balance in apprenticeships and trades. There’s been real success there, with numbers approaching parity over the last couple of years. Great work Donna! Donna’s advice for increasing inclusion at work is for leaders to identify the value that diversity can bring to a team. There are benefits, and leaders should know what they are. Donna says ‘It’s important to challenge yourself about what are you actually after, what do you want in this team, what are the skillsets, what are the gaps in your team? Do you need another person that looks exactly like the three other people in your team? Everyone wants to hire themselves, it's easier.’ To make it easier for leaders to be more inclusive they need a good support team, including people who’ll challenge their thinking.

This is such an important piece of advice that Hanli Pretorius offers in this Leadership Amplified episode. Hanli is General Manager, People and Culture – Defence and Social Infrastructure at Ventia. As she says, while she got into HR by chance rather than design - she took on a job, and found herself a career - she’s had great leadership support and the freedom to play and experiment to implement new programs or technologies. She’s had experience across many different organisations and industries, both partnering in the business as well as working in a centre of excellence. Hanli says ‘This year I have shifted in leaps and bounds in my thinking around my purpose. There's such power in having clarity in your own mind and being able to articulate it.’ Since clarifying her own purpose, she’s been very aware of noticing when others articulate theirs and how it conveys their focus and strength of direction. She says ‘When you hear someone else able to clearly articulate their purpose it's quite striking.’ It’s striking to hear the clarity about what they DO want and what they DON’T want. She says, and I can only agree, ‘The inability of people to say no to things comes from not being clear about whatever contribution you want to make to an organisation or society.’ (Clarity doesn’t always make it EASY, but it does makes it EASIER.) ‘The ability to be clear about my purpose, what I want, to recognise and articulate it, has given me focus, it has been powerful and refreshing.’ These are Hanli’s three pieces of advice for early-career HR people: Don't specialise too early on in your carer Value in working as both a BP and in a centre of excellence Gain experience with multiple organisations/industries Listen in for access to much more of Hanli’s wisdom.

It was an interesting way to end the latest conversation on Leadership Amplified: getting great performance from others starts with you, the leader, taking accountability for your own performance and self-improvement. Rohan Horsley made this conclusion after we’d discussed the often-times tricky challenge of team performance and its successful measurement. I enjoyed Rohan’s take on performance and its measurement: it alternately seems to be pretty obvious and yet is at times – usually the tough ones- a delicate balancing act. He starts with the foundation assumption that people want to perform well – a very good place to start! The object is for people to have ownership of their measures, to be clear about what success is, and for their individual measures to be aligned with the team’s and the organisation’s. When people take ownership they naturally achieve and perform. We agreed that this is something both important and challenging, and that it takes time too. It’s so easy, Rohan says, to pick up the old measures and roll them forward; they might no longer apply, might not be the best (just the easiest) to measure and probably won’t be terribly inspiring. He also counsels the importance of trialling measures, as long as you are super-clear that is what you are doing. When the team can trial some measures and get involved in identifying whether or how well they work it inspires creativity and engagement in the measures. It’s important to avoid a blame mentality within the team. You should do a root cause analysis of both success and failure; it might be system or process that’s not right. A lot of relationships and a lot of careers don’t progress as they should because of misunderstandings. What’s key for the team: 📌 Understand the individuals 📌 Lead them in a way that suits their style 📌 Allow them to contribute to the team in ways they can with the skills they have strength in 📌 Where they want to grow give them opportunities People want their contribution to be valued and respected. If you make people compete they’ll find a way to win – that may be within the rules and it may not be, and can have unintended consequences. ✅ Most importantly, measuring performance starts with the leader, with their accountability for the team’s performance, seeking and listening to feedback, and improving their own performance. #motivation #Personaldevelopment #careers #Productivity #performance

The complexity of our world just continues to grow. We have multiple challenges of very different kinds to make sense of and prioritise attention to. One thing that helps is being able to see a way through contradiction, so I was very pleased in this new episode of Leadership Amplified to speak with Ilka Fuerstenberger, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Australia about one contradiction that is regularly encountered by leaders. Leading through warmth while also driving for performance. This is a balancing act that is foremost in Ilka’s mind as she leads her organisation. For her, establishing trust is the first thing she prioritises when she starts a new role. Strength and competence are not the priority in these early stages, instead her focus is on establishing a safe place, being approachable, listening and paying attention to the new team. Ilka says that when trust is established and not doubted it is so much easier to help people reach their goals. People need to know they won’t be shot for making a mistake, and they should feel empowered to generate decisions; after all they’re the ones who have the knowledge to get the right performance. The drive for performance also needs to sit within a context of a clear purpose. ‘What are we here to do?’ As the leader, you need to live it, to ‘inhale it’, to create energy for it, people need to see it ‘written in your face’. When it is so crystal clear, it’s so much easier to drive performance. Perhaps Ilka’s ability to work across contradictions comes from her family’s approach to travel when she was young – prior to visiting a new culture, the challenge was to learn 100 words of their language. And that early experience contributed to her choice of career path – a combination of languages (she speaks 5!!) and economics that would give her the opportunity to work internationally, which she’s done ever since. Ilka’s advice for leading well: 📌 Make use of different ways of doing things – difference is not about better or worse, it contributes creativity and new approaches 📌 Get the support of a mentor or coach, and mentor others as you can – this helps to avoid a bit of the stress and pain for others on their journey 📌 Leading is a journey that’s never finished, and accepting that sense of ongoing challenge is critical

In this latest episode of Leadership Amplified, listen in to Tim Drinkall’s wisdom about careers, their weird but wonderful trajectories, and the value of career support. Tim should know, he’s Head of Learning and Organisational Development at Metro Trains! While Tim has spent 25 years in various learning and organisation development roles, his career started on a surprisingly different trajectory – as a chef and then a Physical Education teacher. In our conversation Tim reflects on how the lessons learnt from these very different kinds of roles have stood him in good stead for the work he does now. And how his mentors helped and at times challenged him to learn and grow to make the most of his skills and capabilities – some he didn’t even know he had or that even existed. He recalls one particularly influential mentor saying 𝑰 𝒄𝒂𝒏 𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒄𝒉 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒂𝒏𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖'𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒏-𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒅 𝒆𝒏𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒕𝒐 𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝒎𝒆. Perhaps when you read those words it might seem like it’s all about what the mentor can teach, but not at all. Just listen to Tim speak about these experiences and how they inspired him – you’ll be inspired too!! We discuss the particular value of role models, people who both believe in and care about you and your growth, and who’ll both challenge and support you. If you're a leader and not sure how to support others in their growth, or a bit tentative about whether or not you should, listen in to Tim because he’ll make it clear why you should discard any reservations that you might have about how valuable your support can be. One thing Tim is very candid about is that he has had a yearning for leadership in whatever roles he has held. He is clear about wanting to lead a team, set a vision and be strategic. Again, referring to role models who have inspired him, Tim has seen some amazing L&OD leaders whom he aspires to emulate. He has self-doubts, yes, ‘asks himself ‘am I good enough?’, and then uses that mindset constructively to learn more and grow further. I asked Tim for his three pieces of advice for people in roles like his, and here’s what he shared: 📌 Provide leaders with what they need (he identified data as being the one thing he was currently focused on) 📌 Set up executive sponsorship of learning and development because then they own it and it’s a way of teaching it forward 📌 Never stop learning yourself – keep questioning and reflecting. 🤔 How might you inspire others to step out of their comfort zone to fulfill their potential? #Careers #Motivation #Personaldevelopment #Leadership

As someone who’s seen a lot of change in her life Sudha Sharma has some terrific advice for approaching it successfully. In Episode 38 of Leadership Amplified we have a powerful conversation about influencing others for change, and Sudha shares her very human-centered and pragmatic approach. She says that ‘in the corporate world where results matter, you can’t achieve them if you don’t take care of people.’ She’s focused on doing that, and helping other leaders do the same. She says ‘Post-COVD there is no playbook on how to deal with a team.’ The old one doesn’t work, but what takes its place? She says that influence is key to the leadership playbook moving forward. How leaders influence now needs to be adjusted – teams are looking for clarity because of course there’s less of it. To hook into what’s important to them - helping them to see more clearly - means identifying and articulating the why of change in clear and simple terms. She says that people are so much less concerned about the what than the why of change, but that most effort in organisations is spent on the what. Shifting the balance is a key way to shift engagement with and openness to change. Her three key pieces of advice for the new playbook are: Use the power of beautiful questions – using beautiful questions helps you to understand what others’ concerns are and then to frame issues and change requirements in ways that will inspire them. Workload is a challenge, so you need to help people to PRIORITISE, making sure that people understand why we are doing - this is a way to help them focus their limited energy Communicate consistently with an emphasis on connection. Sudha reminds us that we actually remember very little of what others say and leaders need to take this into account. And repeat. Consistency and simplicity are key to getting the point across and making it stick. Leaders’ intent really matters, as does how they show up and what they say and do. These basic things influence others more than we realise. 🎧 Listen in to our conversation to discover more about how to influence and lead change: there are some great insights and I’m sure you will enjoy it. #motivation #influence #transformationalchange

In this episode I speak with Lauren Jones about how she helps technical experts transform into great people leaders. Lauren started her working life as an electrical engineer in petrochemical manufacturing and quickly moved into operations management. During that period, she developed important leadership skills heading an operations team, and the importance of quality assurance, health and safety, and environmental compliance became ingrained. One thing that she felt unable to do as a young leader was to step back and see the big picture – it’s critical to understand the big picture, the various stakeholders and what they care about, and what your role in all that is. You need to know what people want from you to be successful. Developing a reflective practice allowed her to do this. Lauren now has her own consulting practice where she loves working with executives, business owners and leaders at all levels to help them improve their businesses. As Lauren experienced herself, moving from a technical role to a leadership role is often quite challenging, creating dilemmas and usually needing a shift in identity. Having the right kind of support to make this move, including the right training, is fundamental to enjoying the new and different set of expectations people leadership brings. Lauren says to help technical experts moving into leadership roles to succeed, the right systems and processes need to be in place. Her advice to get it right: 📌 By ensuring the best systems and processes are in place, senior leaders give people a great opportunity to improve their capability. 📌 Regular feedback, checkins and mentoring help encourage reflection and learning. 📌 New leaders - be open to learning and confident in yourself. Sure, you don’t have all the answers, but no-one else does! As Lauren says, feedback should be a comfortable, regular thing that people seek to help them improve. Listen in as she shares her story and insights, link in comments. #careers #technicalleadership #engineering #personaldevelopment

Much of my conversation with Chris Pearce centered around being flexible in your style and leading authentically. Chris started his career in the Army, then spent a number of years in leadership roles in transport organisations such as FedEx, Linfox and MaxiTrans, and is now with ecoDynamics as Group Fleet and Asset Manager. The connection between flexibility and authenticity is always an interesting one. With some coaching clients, there is a challenge about being flexible in your style VERSUS being authentic. How can you be both? If you’re being your authentic self, who you truly are, shouldn’t you be consistent; people should know what they’re getting? Yes. And no. It’s how you use various styles that is the key. As Chris reflected on various leadership experiences he’d had, from the military to corporate life, and the impact they’d had on both him, the team and its performance, one of the interesting distinctions he made was between a style, and how you use it. He contrasts two different leaders he experienced early in his career, who both used the command and control style. He noted a significant difference in his experience as one boss wielded the style with a high care factor, and another pushed hard but you could see he wasn’t his genuine self. The first used the style for the team, the second used the style for control. The outcomes were quite different – with the first leader, there was better team cohesion, there was never any doubt that they would achieve their goals, the bonds became strong. This set the tone for Chris - it’s OK to be yourself as a leader, and that works better for your team. When you trust that they’ll achieve the outcome, they are more likely to. His introduction to corporate life was ‘like walking into a circus without a ringmaster’, as roles were so much less clear. This was his turn to create the clarity, to help the team to work towards a common goal, understanding the parts they played. Chris concludes our conversation with three pieces of advice for other leaders; keep learning, treat people as people, and have fun.

In this episode I speak with Kate about how leaders can create more focus and be more influential through the way they engage with complexity, and in particular, how they use questions. Kate is the creator of the CURLY APPROACH™ which uses question-based frameworks to create clarity out of complexity. She is the author of two books: ‘The Thrive Cycle: How to build a customer-driven, unstoppable organisation by activating its adaptive DNA’ and ‘Curly Conversations for Teams’. I’m a huge advocate for questions, and the power of open questions in coaching, where they empower others and help unlock new options that create growth and change. I just loved Kate’s approach to questions and her proposition that they are keys to your brain. She says they’re pathways into what we know, and they help us to explore and discover the unknown. Questions are more powerful at helping to get buy-in to change, they can inspire people and help to create energy and momentum. That’s gotta make life easier! Here are four keys to try: 📌 Use ‘could’ rather than ‘should’: the brain responds to ‘should’ by trying to find the one right answer, whereas it responds to ‘could’ by identifying options 📌 Ask don’t tell - avoid telling as it is answering a question that nobody has asked much less cared about 😆 📌 Ask smaller questions: asking a question that is too big or all-encompassing can be overwhelming. Think about the question process as a triple jump rather than a long jump; a series of small questions will get us there more easily than trying to leap the whole distance in one go 📌 Don’t stress about getting your question/s word-perfect, focus on your intention 🤔 What piece of Kate’s advice might you put into practice to ask more powerful questions?

This is part of the wisdom from my conversation with Louise Weine, CEO of National Association for Women in Operations and is fitting commentary for this International Women’s Day’s focus on embracing equity. Early in her career, Louise learned she needed to check her own leadership style and biases. She worked hard to expand her own circle to have a much more diverse group of mentors, colleagues, volunteers and providers – she saw that she needed to stop going to the same type of people and getting the same answers. She says that a lot of leaders think they're inclusive until they're forced to self-reflect and realise that as human beings we fall into habits that can be exclusionary. We discuss whether we should even be focusing in on women as a diversity target group. The danger in talking about inclusion more broadly is that you might not get to the heart of some fundamental issues that are related specifically to gender. The positive for taking a broader view of inclusion overall is that it's far less divisive; it’s a conversation that everyone’s a part of. Louise says ‘We just want more human-centred workplaces where people consider things from a heartfelt human point of connection first.’ Her suggestions for increasing inclusion put it within everyone’s reach: Become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Through discomfort comes growth. Small, incremental things done by more people make a bigger difference. Be kind and show empathy. What are you doing to Embrace Equity this 2023 International Women’s Day?

This was one of the many pearls of wisdom from Sara Garcia in the latest episode of Leadership Amplified, together with: 📌 Take charge of yourself and your decision making 📌 Be empowered to step outside of your comfort zone These are key challenges for women as they step into senior leadership roles. And Sara approaches them with passion and compassion. We had a great discussion about Sara’s love of psychology and people, and how that drives and guides her career. She continues to explore her desire to understand people, and her fascination/compulsion to find points of empathy with others. She ‘likes to find the centre of people and help people go where they're going’. She has always loved work, and what work can do for you, it ‘helps you to grow and expand, gives a sense of satisfaction.’ We discussed the challenges of leading that women in particular face. Sara says, when running a business you see men put themselves forward much more than women. Women can find themselves dissatisfied but without understanding why. She says that it is because they're actually living someone else's journey not their own, and they're not aware of that. There’s such great food for thought in that. Sara says that some women feel that they don't have a conscious choice, but she insists that they do. We always have choice, she says. She says that we need to do away with any compulsion to strive to do something that isn't going to give you joy. ‘You have more freedom than you think, you are more empowered than you think.’

I’ve had a few recent conversations with amazing leaders. You know the ones – you may well be one - who routinely go above and beyond, who trade-off weekend time to get the job done, who are just darn good people with a strong work ethic who don’t want to let the side down. But who are on (if not over) the precipice of burnout. They’re having to self-manage their emotions without adequate support from their organisations. Demands are off the scale, support is lip-service as best: relying on such people to be resilient enough to put up with this with no end in sight is crazy. So in conversation, when Michelle Bihary said ‘you can’t out-resilience a toxic workplace’ it was YES, you can’t!! We’ve got to stop expecting that people can. Michelle’s work is focused on providing professional supervision and support in the healthcare industry, where the need for it is so great. She’s highly attuned to the bandwidth/energy/vitality required of health care professionals to do their work. Prior to COVID, she says that burnout was already a huge issue in the sector. Mental health was chronically underfunded - it was like giving a surgeon half the amount of time to do the surgery – mental health workers had half the time they needed to treat people. During COVID, that workforce became one that held the anxiety for so many in the community, plus of course they had their own concerns. Michelle reflects that it will take a long time for people to feel they have the space to restore and replenish as the demand for support and care has increased so much. She says that organisations need to provide ongoing support and permission to help people to maintain their wellbeing, they need to be taking responsibility and thinking more strategically about the environment that the workforce is operating in all day long. It’s not just getting the job done that matters, it’s how the job gets done.

Dr Michelle Evans is the Director of Dilin Duwa Centre for Indigenous Business Leadership at The University of Melbourne. Dilin Duwa runs programs, research projects and partnerships that strengthen indigenous focused business and leadership, and has just celebrated its 10th anniversary 🙌. Dilin Duwa means everlasting flow in the Woi Wurrung language. “Guided by the ancient flows of Country and the responsibility to our communities the 'dilin duwa' of our ancestors, culture and entrepreneurial spirit, collectively works towards an economically powerful Indigenous Australia.” Dilin Duwa features as an important part of Michelle’s career. I was fascinated to hear Michelle reflect on her early clarity about wanting to take leadership roles. She ‘knew what needed to be done’, and sought to enrol others in that, even when at school, then later at university and that continued into her work and over her career. While in her childhood there were few tangible resources, her imagination was lifted as she sought to make something from nothing. Her perspectives were shaped by her university studies in communications and media, and her work in community theatre and radio. Her leadership of the Wiiln Centre for Indigenous Arts saw her focus evolve to growing a pipeline of indigenous talent. She describes her own leadership approach as tempering her ambition in concert with the views of the group: sometimes she needs to get out ahead of the group to draw them forward toward the vision, and other times, to let them go out ahead. We touch on what non-indigenous leaders can learn from indigenous leaders – and it struck me how much there is to learn from this exchange that would help to deal with the big challenges we face: 📌 place is critical – the place you are in provides context for your leadership work and interconnects with what is possible 📌 time is limitless – holding the past, present and future with that sense of everlasting flow – this is a profoundly different position from which to view your actions 📌 successfully boundary-spanning increases adaptability and the ability to think in different ways These concepts place leadership in a much bigger frame, providing an opportunity for non-indigenous leaders to find greater meaning and purpose in the practice and value of the leadership work you do. For Michelle, it’s important to critically examine who you are and how you are operating – that reflexivity is fundamental to good leading.

Nick is Executive General Manager at Terrywhite Chemmart, and he reflected on his leadership journey and philosophy in our discussion for Leadership Amplified. Nick's sense of balance has been one of the hallmarks of his career, inspired by teachers, family and other business leaders. While at school he’d held leadership roles, for example as sports captain, but it was only as he was leaving school that one of his teachers called out his leadership ability. He was seen as a leader by his peers: she called out his role modelling, and this gave him a first sense of what leadership was, and that he could do it. When he reflected on the comments leadership began to take shape for him. Her comments encouraged a confidence to take on key leadership roles, coaching others and developing people. Nick says it took him a while to decide what he wanted to do with his career, he undertook study and worked in a wide range of different organisations, then fell into his retail career as a graduate with Aldi. From there, it has flourished. He subscribes to the KISS principle as his leadership theory, keeping it simple by focusing on engaging people to deliver results. This philosophy has served him well, particularly through the last several years of such rapid change. Nick tells the fabulous story of his parents running their own business and how that continues to inspire him COVID and its impact on retail pharmacy compelled Nick to evolve his leadership style to put more emphasis on people than ever: he says it’s critical to focus on your people and build trust for what you are trying to achieve. ‘Leadership is not an individual sport, you need followers’ To lead successfully you need to shift the source of your esteem from you to the team, says Nick. Seeing the team and the business get the results should be what it’s all about.

This is how Marie-Claire Ross summarised our lively discussion about leadership and trust: 📌 Leaders should create safe workspaces, and they need to take the time to reflect on what they are achieving, to slow down and review their actions and results, so that they can be more intentional about this. Successful leaders who have grown companies with some remarkable revenue generation reflect on their leadership weekly and do everything in their power to ensure they don't break trust. Broken trust takes a long time to repair; once it’s broken repair is not always guaranteed. 📌 Creating connections to increase belonging is critical: leaders need to help people understand the meaning of their work and know how what they do helps others, as well as explain organisational connections and reduce silos 📌 Leaders need to create an exciting future so that people know that their hard work is worth, it and can easily see how they have contributed to the whole 📌 Leaders need to make things such as the organisation’s priorities, decision-making processes and KPIs more visible so that people know what’s going on Marie-Claire cuts through the complexity of trust, defining it as the ability to confidently rely on and predict that others will do the right thing and make good on their promises. She says that a very small number – 5-10% of leaders are self-aware and this means that many have little idea of the impact their behaviour has on those around them. Listen in for more gems on why high levels of trust are critical for successful performance.

This is such a strong and clear philosophy that shines through the latest podcast conversation with Amanda McInery who is Head of Marketing at @Homely.com. ‘I actively sought out ways to better myself at every opportunity’, says Amanda. Amanda created a roadmap of roles she’d like and identified the skills and knowledge that she needed to learn, and has actively pursued learning in every role she has had. ‘If there was something I didn’t know, I immediately applied myself - empowered myself - to learn about it.’ She says she identified the mentors that she wanted to surround herself with to help her build up the skills that she lacked. ‘I have a drive to always be better, and to better myself and learn all the time.’ She says she’s both impatient to achieve her goals, and enjoys the learning journey. She relates a recent experience where she was catapulted into a more senior role and describes it as creating a seismic shift in her career. It was incredibly terrifying as well as empowering, and while it also took a lot of hard work, she felt hugely supported and trusted by stakeholders around her. She had the empowerment and support to do really well. We also talk about the value of working in a scale-up environment and where and why an MBA has fitted into her development planning. It’s fitting that we end our conversation with some suggestions for developing your leadership capability: Surround yourself with inspiration – there is something to learn from everyone around you Ask for help and advice from others – people love be asked to help Find role models and seek to emulate them Support people to be their best and do their best – and don’t expect to be praised for it! Be real with yourself about what you can achieve – whether it’s a weakness or an opportunity, be honest, take the ego out of it – actively, honestly focus on it and practice. It’s just like learning to run a marathon, it takes practice.

That’s one of the take-outs from my conversation with Simon Duke, Infrastructure & Capital Projects Manager, Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. One of the first leadership lessons Simon had to learn was to listen very acutely, and with sincerity, to the community he was in. He had to listen really well to be able to understand small nuances that made the difference between success and failure. He had to listen to survive. In what was a challenging start to his leadership career, Simon turned challenge into opportunity, and created a firm, values-based platform for his future leadership approach. It helped him to not just prioritise purpose and community, but also to increase his own flexibility and adaptability. From a young age, Simon had a sense of wanting to serve a bigger purpose, and as his career has continued, that has developed into what we might now call the servant leader philosophy. In his leadership roles he is keen to understand how best he can serve. He knows that others too want to be part of something bigger than themselves. His fundamental belief is that for people to thrive leaders need to give them power, to share and align their power. He says to his teams: ‘I want to solve it with you.’ Aligning people to the why is critical to be able to move things forward ‘we're not here for you or me, we're here for our community’.

Annie Lacombe is Engineering Manager at Boeing. She says that one of the leadership lessons she has learned is this: there is enough for everyone. Her mindset of abundance is an important part of her philosophy of leading: it means her focus is not on herself, but on how she can help others. Her philosophy is based on generosity and ego-awareness, yes, but also on self-fullness and personal integrity. Annie began her career as a chemical engineer in Canada, then working in a FIFO role in New Caledonia before moving to Australia in 2009. She loves cultural differences and working with diverse teams, as she strongly believes that it makes it more interesting. In this episode of Leadership Amplified, we talk about Annie’s work and leadership experiences, including some of the cultural challenges she faced along the way. She says ‘In difficult situations we tend to focus on ourselves, we think it’s about us, but we put too much emphasis on ourselves, rather than on the situation. We need to be able to step away and come back with fresh eyes, otherwise we get too emotionally hooked.’ Her leadership approach has strengthened through these, as well as the positive experiences she’s had along the way. She believes she has the power to bring diversity into the traditionally non-diverse areas she’s worked – she is passionate about bringing women into trade roles and giving them access to well-paid roles. She says ‘People can feel your support and interest in them. They come to work to do their best and as leader, you have to empower them.’