What if we were human at work

[Applause]

and it feels

great to be here because this is back

where this actually

began for me an election theatre not far

from here i fell in love with the

concept of work

and so to come back and talk and they

said afternoon about work

so it feels right and i know what you’re

thinking

she’s going to talk about work and i am

and i love it so i just

hope so it’s an advance um what i want

to talk about

and the reason i want to talk about work

is because

it is my whole life not only i’ve

worked my whole life and i didn’t mean

my whole life because i actually started

work when i was 12.

i made rand dolls and puppets quite

entrepreneurial spirit as

in high school and then from that i’ve

not only worked

but i’ve also written about work taught

about work

thought about work i’ve led work i’ve

thought about needing work i’ve written

about leading work i’ve taught other

people to leave work

i am obsessed by the fact that it should

be inclusive and open to everybody

and all of us it is my life’s work to

make that possible

and two years ago i had to stare into

the fact that like many before me i had

failed to achieve the impact that i

wanted to achieve

so i didn’t lose my lifelong obsession

with work being open and more inclusive

and

being available for all of us what i did

instead was i walked away from your

career so that i could have a very

different conversation because i

fundamentally believe that we need to

look at it very

very differently than we ever have

before

and that’s what i’m going to talk about

so there are very very very clever

people

with brilliant ideas about how work

ought to work but i want to talk about

it in a much different way and the

reason i want to do that is i come

from normal and when you come from

normal

you don’t know what a gift that is until

you get a bit older and then you

suddenly realize things that you’ve

known your whole life that other people

are discovering

when you come from normal he realized

how important work is

it’s about turning up contributing being

part of something and somewhere to go

you need hopes and dreams and

opportunities like everybody else

nobody has to teach you that because you

already know

so i want to talk about it from that

foundation five

really simple realities that i think we

can rethink and i think we could read

into

tomorrow maybe even today those five

things are

what is work secondly what is leadership

thirdly what if we just turned up just

as we are

fourth merit is a myth we just need to

own that

and the fifth one is let’s think

differently about where businesses sit

in society

so let’s start with the first one work

is a part of life in fact it is a

fundamental human right it is article 23

of the universal declaration of human

rights it is the right

to work it is not a word versus life

thing it is a work as part of life thing

it’s your opportunity to turn up to a

community or a society

and participate to contribute and

exchange your contribution with your

hands head and maybe even your heart if

you get a job you really love which

people have talked about today about

then you get your independence your

financial independence

but equally you get a sense of belonging

and it’s that feeling of belonging

contributing and have somewhere to go

that is so

fundamental to being a human being

and that’s what work is nothing more

grand than that but so

very fundamental to all of us and if

it’s that fundamental

it should be available to every single

one of us

and if we can think about work by that

definition very simple

human rights then we can think

differently about leadership as well

there are libraries of books about

leadership

libraries but we have to consider that

they’re not right

or they’re going through form if you

want data

the one that you come will pass at the

moment is the most recent work from

jeffrey feffer at the stanford grad

school of business

120 000 deaths

attributed to the anxiety of work and

the way we work together

that makes the anxiety work in the way

we work together

more causing more deaths than diabetes

in the usa last year

and yet even faced with those sorts of

facts we keep talking about leadership

as an individual thing one story

background one story

one one um life one man

and we say a rock star to be worshipped

and yet we’re surrounded by ancient

cultures that understand leadership so

much better

australian aboriginals understand

leadership as two things

one is collective your impact on

everybody else

and secondly they understand it as what

you’re doing for your whole community

and yet right next to them we keep

talking about careers and leadership

as gladiatorial battles to be king

and if we just stopped and said what if

leadership wasn’t just about

winning and beating everybody next to

you what if it was about

your impact on other people what if it

wasn’t about style or introversion of

extroversion or

gender or race or age or any of those

things it was just fundamentally

your impact on other people and that

would mean when we talk about

me as a leader it doesn’t matter about

me it matters how it impacts you

and that is a very different way of

looking at leadership

the impact on others so if we start with

work as a human right

and leadership is a relationship that

positively impacts the people in the

community around you

then we can change a whole bunch of

other groups too and the next one i

really think we should change is turning

up just as we are

when i first started bhp as a trainee i

was the first girl

given a degree traineeship in my field i

didn’t know that was special until i got

there

and they kept telling me over and over

and

over again and they took my very shy 18

year old face and put it on every

internal magazine they had

and it did not come without great

discomfort because

as an 18 year old desperately wanting

just to fit in

they gave me the king g industrial work

pants

but they weren’t made in those sites

because there was only one of me

and so as i hitched them up to my 18

year old waist

there was a giant gap between the bottom

of my pants the tops of my workbooks

and i felt ridiculous they looked pretty

stupid tea

and i went home stalked my mother and

said what should i do

i look like an idiot and she said and

it’s the best piece of professional

advice i’ve probably ever had in my life

she said wear stripy socks

and so i did and i walked in the next

day with my stroke

socks because if they give you rules of

work that don’t work for you

you have to change them and make them

work for you

but what happened next one and when tim

was so much more important than me and

my structure socks

what happened by the end of the week was

that all the other women i was with

celebrate extra socks too you see i

thought i was on my own in the green

pants

breaking glass ceiling but actually i

was surrounded by trades women

and engineers indentured wearing grey

with the same stupid problem with their

bands that i had and we found that

collective solidarity

a sense of belonging and feeling that we

could change the rules by wearing stupid

stripey socks and turning my ball away

and that’s sort of what we need to get

to

i want to talk about merit because it is

the one that we keep debating all the

time

and it’s a really important one to

understand but it is in fact a myth and

i’m sorry if someone didn’t think that

was true i didn’t want to say that to

you today but

it’s a myth there are seven factors that

will get you statistically to the top of

an asx recruited company

this is them and most of us are born

with any of them

or at least not the full set the seven

are

gender male education

private and single sex socio-economic

status of your parents

hi grace’s color thing and it’s well

it’s white pink

language english first religion there

are just three religions of the hundreds

that exist

seem to get to the top and strangely

even perhaps even stranger than the rest

there are some sports that lift the

whole team to the top

and we know those zebras so why aren’t

we talking about them why aren’t they

clear to us

because eight of the employment data in

this country is

what we call dark and that sounds very

sensitive

but actually what it means is it sits

underneath the company of a brand and we

can’t see it

but we know it and we can feel it

we know that there’s 50 of our

population is female

but only 22 percent of us can get to the

top of the asx 100

we know that 16 of our population is

direct asian heritage

and yet only two percent get to the top

australian assets company you know three

percent of our population is first

australians

and really if ever do they get to the

top of the company

and that’s before we talk about

disability one of the largest

under-utilized workforce we have in this

country

now those stats make me just so angry

and they look

quite dramatic when you see them laid

out as a number

but my reaction to it and i’ve had so

much time to think about a

lifetime trying to address it is i sort

of sit there and i calmly think how can

i be creative about approaching these

stuffs

and i think what would don corleone eat

in the godfather now dr corliani i know

equality will go to the mattresses and

prepare for battle

and having looked at these numbers for a

lifetime i sort of feel like going all

gay strong

too because they make me angry but i’m

not going to change them i’m being angry

so i’m going to ask you to come for a

little bit of a walk with me and look at

it even more calmly

i’m asking you to come on the bus

i’m walking down the australian street

in a community we all know and love and

are part of

50 of the people around me are female 16

direct asian heritage

3 first australians 8.3

lgbti we share a bunch of disabilities

and differences

all over the place we walk along there

and feeling comfortable and we belong

and a bus pulls up let’s call it the

australian leadership bus

and i get on and as i walk into this bus

there are 50 people on it

across the 50 there are just 10 women

and i know the mathematicians in the

room will tell me it’s actually 11.

but one of the women is sitting down and

she looks quite short and i’m told that

there’s going to be talk so i’m not

going to count her

there’s one asian there are no first

australians no people with disabilities

there’s people look the same talk the

same same act

said same language it feels weird if

you’ve just been walking in the

australian community that you know and

love and you hop on a bus like they

think what

where the hell is this bus going

why am i on this bus and do i belong is

a feeling of uncomfortableness

but there’s another question that became

increasingly loud for me during the

course of my career

the question wasn’t whether i belonged

the question was whether

wanted to be on the bus why would i want

to be on a bus that felt so

uncomfortable for someone like me

do i press the button to pull the cord

get them to stop pick up more people

like me pick up different people with me

or what do i do so face will be

statistics

i think we have three options the first

one

sphere second one

range and the third one let’s change

things

so the first one is so tempting to just

grab a chocolate bar field position

blanket netflix just

binge watch hit the couch the world is

overwhelming let’s just hide for a while

but when the movie’s finished

and you get up nothing has changed the

second option

we go out the street and we rage against

the machine

we find people who are equally furiously

march

and it feels fantastic to find out

collective strength

but at the end of the march nothing’s

changed

the third option is we change the rules

and that’s a confronting option because

at the moment what we keep doing is

looking at the guys who are writing the

rules and saying can you please change

the rules

but we don’t understand how much power

we have to change those

and the first thing we need to take is

we need to rethink where businesses

currently sit

this drawing on the left if it’s on your

left

is how we currently see businesses

here’s a business

and here’s society and the business

gives us small things like

22 women and as long as we don’t ask

about the other 28

we’re okay but the business there’s no

there’s no over here

this is society and businesses sit smack

in the middle of our society with

us in fact they are us or they shouldn’t

be they’re like us and they’re with us

and if we thought our business and sit

we could start to rethink how we

actually approach all of this

and that brings me to one last story

when i was in imd in switzerland i was

working with

the leadership school there and my hero

of my

heart was still i love man you can think

but jack would one of the greatest

thinkers ever on leadership

invited me to a workshop the next day if

i could change my flights it was very

exciting

and he and four or three of his

colleagues four of them been total we’re

going to reinvent the future of

leadership

i was so excited to be invited so

excited and i quickly said yes

and then i rambled off what i would do

to help them invent the future

i would get coffee i would organize

lunch i would take nights i would just

be

so helpful when they reinvented the

picture and jack would look to me with

disdain and i must say a little bit of

disappointment

and he said i don’t need you to organize

lunch

don’t come and i think

and i was crushed because i had this

great opportunity and then it was gone

but then he kept going because he saw i

was questioning he’s a nice man and he

said

i didn’t invite you to organize lunch

nobody can do that

i invited you to think with us to turn

up and give us your best ideas your best

thinking your best way of being

so that we can invent the best we can

for the future and he was right

because even though i was the only

person walking into that ring without a

doctor and actually two of them had two

doctors which is quite unique

but i was also the only australian i was

the only person from wollongong

very rare is anyone here

the only person who worked in china that

was very unique at that stage

the only person who could speak dutch

albeit quite poorly

and i was the only person that had

family members who went into coal mines

to work

now why does it matter that you have a

coal mining part of your family

it matters because when someone says

what should we measure companies on and

people say safety stats

safety stats are a bunch of numbers but

safety stats are a coal miner whether or

not you found the capsule

and there’s an emotion in that when

you’ve got that it’s a perspective no

one else can

take away from me so i wasn’t walking in

with the doctor but i was walking with

all of that and i had to own it

and that’s what i think we’re up to is

all of us not waiting for

tomorrow or when a leadership program

kicks in or someone evens up agenda or

the race stats or allows people with

disabilities or whatever it happens to

be

but actually just saying we actually

have a big role to play already

see those seven aces ceos

have been writing history for hundreds

if not thousands of years

and i feel they might be writing the

features sort of the same way because

that’s how they know how to write

but i do know something else about them

each of them owns 10 people in the team

and beneath those 10 people in their

team

we own thousands of teams we own whole

departments and businesses and parts of

big corporations

we own almost every small business in

this country built

by normal people who don’t carry seven

messes

and i think if we stood up and stopped

waiting for tomorrow away from we could

do it etcetera we think where businesses

sit

that we could actually play a role in

standing up and saying

my team my business is inclusive

diverse open i have tackled

my own biases and i’ve brought people in

who think differently than me who’ve

experienced life differently than me who

have something that i can learn from and

something to offer

that i don’t have and i think that role

that we can plan with the player today

could be

one of those very small pieces that

makes for a very big change

thank you very much