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