Public Sector Women in Leadership Conference – Canberra
15 June 2016
Michael Pezzullo
Secretary, Department of Home Affairs
Driving change to promote female leadership as a public service priority
E&OE
I’m delighted to be here and to speak on a topic that is very important to me—Public Sector Women in Leadership.
I have some very clear and strong views about this subject, but I’ll start with this proposition: we’ll make absolutely no progress on this issue until it becomes a mainstream management people capability issue which sees us address this fundamental question: are we employing the very best talent?
From my point of view, it’s not strictly a gender issue. I know it has gender ramifications, and I acknowledge that many see it through the prism of right and fairness.
I’m a hard–nosed manager of a large enterprise of 14,000 people, and I have to be completely unsentimental about how I go about that management role. I want the very best people I can get my hands on, and I’m completely gender blind in that regard. However, it ultimately boils down to workplace effectiveness, productivity and performance, and until we are thinking about it in those terms and acting in those terms, the issue of women in leadership is going to remain a side issue.
It shouldn’t remain a side issue because it’s so vitally important.
In my department—the integrated Department of Immigration and Border Protection, which came into being on 1 July last year pursuant to government policy direction and a change in relative law—we manage the immigration, citizenship, border protection, trade, customs and offshore civil maritime security functions.
In terms of our combined departmental and enforcement arm—the Australian Border Force—SES demographic, 45 per cent of our SES are women, which is three or four percentage points above the APS norm. But I’m not satisfied with that number, because logically I should be able to toss a coin and the outcome should always see a 50–50 representation in my SES leadership. As a result, I actually see us underperforming by at least five percentage points, if you take a purely statistical view.
So I’m inspired by, and work with strategies that I’m shamelessly pilfering from Treasury, from DFAT, from PM&C and other like departments. I look at how these strategies go to things such as subconscious bias in recruitment, flexible work arrangements, and the role of mentoring, development programs that target high–talent women to groom them for leadership roles. My Department is very open to the range of techniques, procedures and strategies that are available before we lock down a strategy in the next couple of months.
However, my main message is that even if do all of those things, the following point is still being missed: the very nature of public sector work is changing, and it is actually providing us with an opportunity to redesign the way in which we think about talent. Digitally native, younger officers have got as much, if not more to contribute to the solving of public administration problems as their supervisors. And this is going to revolutionise the way in which workforce management needs to occur.
For those of us who are male and above 50, it shouldn’t be thought of as the end of the line, rather the skills older workers can contribute actually relate to a coaching and giving role to younger officers—male and female—people who are more savvy about the way of the world, because older workers have the one thing that younger generations don’t have—lived experience.
All lived experience really is, is a euphemism for managed failure, because life is about trial and error, and about bouncing back from failure. That is the experience, the X factor that, that more experienced and seasoned workers can impart on their more junior colleagues.
However, I want to touch on what is changing public sector work. We often talk about the technological revolution, and while technology has always materially transformed the human affairs, the changes we have seen over the last 25 years with the widespread disbursement of personal computers and mobile devices, the vast take–off of computational power, the amazing global spread of connectivity and networking, the rise of massive data sets and their mining, including by way of predictive analytics, the rise of very sophisticated artificial intelligence systems and robotics has fundamentally change several things: the way in which we work and the problems that we’re trying to solve. Technology is changing the very nature of society that we’re dealing with, and therefore by definition how we try to solve those problems.
No one has a monopoly on what that world’s going to look like, because we’re designing it as go. As such, the thought that you just have to simply work your way up the ladder, that you have to simply work out ways to be effective in terms of advancing your career, using all the insights you have heard about before, needs to be subverted.
We are so into new horizons that anyone—age, gender, of any different technical or subject matter expertise—who has a view about how to shape solutions to complex problems but focusing on substance, as far as I’m concerned you’re a winner. It doesn’t matter where you have come from, or how many steps in the ladder you have progressed, or even whether you’ve even had a lot of subject matter expertise. In fact, if anything, we have to be open to subverting traditional notions of how we go about things like administering the Customs Act and the Migration Act, in that people with completely fresh perspectives who have never touched that legislation can be more useful at times than people who have had 23 years’ deep experience. However, the sweet spot is actually combining those two groups to get the best result.
What else is changing the world?
For the first time in 500 years, power is shifting. We’ve seen through the changing economic relativities, fundamentally shifting power relationships, and shifting strategic weight between what’s called the West and the East. We’re seeing fundamental changes to demography in more established industrial nations, with the exception of the United States and Australia, OECD nations are actually showing a dramatically aging demography. Through migration and relatively high levels of fertility, Australia is maintaining its demographic profile in ways that most other OECD nations are not.
We have seen an explosion in the population of what traditionally used to be called the second and third world. As well as, an amazing evolution over the last two decades of patterns of global trade travel, the rise of temporary labour mobility where people don’t migrate largely for permanent reasons any more, rather they have work and life experiences for four or five years in different countries before they move on.
All of this is to be embraced.
For those who joined the public service 30 or 35 years ago, this is such an alien world that while you have experience and you’ve got wisdom, you don’t necessarily have subject matter knowledge that is required to solve these problems.
Any officer, who shows a focus on outcomes, who has a diversity of views, a willingness to be open to new views, a participative, collaborative approach and problem solving approach that sees diverse talents coming together—whether this is deep knowledge of the Customs Act and the Migration Act, or deep expertise in artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, analytics, the fusion of big data sets to achieve better outcomes which have nothing to do with knowledge of the two principal Acts we administer—anyone who’s up for that challenge is going to be successful. I am completely gender neutral about this point, however, in my view, it provides a better environment for our female officers to become successful.
But, I would warn you not to fall into the trap of thinking that there’s a structured way that men have worked out how to do this, and what women need to do is kind of replicate how they mentor themselves or how they network, etc. That somehow, once you get access to that secret knowledge, you’ll be welcomed into the club.
You need to disrupt the very system itself by creating new solutions to problems that largely men—because most of the senior leadership positions still are owned by men—are nominally charged with. Now this sounds like quite an insurgent approach, and as Secretary for a Commonwealth department I normally wouldn’t recommend insurgency and revolution, but that is the moment that we’re in.
So I urge all women and men to not fall into the trap of thinking ‘if I just get these HR settings right’, because while they are foundational, they are not the main game.
Because what will happen is a whole bunch of people who’ve already worked out what’s happening in the world take charge of that emerging new agenda, and by the time you’ve worked out how to succeed in the old world, you’ll have to learn all of those tools, all of those skills, and work out how to get ahead in the new world. A world which is much more networked, which is much more about blended teams, which is much more about not necessarily privileging subject matter domain knowledge, but actually privileging new ways of thinking about old problems and applying the techniques I referred to earlier.
So, I ask the following question: does anyone seriously think that you’re going to become a senior woman in leadership if you’re not engaged on those questions of content? If you’re not owning those areas of subject matter of expertise and creating whole new ways of thinking about those problems? It is what I expect from my senior women, because it’s what I expect from all of my senior officers.
We need to flip traditional thinking in terms of old ways, for instance of doing customs clearances or issuing visas or finding terrorists in amongst millions of auto–granted visas, or any similar problem.
And while you may think ‘oh well, no that’s the substance, let’s just think about the HR side’, this will trap you into solving admittedly important HR solutions to difficult intractable HR problems—but you’ll have missed the main game, which is how do we create new modes of thinking about public policy problems?
You need to become part of that debate. To succeed in the modern public service, in my view, those who show a cutting edge, lateral, and innovative mind on those very tricky problems are the ones who are going to add the most value.
To finish, I want to take a moment to share some stories of the experiences of some of my senior female leaders—both of which I have permission to share.
One of my best senior officers said in any job she gets into, she feels like an imposter—something, I understand having come up through the national security intelligence and defence worlds where it is very technical, with lots of acronyms and discussion about hardware and all the rest of it—and I said to this officer ‘but we all are the same’. None of us at the most senior levels can pull apart all the relevant widgets that we talk about. Why? Because we employ some very smart engineers, scientists, and software people to do that for real. Our role is to talk about the employment in those systems, and it is this that we need to be confident about, so when we get into the technical detail, we’re all imposters. So why feel at all diffident about that? Why not just simply command the room in any event, just like men have trained themselves to do?
The second story is that another of my very senior officers who was working on a particularly big problem that is often in the news. She was working on a new approach to how to think about certain international issues that are very vexed for the Department. She was very, very confident on the detail, but not particularly confident at going into a room—particularly of her peers and people at my level and maybe even beyond —and commanding that room. So I thought, well, there’s only one way to really work through this, and that was to encourage the officer to take the lead, own the issue, and dominate the room and run the discussion.
We were both heading to a meeting in the Barton Triangle and I thought, ‘I don’t need to be there for the start, this officer can start the meeting’. It just so happened that as I was driving there, one of the radio stations was playing a repertoire of old rock songs and I thought, ‘no, I want to listen to these songs’. So I deliberately drove around the block a couple of times, sent a message to the convenor of the meeting, to just start the meeting and I’ll be there a little bit late because I’m attending to other business.
I went into the meeting after 10 minutes, and the chair of the meeting said ‘oh, good that you can join us, and officer X has already laid out the issues, and yep, we’re across what it is that’s within the scope of the discussion now, and she’s given us a recommendation, which apparently you support’. I acknowledged that I did, and made it clear that I didn’t need to lead the discussion, that the officer can continue and that I was there to provide endorsement.
The meeting went very well. The policy proposition was accepted, and ultimately, a recommendation was put before the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, the look of death that was projected towards me by the officer as I walked in the room, I felt I needed to admit the real reason for my lateness—she didn’t speak to me for about a week. After about a week, we made amends, and she came to me and said: ‘okay, I can see what you were doing, I know you like your old rock music a lot. Can you please never, ever do that again? But I learned my lesson, thank you’.
Make that jump, and if someone’s got to give you a friendly push, it’s because they’re your friend.
Own the issue, and as required, own the room.
Does that mean you have to not be yourself? Of course not, some people are quiet, some people are reserved, some people need to employ different tactics to own a room or own an issue. You don’t need to have the loudest voice. You don’t need to put ego into every sentence. Rather mould this advice to your own personality. Because, unless you’re willing to go at least halfway in the direction that I’m suggesting, we’ll just keep coming to similar conferences; in five years’ time, in 10 years’ time, we’ll be talking about the same things, we’ll be going through the same HR–centric strategies—which while all important—we wouldn’t have cracked the actual problem. We would have dealt with these important, enabling second and third order issues, but won’t have cracked the central problem, which is in the end we’re all trying to work it out. That we all need to be engaged on the substance, and all engaged on achieving better policy as a result.
