Chief HRO Network Conversation with Deboarah Blackman

TRACY CULLEN: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the second CHRO network conversation series. My name is Tracey Cullen. I’m the principal consultant of diversity employment at the Public Sector Commission.

Today’s conversation will focus on capability and diversity. Before we officially begin, I would like to acknowledge the Whadjuk people of the Nyoongar Nation, and their relationship to King’s Park, where today’s event is being held. The Nyoongar people refer to this place as (inaudible). So, I think you are familiar with that name, and it means a place of spiders, so any arachnophobes, lookout.

TRACY CULLEN: I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present, and acknowledge our continued connection to land, waters and community. I make this acknowledgement to welcome you today on behalf of the Nyoongar people, as I am, like many of you, a visitor to this country.

This morning, you will hear from Commissioner Wauchope, and our guest speaker, Professor Blackman. The Commissioner will introduce the new whole-of-sector diversity strategies, which I believe you’ve all got a copy of ‘Time for Action’, and ‘See My Abilities’, an employment strategy for people with disabilities, and they will discuss this collaborative approach to developing them both.

TRACY CULLEN: Professor Blackman will then talk about her insights around the intersection between diversity and capability. It’s my pleasure to introduce Commissioner Wauchope, and, as many of you know, Commissioner Wauchope is responsible for leading the future direction of the public sector, in his role as Public Sector Commission. He was appointed as Commissioner in November 2008, after 11 years as director-general of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. Prior to this, he held senior roles in the Office of State Administration, the Department of the Premier, and the Treasury Department. The Commissioner will speak to a collaborative approach to diversity, and the importance of public sector leaders taking action. Commissioner…

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: Thanks, Tracy, and good morning, and thank you for turning up today. Particularly, as it’s the winter solstice, and the shortest day of the year, and probably harder to get out of bed than normal.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: As you know, we did have our first CHRO event in March, and it featured Julie Sloane, who I found particularly entertaining. I think it’s beneficial for people in the industry to get together, and particularly at a senior level, something but I don’t think has happened for a number of years. Was particularly pleasing on that occasion, was the eagerness for the CHRO to continue on afterwards. So, in response to that, we invited presenters from the ten largest public sector agencies to form, what we call, a ‘community of practice’. I’m told that those who attended the inaugural meeting on May 5th, which was facilitated by Cliff Gillham from Education, they felt that it was benefiting them greatly, and they had the opportunity to share their knowledge and experiences. But it was clear that a one-off meeting wasn’t going to cut it, it needed to be some other means of continuing the conversation. So, I’d like to think that it is a sustainable approach, but it will only last as long as the people involved think it is worthwhile, so you have to keep it relevant.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: I’ve asked my team to work towards formalising a communities of practice model, with a view to providing you with guidelines to assist you with initiating new communities as the topics and needs arises. And given the early success of the network, I am optimistic this will probably be the way to go in the future. The future workforce is something we all need to turn our minds to. Was to have the imperative to deal with the here and now, and were all going to be going through agency expenditure reviews, and similar kinds of initiatives, we do need to actually think about the future and the future workforce. And history tells us that as economies evolve and change, old jobs disappear, and new jobs, and acquiring new skills, emerge. We must anticipate that and be ready for it.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: The key issues for me are to design jobs and recruit the future. Therefore, you must have a sense of what the future will look like in terms of your organisation, and that’s where I think the agency expenditure reviews are an advantage for us, because it’s actually going to put us in the position where we have to think about that. We also need to promote contemporary employment practices, which are non-discriminatory, and utilise flexibilities that are available to ensure we have a relevant, capable and sustainable workforce. I’ll only make one point there, that the Public Sector Management Act is actually a very enabling act of piece of legislation. It has been freed up, and people need to take those advantages.

We also need to design organisation and cultures that can adapt readily to change, and that are appropriate now and into the future. What is clear is that we need to get ahead of the game, and not constantly be playing catch up. At the risk of using an overworked word, we must get more strategic about HR, and the role of the CHRO is critical to this requirement.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: As advised in March, the Australian and New Zealand Public Service Commissions are jointly advocating for the role of the CHRO as a key partner and enabler of business outcomes. Very recently, a joint success profile for CHROs, and the accompanying guidelines for (inaudible) profile was endorsed by this group. This, in itself, is a major achievement, trying to get all the sectors to agree. It’s like herding cats. But I have to say, I have to pay tribute to Rebecca Harris. It’s largely due to her efforts in getting in getting the collaboration and the nudge required to make that happen.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: The profile may be used as a tool for identifying some of the key expectations and accountabilities necessary for an effective CHRO, agreed on at an inter-jurisdictional level. Leaders can use this profile to establish a common language within the authorities, and across jurisdictions to provide clear expectations on what the strategic role of the CHRO is. The profile, and the accompanying guidelines, will be available in the new financial year, not sure are going to launch it, but… July? That’s good.

For those of you from the public sector, you know we have just come through this recruitment freeze, and it’s important to understand that while that was a here-and-now issue, it does have an impact on the future profile of the sector. And whilst the recruitment freeze was only for a number of months, it will play out into the future, in terms of the age and skill profile.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: Shortly, Deborah will share the result of work she has been doing around this, particularly the impact at the middle management level, being one of the impacts of recruitment freezes in other jurisdictions. I understand she will also discuss how having an inclusive

approach to getting the right people in the room at the right time of recruitment is key to getting the right person job. So, I’m looking forward to those insights, which takes me to my key messages of the day, and it’s working collaboratively to support diversity.

The media spotlight, this year, in many ways, has been firmly placed on the diversity, and the community’s appetite to discuss diversity and inclusion is on the rise. Even as recently as a couple of days ago, Eddie McGuire’s comments, I think, sort of added to the debate in a fairly negative way, but it’s always constantly going to be there.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: There appears to be a growing body of research that the diversity dividend pay-off of an organisation gains from having a representative workforce is actually real. Workplaces that are fair and transparent, and where diverse gender, racial, and cultural perspectives are valued, tend to perform better. At the end of the 2014-15 year, the whole of public-sector aboriginal and disability employment strategies reached their conclusion. And I want to acknowledge the commitment the government gave to that, by way of funding it. We achieved a lot, but there’s a lot more we could achieve. And in evaluating those achievements since 2011, I think it’s fair to say positive headway was made in improving employment opportunities for, and the representation of people from these diversity groups.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: The Commission’s aboriginal traineeship program, and agency specific programs that have picked up a similar model, have been the success stories of the past few years. We learn from our mistakes early on, but at the end of the day, we had a very successful program. But clearly, more work still needs to be done.

Unlike a lot of you, are not required to have a performance agreement, which is one of the advantages of the job, but I take it as a matter of good practice of having a statement of intent, which I have with the Premier. And the Premier, in responding to my statement of intent this year, encouraged me to pursue the diversity agenda aggressively, and ‘aggressively’ is his word.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: We have to think about how to change the status quo, while ensuring that any new strategies were practical, and achievable for public authorities given the current climate. Towards the end of last year, Rebecca Harris, who is the current director of Equal Opportunity and Public Climate, and I discussed how we could provide clear and simple messages in public sector about common workforce and diversity issues, particularly in the context of the rapidly changing nature of jobs, and how they are performed. We agreed it makes sense for us to work collaboratively on this issue, and it provided the opportunity to reach the widest possible audience. So, it goes beyond the public sector out to local authorities, the GTEs, and, indeed, the public universities. And is where we commence work on Time for Action, diversity and inclusion in public employment, which you all have a copy of on your chairs.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: Time for Action is our commitment to support you over the next three years to achieve positive outcomes in improving representation of people from the diverse groups. You can expect us to focus on disability employment in the coming year, aboriginal employment in 2017-18, and in the final year will be looking at you. They are not mutually exclusive, though. Obviously, you can do more than one at one time, it’s simply where we are putting our emphasis.

Importantly, the Public Sector Commission Advisory Board, a number of members who are here today, may have taken up this as a key agenda item, and we’re going to be championing this over the next period of time. We agreed to this at a meeting last week.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: We’ll also look at the stats, public authority programs, and contemporary research, and best practices, twice a year to ascertain if we are on track, or more work needs to be done. And if your organisation appears not to be performing, expect one of us to ask why in a very nice way, but we’ll be there.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: The practical approach to how we’ll achieve our shared goals and the Time for Action, comes from our group specific strategies, and today we launched See My Abilities, an employment strategy for people with disability. It’s a collaborative effort between Rebecca, Disability Services Commissioner, Dr Ron Chalmers, and myself. Will have specific roles and responsibilities in relation to people with disability. So we are actually trying to get our act together. The challenge, and indeed the opportunity, of course, is the wide range of physical and mental disabilities. On See My Abilities, I am pleased to working with Ron to assist in improving the economic and social participation of people with disabilities. and again, I know the Premier is keen for us to focus on disability employment, where our representation has been declining.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: Earlier this year, the Australian Public Service Commissioner, John Lloyd, introduced his new disability implement strategy, called ‘As One, Making it Happen’. Pleasingly, after having looked through that strategy, our approaches are very much aligned, particularly in the call for leaders, that is the people in the room today, to take real action and driving improvement in the employment of people with disability.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: In mid-May, the honourable Susan Ryan AO, Age and Disability Commissioner, released of Willing to Work report, which Rebecca and I actually contributed to, on behalf of the W.A. public-sector. Commissioner Ryan notes that all of Australia’s public services employ about 12.5% of all people in the Australian workforce, that’s about half of what it was when I joined the public sector. But it’s still an important number. She put some of her most complex recommendations squarely at the feet of the Public Sector Commissions in each state and territory, and calls on us to reduce discriminative practices and employ people with disability, and older Australians, both of whom have significant contributions to make. I’m pleased to say that our new strategy, approach and commitment, combined with our collaborative effort to take real action, can assist in taking W.A. to being a leading state again in this area.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: The Willing to Work report also urges public service commissions to develop stronger policies to recognise and reduce conscious bias. Commissioner Ryan recommends both sector-wide and agency-specific, publicly, and educational programs led by champions at each agency. I’m pleased to say, I think we are ahead of the game here.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: In collaboration with the Minister for Women’s Interests, the honourable Liza Harvey, she asked us to do a body of work around this about 12 months ago, and while she was specifically consumed with unconscious bias towards women, it quickly became apparent there was a broader application to all diversity groups. The role unconscious bias plays in the public employment cannot be underestimated. It’s not a new concept, but being aware this bias exists means we can take the steps to address it. It underpins many human resource processes,

particularly in an environment where employment and recruitment must take into account merit, equity, interest and transparency.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: The documents we are releasing today, include a commitment around raising awareness of unconscious bias, and ways to reduce it. I understand a number of CHROs are agency champions, and have already attended an unconscious bias workshop that we have run. So thank you for your commitment, I think this is going to be an important initiative for us into the future. I want to be clear, however, that we are focusing on disability employment initially, but it should not detract from the work being done on other diversity groups. Our work on the other groups has not stopped.

Jill Jamieson, who is a senior PSE consultant, is scoping work on gender equality and leadership. Gender equality and leadership, rather than women and leadership, is the focus and approach, with the New South Wales and South Australia public service commissions, both having current strategies, and the APS recently releasing a gender equality strategy. Well worth having a look at, and it’s is where we’re heading with our work.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: Jill’s work will look at building cultures and capabilities to achieve more equal representation of men and women in senior public employment roles, and I’m sure there will be a strong underpinning of reducing unconscious bias in work. Now, it’s fair to say that we have had steady improvement in the statistical side of things in terms of women in senior leadership, but it’s been slow. And we still rate behind many of the other jurisdictions. in public sector, there is still a disproportionate representation across the levels, with about two thirds of all those employed in level I to 6 roles being women. Level 7, it’s about equal, and beyond that, it’s about two thirds men to one third women, so we need to make sure we can get those stats back into balance. With that said, taking action to achieve positive outcomes, and having a truly representative workforce does not lie with you alone. Diversity and inclusion simply makes good business sense for senior management, as well. As such, there is need for a sustained effort and commitment across your organisation, from the CEO down to the trainee. Simply putting a great diversity strategy or policy in place in your organisation, that is only looked out once or twice a year when you report, is not good enough. It’s not a tick and flick approach that is required. Diversity and inclusion should be fully integrated into all your business planning processes, from your corporate plan, your vision, your mission and values, through to your operation and human resource planning. And I know I’ve said this before, but I strongly believe that workforce and diversity should appear by default on the corporate executive agenda. With the strategic workforce being driven by the CHRO and others in the corporate team. Again, this can only happen if the CHRO is part of the core pegs, and not an outsider looking in.

COMMISSIONER WAUCHOPE: I’m strongly of the view that good corporate decision-making and performance is enhanced by diversity of those contributing to the process. So, to conclude, I encourage you to take some time to review the documents today, and I can assure you that will be allocating a high priority to improving outcomes in this area. And in keeping with this priority, the PSE would like to hear of your experience, both successful or otherwise, in your engagement with this agenda. I’d now like to hand over to Deborah to hear her insights. Would you please (inaudible), Deborah?

TRACEY CULLEN: Thanks, Mal. So, all just introduce Professor Blackman to you first, before she comes… I think she’s going to come to the lectern, or maybe wander around a little. OK. So, thank you very much, Mal. Now, but the background as I said on Professor Blackman. She is a member of the School of business at the University of New South Wales, based in Canberra.

Her research interests include public sector policy implementation, employee performance management, organisational learning, and effectiveness and governance. She is well published in leading international journals, such as Public Administration Review, Management Learning, Management Decision, and the Journal of Knowledge Management, and is regularly invited to present her work at conferences around the world. And I was talking to her earlier, and she has just flown back from Singapore recently, I hear.

TRACEY CULLEN: Her recent body of work with the Australian public service, which she spoke about to the Mandarin, has investigated the current state in impact of middle manager capability in the sector. It is these insights around capability, and her thoughts on inclusive human resource practices that we are particularly interested in hearing today.

Professor Blackman will today address the topic: putting the right person in the right job, the importance of capability and diversity. Professor Blackman…

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Thank you very much for inviting me here today. I tend to potter around, so my biggest short-term target is, don’t fall off the stage. So again, it’s always nice to have something you know you’ve achieved, hopefully. We’ll see. What I want to do today is to obviously talk about capability and diversity together. And to do that, I’m going to… and together by using inclusion, and that will, hopefully, become clearer as I go through, as to why want to do it that way. My plan, if all goes well, is to look at what is it we actually want? And by that, I mean, in terms of what is it we want in terms of long-term capability? And what do we want in terms of long-term inclusion? What will be different if we do this? And I’ll come back to that statement quite regularly. I’m going to talk about that research, why there are capability gaps, and why we need to be thinking about it, particularly just post of freeze. As Mal has just said, it’s a very important time to be thinking about it.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Why inclusion? And I want to talk about conversations, because we talk a lot about conversations, we say we must have the conversations, we must do the conversations. And I want us to just think about the fact that there are different types of conversations, and that we tend to start with one type, and we might need to start with another. And then look at some ways forward. That the planned. So what do we want? We are HR people we know we want, don’t we? We want the right person in the right job. How can that be? Well, apparently, very.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, I dunno if you can see this, but on the left-hand side there is someone holding a chart, and the performance is clearly not going well, it’s going down quite steadily. And it says, so what you doing about this? We decided to hire a trainer. Sorry, we’re too busy, my people are too busy to do training, my people too busy training, so am I, they can go to training either, maybe in about three months, or maybe in a year. And at the end, we had to get rid of the trainer, they weren’t doing anything for us.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, why do I give you that as an example? Well, because this is about the system. When we start with HR, we all know we talk about the HR system, and then we busily break

it down, because it’s easier to manage. But we need to think about some of the implications of that for governance, and I want to start by talking about governance. And I’ll give you an example, it’s a really obvious one. We say we want the right person the right job, so what’s the first thing we should do when we have a vacancy? Well, we should look at the long-term skills that were going to require for the organisation, not just this job but for the organisation as a whole. We should look at what’s going to be different about the capability that we are going to need, how our current team has changed, and therefore we need to add different things. So, we look at that, don’t we? We change the job description, we change the skills, and then we go to people like you, and you go, does have a job number? No, you can’t do that. It’s not in the system.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, very early on, people learn is easier to replace what they have conceded to get signed off. So they say, we want this over here, but we don’t support it over here. And that’s what I mean by governance in the system. How are the bits going? Because one of the things we all know, all the people in this room know, if we say one thing and we do another, we get what we do. We can say it all the time, and it’s particularly the situation with diversity inclusion, and so forth back. So, we need to think about the governance structures, and when I was looking at the policy yesterday, and I saw it says, ‘get your organisation ready’. One of the biggest things is, how does your governance support those things at the moment? I’ll come back to that in a little while.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, what do we want to be different? Well, we keep talking about values. Why do want values to be different? Because values drive behaviour. Right. We want different behaviours, why do want different behaviours? That’s obvious, because you want different organisational outcomes. So it comes back to values. So, I hear all the time, we need to change the culture. Yeah, good. That’s really, really hard. That’s like me saying, I want to be slightly less independent. That’s not going to happen. Well, it might do, but it will take me a long time.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, what we really mean, and the good news of course is that when you do hear, ‘we are going to change the culture, and then…’, we can relax. So, if you say that, by the way, ‘we’re going to change the culture, and then…’, most of your team will go, that’s OK. Because the culture change will never happen first. So, what I’m talking about today is we need to embed the behaviours to become norms, because that’s how we change the culture over a period of time. And we know that, but we don’t always think about it that way. So, that brings us back to values. Why are we changing them? Because we want that long-term change, but it means we’re going to have to think very carefully about how we sustain it.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: The store is alarmed. The window is startled. And the floor is somewhat taken aback. Clearly, that’s ridiculous, but I’m giving you this slide for a reason. We talk about ‘the organisation will’, ‘the organisation has’, ‘my organisation won’t let me…’. That’s ridiculous. I love the one, ‘we have an unhealthy organisation’. So, let’s take the building and take it to the doctor. No. We are managing it in a way that is creating something unhealthy. We own the policy, not the organisation. Now, why is it matter? Language is really important. When we talk about conversations, it’s about language. When we use that language, we make it ‘other’. Somebody else has done this. Now, when I was… In one of my previous roles, I was responsible for developing the support systems for the (inaudible) research students across the University. And I said I want to do this. And they went, you can’t do that. What you can’t do that? I’m in charge. Oh, yes, but the policy won’t let you. I write the policy. Oh! You’re going to change the policy? Yeah. Won’t that be fun?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Anyway, it turned out in the end, I didn’t actually need to change the policy except for the problem, which is often the case, it was way too much about the implementation in the policy. Now, I have to say, across the sector as a whole, that is improving. We’ve got a lot less of the implementation processes, the practices in our policies than we used to have. But still find some say, that say we’re going to do… This is one of my favourites, and it was only last week… would you review the performance management policy for us? Yes, course I will, very happy to do that. You have a problem. Why? Why are you doing your performance management in April? Oh, well, it’s nice and quiet then. The planning cycle starts in May. Really? Did you listen to yourself? How does that possibly work? You’ve got to do your planning cycle before you do your… But the dates are actually in the policy, we have to do it in April. So, we can’t change that, they said. Of course you can, you’re in charge.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, we need to think about, what do we mean by the organisation? It’s us. It’s us in senior leadership. And one of the… There’s two things I would love you to think about doing in your language from today onwards. First of all, see how often you say that, or your colleagues say that, and each time stop them, and say, what do we mean? Because that will change the conversation. And the other one is, by the way, hope is not a strategy. Right? So, every time somebody says, ‘and I’m hoping this will…’ Stop! What makes that go away from hope? I started doing that two years ago. It’s a really hard habit to break, but it’s really valuable in terms of thinking about how am I going to make sure that I’m going to achieve the outcomes that I want. (*2622)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, some of the issues around capability from the work we’ve been doing. There is ongoing lack of leadership skills at all levels. This is not a big surprise. We know this. But we need to think about it. There’s been lots of focus on the SES. Yes, that’s important, but actually it’s the next level down. Its middle management, which is my biggest concern at the moment. Why? Because actually they are the ones who do most of the work. They are the ones who develop the capability for the future. They are the ones who actually deliver the tasks. They are the ones who do all of those things.

And now I’m having a panic attack, and a long way from phone, and I’m hoping it’s not… Oh well, I could have an embarrassing moment later.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: But that’s the level that really worries me at the moment. Now why is that happening? Part of it is because we are very task focused. Disorders on a really good job at their previous task, we’re saying they will be good in the next task, and we promote them because they’re really good at that. But at that level, that’s not what they’re doing. At that level, they’re managing people. But review how many of the things in their job descriptions talk about managing people. It often says they can run a team, but it doesn’t really think about, it doesn’t say, you are accountable for the capability of this organisation in the future. But that’s what they really are. And if it does say that, they don’t really know what it means. and I’ll come back to capability development in a minute. So, there are some serious issues around how do we frame what people do. (*2749)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: In one of the interviews, somebody said, ‘80% of my time is spent managing people’, and it’s nowhere, at all, in any of my formal paperwork. It’s all about my tasks. But, actually, that’s not my job, is it? Deliverables come through the other people. So, we have some serious issues around capability. Particularly, how we develop other people.

Governance, I’ve already talked about. The recent freeze has got some big impacts on that, because it means we have put people into jobs that they probably weren’t that good at. But we happened to have a person, and we happened to have a gap. Yeah! Right. Now, we’re dealing with some of the outcomes of that now, because unless people have been skilled up, they possibly still don’t have the skills they need. Experiential learning… Let’s just for that one to bed for a minute. (*2840)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Yes, we can learn, but only if we want to. My father used to fly fast jets. But, apparently, he can’t manage to make the washing machine work. Not once, not twice, oh no, they say to me for eight months and every week we had to do washing machine training, right? I said, I know this is about, you just don’t want to know. And that’s fine. But it didn’t matter how many times… I’ve forgotten which button. There’s only two! How hard can this be? Just don’t put anything pink in there, it’ll just come out wet, it’s not that hard. But no, he doesn’t learn from experience, because he simply doesn’t want to. That’s fine. When we think we have someone in an acting role that magically they are going to learn the skills that we need for the future, it will be by luck and fairy dust. Right? So, when someone is acting, what are the skills you want them to develop in that role? What is it you think will be different with them by the time they come out? Who’s going to frame it, who’s going to support them, what’s going to be different at the end? I’ll come back to that in a little while.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Structural decisions. We like structural answers, they’re nice and clear. Spans of control is my favourite one at the moment. What is the… And somebody will ask me so often when I go… ‘What is the ideal span of control?’ That’s like asking somebody, what is the ideal height of the population? It varies. The ideal span of control, is the span of control that means that we get the work done in the best effective way. Now, many, many years ago, John Childs said it was seven. This is a magical number that people seem to have found again. It’s the only excuse I can think of for what’s going on at the moment. But it’s a ridiculous situation. Now, I know why we’ve got it, which, of course, is we’ve got lots of managers who have one or two people reporting to them. But we have to think about why did that happen? That happened because, to be honest, HR managers decided we needed to have a system that apply to everybody. (*3048) so, all the specialist routes got pulled out, you could only get promoted if you were a manager. And then, of course, let me take an example of an agency that I’ve been in, Geoscience in Canberra. They’re a lovely bunch of people, they look after rocks. Right. Not even warm fluffy things, they do rocks. And my favourite ever discussion about a performance management problem was, quote, ‘We are full of people who don’t like talking to people, who have to talk to other people who don’t like talking to people, about something neither of them wants to discuss.’ OK? So, that’s why performance management is a little bit tricky at Geoscience. But it’s also why many of them only have one person who reports to them, because as their CEO says, they’re really good with rocks. (3138*) that there are now supposed to have a wide span of control because it’s been mandated. I’m looking forward to seeing how that works out. Unlike, by the way, the CEO, because I’m an observer on this.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Bias. OK? Yes, unconscious bias is important, but it’s not new. My slight concern with it at the moment is it’s becoming such a popular thing, and it’s becoming a bit of an excuse. I’m hearing it in the language starting, not of the senior levels, but some of the other levels, ‘Oh, it’s my unconscious bias.’ Get over it. We’ve always had it. Of course we have. We bring our experience is with us, it’s not a problem. It’s only a problem if we don’t recognise that we bring experience with us, and everyone in the room is exactly the same. That’s why we have to have a

conversation about selection. That’s why we have a conversation about shortlisting. Because that’s when, if you’ve got diversity in the room, that’s when you get a diverse… That’s actually the best way round unconscious bias.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And sometimes, it’s just about being really honest about something. I remember going through one recruitment process with some of my colleagues, and… In the UK it’s quite common in academia, doesn’t happen over here, but it happens over there. You bring all the candidates in together and you all have lunch, which is a slightly stilted conversation, as you can imagine, but… I never quite understood why we did it, but I just think we liked making people uncomfortable. And on this particular occasion, we had one person who was, I know the people in the room who are tall, this is not what you do normally, but there was one particular gentleman, who was absolutely convinced that, because I’m only five-foot-something, he clearly needed to lean over and talk to me quite loudly, because I was a long way away. And slowly, for some reason that I really couldn’t establish at all… you can imagine ten minutes of this, and I’m beginning to wonder it there’s something I can use to physically harm his knees. And I have to go into a room and try to be objective about his application. So, the first thing that I did when I went in there is, I said, ‘OK. Just so you know, him, I really seriously want to find him and a bus together. So, we just need to be aware that I’m know I’m not feeling entirely objective about him right now.’ Nothing I can do to change that, but I can make it very open. Sometimes it’s just about being really clear. Sometimes you can’t say it because it’s not something you feel comfortable with. All the people in the room, is not nearly such a problem. And come back to that.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And then poor management development. Because of the cuts and all sorts of other reasons, there’s lots of reasons why people haven’t been able to get management development, but mostly it’s because we focus on task. So, there’s lots of things happening, but you can get things signed off if you can directly link it to your current job. This comes back to developing our managers for the future. They need to understand that there developing the capability of the future, and they need to be releasing, but they don’t. Not at the moment, anyway.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, I want to come onto something a bit different now, which is about why inclusion? Trudeau quite famously, earlier on this year, said, ‘It’s 2016.’ And his right. Everybody’s talking about it. And it’s about all sorts, if you look at his ministry, everyone focused on gender, but it was a much, much more important industry than that, it was about diversity, it was about indigenous, it was about sport, it was about a whole bunch of different things. So, it’s time. And one of the things I get asked is, ‘Well, would this just be the same thing again? Have lots of policies. Not if we change the way we think about it. And is what I want to do today. Carmel McGregor also, quite famously, once, she was asked, we got some serious problems, particularly this is about gender. We’re not managing to get a different picture with the senior staff, what do we need to do differently? And she said, ‘Well, we could stop appointing white, ageing economists.’ Because, actually, if you look at the senior team, most of them were. This comes back to, if you want diversity in the room, in the future we have to have the diversity in the room. For now… (3553*)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, why do I talk about inclusion and not diversity? Well, because, what’s in a name? Diversity is an outcome, when a diverse range of individuals are represented. Inclusion is a process. I cannot be diverse, I will always be me. But I can be inclusive. I can behave in a way that leads to inclusion. So, inclusion becomes a capability. And once we think of inclusion as a capability,

we realise it’s something we can develop in others. You can’t encourage somebody to be diverse, but you can encourage them to be inclusive.

Now why do I look at inclusion? Well, because, actually, inclusion is much broader than just thinking about it in terms of representation and workplace. It’s a way of thinking about the world. So, it’s feeling included, supported. How many of you are measuring engagement levels across your organisation at the moment? No? Nobody’s measuring engagement? Levels of commitment? Yeah. Citizen behaviours, there’s a whole bunch of things that people are measuring at the moment. If you have inclusion all those things will go up, because the people feel supported and able to do the best job that they can. Why does that matter? Well, it means that we change the way we think about a lot of the processes that we do, let me take probation for one. (3716*)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Many policies, I reviewed a whole load for a paper that I’m writing quite soon, most of them still basically have the assumption that probation is about surviving the first six months. And now I’m under the radar, yeah! Home free! Well, that’s great, but it’s not really enabling high performance in an organisation. It’s not helping us think about our value set. How many of us seriously support our managers to understand how to use probation as a time to offer support, modelling of high-performance, developing what you want? Well, partly because I asked people what is high-performance? They say, I know what I don’t like. Not quite the same thing. Can you model the behaviour that you really want? Can you explain it to people? And then it’s, of course, I haven’t got time. This is about, you know this, but how do we encourage this? Actually managing people in core business, that’s your job. Well, that comes about changing the task. The task now is about managing people stomach so, individuals function at full capacity, they feel more valued, that’s what inclusion actually means. When we use the word inclusion, a lot of the time we think it’s synonymous with diversity. It’s not. It’s a very different thing we are trying to talk about. So, diversity is the mix, inclusion is creating the mix, and getting it to work effectively. That the shift in culture. OK.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, how do we actually do this? It’s not about weighing the pig stomach that mean? Well, it means that a lot of the time, we spend a lot of time weighing the pig. Right? And we want the pig to be fatter, so we keep weighing the pig. Nothing about weighing it is going to make it any fatter. We might feed it different things. We can weigh what we feed it. We might stop giving the poor thing any exercise. That might help. We might put it in a world where it feels better and it eats more. As a whole bunch of things that we can do. We can change the environment, and if we keep weighing it, that won’t help. This is about targets. Now, I’m not saying targets are not important for diversity and inclusion, they are very important. But if you’re not careful we start focusing on measuring the target against all other things, and we forget what it is that we want to be different. So, that’s why I say it’s not just about weighing the pig.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, what is it about? Clearly, I think it is about changing the conversations. So, in case you can’t see it, it says, yeah I’ve noticed that, have you ever noticed in captions is the one on the left that talks first? How do we change a conversation? Well, there’s two questions that I have found the most valuable. The first one is, what you want to be different? Right? Now, that might sound obvious, but actually a lot of the time, we don’t think that through. So, we might say, in this case, well, we want to have a different… We want to achieve it target of a high number of people with disability working. Well, that’s true, but why? Because it’s nicer. Because we now

recognise that gives us a range of different skills and ideas, and we have diverse views throughout the whole organisation. That’s what we really want to be different. We want a world where this becomes normal. That we have everybody included. In an ideal world, and I’m a realist, this can happen in the near future, we wouldn’t need a diversity strategy, because we’d have diversity. That’s what we actually want to be different. That’s what it looked like if it’s working. And that’s another question, what would it look like if it’s working? So, we take recruitment, what will it look like if it’s working? We will have a whole range of different people applying than we have now. And the use recruitment very carefully, because we tend to start worrying about selection. Recruitment is the place we really make a difference here. And come back to that again in a minute.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, there are four types of conversations. The first one is initiative. In theory, if I do a good job today, and only a couple of people start to think about including it as a capability, that would be the start of a new conversation.

So, the stimulus of the mental models. Why are we doing things? So, that’s why we have the policies. Policies should be about initiating new conversations. We then have shared mental models, now, somebody will say to me, oh, but you said we don’t want shared mental models because of everyone thinks the same way, then we won’t have any diversity. What we do want is a shared understanding of what it will look like if it’s working. That’s the shared mental model that we want. Where are we going? Without that, we don’t… One of the things I shouldn’t ever encourage anyone to be bad in a meeting going to trouble for this, you know how sometimes you go to the meeting and you think, this is the same as the last meeting, and possibly the one before. And it’s Groundhog Day. There is a great way, some people would classify it as derailing the meeting, I think it’s about adding value to it, but that’s because I’m usually one that does it. But you take the word that you’re talking about, and you actually ask all the people in the room to write down what it will look like if it’s working.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Motivation is a really fun one on this one, by the way, as HR people, this one is always a good one for a bit of a laugh. Because what you’ll find is, if you’ve got eight people in the room, one of them will say that people will be happier, and at least one of them will say they’ll work harder. Not always compatible. Somebody else will say the level of work, that the quality of the work will improve. Somebody else will say, they’ll go the extra mile, and will have increased organisational citizenship behaviours. We get all sorts. But what you’ll realise is that, actually, nobody in the room is having the same conversation. You’ve got eight people in the room and eight conversations. Because that, actually, is what unconscious bias is really about. It’s that we are all focusing everything in our own current experience. That’s why the shared mental models are really important, and that’s why understanding conversation is so critical.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: My brother runs a company, and they were trying to sort out their strategy the next ten years. And I said, just as a matter of interest, before you start, just get everyone to write down what they think you’re talking about, as in where they think the organisation should be going. So that you can squabble for the next two hours about what it’s really about, which is exactly what happened. So the understanding conversations is pretty critical.

Performance, and this is the one where we normally start. So, performance to generate action, we have a tendency, because we are short of time, because we are in a hurry, because someone wants us to achieve something, we go, oh, let’s go and find out what’s best practice, and then we can write

a policy. Right? Let’s go and get the consultants in. Now, I have nothing against consultants. But the problem is, because we start at the performance conversation, we can’t brief them properly, right? So, we asked them to write us a policy. But we don’t explain why we really want this one to be different this time. And so we end up with the same conversations, going round again. So, we really need to think about starting, other than at performance. (4433*)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And then closure. This is the sustaining… this is the culture. How do we actually sustain it, so that people can come in? And this comes back to inclusion and support. So, several years ago, I think it was about 10 years ago now, the Australian Public Service Commission decided they wanted to bring lots of private people into the Commission. So, rather than going out and asking people, they’d bring people in, so they could change practice. Now, you know that this is very different, but there was no support system put in place for those people. I think there was only two, there was quite a lot of people brought in, they got spat out, usually within about four months. They kept going told you can’t do that here. They kept getting told, well, yes you would think that, but you can’t do that here. The organisation doesn’t let us. So, none of the systems that needed to be put in place to support the new thinking were brought in with them. So, that’s what I mean by a closure.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, I’m not going to go through these too much, but it just gives you some ideas. So, if we are going to talk about inclusion and diversity, let’s start talking about inclusion as a capability, what would that look like? It’s like, we’re talking yesterday, agility… Everyone is talking about agility. It’s a lovely word, isn’t it? I think I was quite agile when I was ten and doing gym, but I don’t think that’s what they want. I think, what they want, is that we think of the world in terms of skills and outputs, rather than just in terms of my current experience. Before an agile organisation, will understand where we have skills that we can reconfigure into dynamic capabilities, is the language that is often used. We can reconfigure the capabilities in a different way, so we can do something different. But we can only do that, A, if we know what the skills are, and B, if we are actually managing to make sure that we’re thinking of the skills for the future. At the moment, I would say most of the time, we’re not, we may say we are, but we are not. So, thinking about the initiative…

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Mal said, it’s very important that the leaders lead with inclusion. That’s very true. So, how do we actually think about that? The stories of success, the stories of difference… Stories make an enormous difference as you know. I’ve just come out of working with one agency that wanted something to be very, very different. But, unfortunately, the first time they had the opportunity to do something different, they didn’t. So although the rhetoric is still really strong, the story, the most important story of all, got lost. And the only story that’s going around now is business as usual, nothing is changing. So, if we want change, we have to think of the stories that are really going to show what we want.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And then performance. So, I’ve already mentioned the idea that if we not careful, we start here. Sometimes, it’s about rethinking our expectations. So, coming back to governance, and I come from a hospitality background originally, and every time we did advertising for the restaurant, we would always say that the people needed to have restaurant experience. And I would ask, quite regularly, why? Some of the jobs it be useful, but actually you can train quite easily. But there’s other things you can’t develop in people easily. So, for example, this was a very

popular restaurant. I never quite understood why, but on a Friday or Saturday night, we would have hundreds, literally, of people trying to get in the front door, waiting for tables. So, as a hostess, it was really the wrong word for it, it was actually crowd control with charm. Now, crowd control with charm is not something you normally learn as a waitress. Because, frequently, you are encouraged to be very polite, and always thinking that the customer is right. If you’ve got 150 people shouting at you, that’s not going to work. What we actually needed was somebody who had the flamboyance to be at the front of the stage and control the crowd. We finally worked out that the people we really needed were out of work actresses. They were brilliant. They put on their… They used to describe it as their circus trainer’s hat, and they saw all the people… I often didn’t want to know how they saw the people, but clearly some form of circus act, and they went on stage. Now, there was a problem with employing out of work actresses, which is, obviously, that they would hopefully want to be… And actors, although as it happened at that point it was actresses. They wanted to be in work actresses, because at the end of the day, working fronts office with us was not their long-term goal, understandably. Which meant that they needed to be able to go to auditions at the drop of a hat. So, what did that mean? Well, that meant that we had a very different approach to the way we did our scheduling. We just had a number. And there was a pool of them, and they all knew each other, I think there were six of them at one point, and we would say, ‘two, three, one, two, three…’. And that meant, you lot sort it out amongst yourselves, but that’s a number of you that have to turn up that day. As you can imagine, it took a little while before the senior management team were confident with this approach, because, who am I going to phone? But it actually worked really, really well. And they were great. But it took us a really big difference in realising that the skill set was not the one we thought of.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And then, again, closure. How do we make it part of the standard system? And ongoing review and change, because the issue comes back to, if everyone thinks it’s OK, who’s going to challenge that? I don’t know how many of you know the story of Coca-Cola’s most expensive mistake. And this comes back to groupthink, and is the problem with… the actual problem with unconscious bias. So, with groupthink, it’s that everybody thinks everybody else wants something, and so I’m going to go along with it. What happened with Coca-Cola was that Pepsi and 7-Up had both relaunched, because they’ve been trying to get a bigger market share. Cocoa had the biggest market share, but they thought maybe they should relaunch as well. Now, I know I’m a touch cynical, I understand that, but you call in a marketing research company, and you say to them, ‘Do we need to relaunch? I think we do.’ And if they say no, then there’s no more money attached to this project. And if they say yes, it’s a license to print millions of dollars. So, surprisingly enough, the answer was yes. Go figure. And they did relaunch it. And everybody hated it. And they had to spend billions, very, very quickly, putting all the factories back, and it became known as ‘Classic Coke’, but what it meant was, the one we had before because you lot won’t buy the new one. And they put it back. For me, the interesting part of that story, is what they did next. They appointed someone called the devil’s advocate. I’ve been trying to get a job four years. Right? Because you are paid to be difficult. Go figure. That’s my skill set, wouldn’t it be perfect? But on a serious note, what they wanted was… Because what they realised was, I mean, hindsight is an exact science, and you can never be quite sure. But all the people who are involved in the decision all said, except the CEO who did admit that he might have thought it was a good idea… all the others apparently said, ‘I didn’t think it was a good idea, but all the others seemed convinced.’ Was a very centralised, very paternalistic company, and apparently they’d all cut themselves into this horrible groupthink

situation. I suspect some of them did think it was a good idea, but it made a lot more sense to say no afterward. However, what they then needed was to make it OK to have the alternative conversation. So why am I telling you that story now? That’s what we have to have. Who is going to be the person in the room, who, when everyone is in agreement, pushes it to say, have we considered this, have we thought about that, are we sure? There comes a point when you have to make a decision, not saying there isn’t, but it’s an interesting role. Whose can be the person who is going to make sure we keep challenging what we think we know? Because that’s the issue with bias.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, let’s have a few examples. What we need to achieve? That’s the thing with thinking about, isn’t it? And the outcomes of the practices that can make a difference, I sort of mentioned recruitment not selection. For me, this is the place where we can make the biggest difference. Where do we advertise? I think, many years ago, I just started a new undergraduate course, and I was very proud of it, and I wanted to make sure I got lot of students on it. So, I had a look at where the demographic of my students, and I wrote my marketing plan. And I was told that that’s not where we advertised. That’s not where we marketed as a university. And I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, where do we market, where do we advertise?’ ‘Oh, in the broadsheets.’ And those days, there was a newspaper in the UK called the Observer, and it wasn’t the most exciting read, even if you are into finance, it wasn’t a very exciting read, which is one of the reasons, I think, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the idea that our students read the Observer was, quite frankly, ludicrous. And they said, ‘Oh, no, but the parents do.’ And I looked again at the demographic of my students and I said, ‘No.’ At that point, there was a new comic book launched called ‘Viz’. And I said, ‘Can I advertise there?’ ‘Absolutely not! We do not want to be linked to that.’ I said, ‘No, but every single one of my students reads it.’ Just think who I could get to. And I was never allowed to advertise there. We had some kind of compromise in the end, but it struck me that that was when I needed to start thinking about how do I really change the recruitment pool?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: The other example was, in my last role, I needed to recruit an administrative assistant. So, I asked for the job description for the level of job that I was going to be able to appoint, and it was all about administration, is all about her tasks that she would do. And when I said, look, 50% of it is going to be support for me, the present is support for the team, but a hundred percent of this job is developing a culture of inclusion for a higher degree in research students. So, this person has to like students. Now, those of you who have been anywhere near universities will know, that liking students and working in the admin sector is not necessarily synonymous. In fact, sometimes I think it’s quite clearly, must not like students in the job description, hidden somewhere in the base… And I said, I need to have that their job is about developing inclusion for the higher degree research students, in terms of improving research, and completion rates, and all those kind of things. I need that in the advert. I need that in the way it set up. No, no, no… That’s the one we have. I see that, but that’s the one I want. We ended up having a very, very unfortunate row, which, fortunately, in the end, we compromise. So, I managed to get an amazing lady to come and work with me. But as a thing, I said to her, just as a matter of interest, look at this advert. I showed her the one that was a standard one for that level, the job description for that level, the standard one, and she said, ‘Oh, I would never have applied for that.’ Because she came from a very different background, but she could see how her skills applied, and it wasn’t… Everything I did was about the skills and not experience. So, you can see what I’m doing. I’m asking you to think differently. So, recruitment rather than selection.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: But then we have the shortlist. We have a tendency to look for experience in the CVs and/or response to criteria. We’re seeing some quite interesting experiments taking place in some organisations at the moment, trying to stop having the very long response to criteria, and moving towards a CV and covering letter. One of the arguments put forward as to why we can’t make that shift is about merit, and the merit principle. So, really, we need to go back and ask why we have merit in the first place.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Merit was put in place to make sure that we provided equal opportunity for everybody. That’s what it was for. It’s about equal opportunity. Now, what does that mean about when we read CVs? Well, we need to be thinking about how well has somebody done with the opportunity that they had? So, if I’m looking at CVs, I might have somebody who’s only just entering academia, there’s quite a lot of people who like to join academia as a second career. I think they think it’s gentler than it really is. And one of our jobs is always to explain that it’s not a nice place… No, it’s a lovely place, but not if what you want is a quiet life. We get lots of people coming in, so we have to look at the CVs and say, right, where’s the skill level? What have they done in terms of their opportunity, and how do we compare these two CVs that look so different, in a way that means that everybody gets an equal opportunity to shine? Because otherwise, we’ll always… And we looked at it, we looked at the history, we always took the person who’d been in academia before, we always took the person who had a longer experience in academia. But, actually, they weren’t necessarily the right person, not if we’re going to try to change. We’re always being accused of the fact that we live in a world where you don’t understand the real world. Well, if we’re going to recruit people in who do understand, then we have to make that possible.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So how is shortlist developed, how is the conversation in the room managed? One of the things that worries me is that we get really busy, and we often do shortlisting by email. Right? So, people send it all out, and say can you send me all your suggestions and then I’ll put it together? Sounds great, saves a lot of time. But it means we don’t have the conversation about that one person who we can’t quite work out, who might be great and who might not be. Let’s just see. We did that recently and they turned out to be fabulous. But if we hadn’t had the conversation, I know we wouldn’t have shortlisted that person. Who’s managing that conversation, is a really important one.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: I’ve mentioned probation already. OK. We’re thinking the reasons for probation, why do we do it? It’s about opportunity. When somebody comes in… This is the kind of thing which, when I sometimes (inaudible) do interviewing about my research, and I think I’m being harsh about the sector, and the 90 people and I realise I’m not. So, one of the quotes recently from somebody was, ‘Oh no, I think it’s very good that we do performance management. You should speak to your staff at least once a year.’ My colleague Fiona has no poker face, and she had to catch her chin and put it gently back up. (100:57*)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Another one, was I met someone recently, who said, ‘Yes, I started here six weeks ago.” I said, ‘Oh great, you know, how are things going? She said, ‘Well, I’m hoping to meet my manager soon.’ What? ‘Yeah, yeah, he’s been really busy.’ I said, ‘Well, yeah? That busy?’

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And I’ve been doing a whole of work with one of the very big organisations in Canberra with, what they call the EL2s, just below SES level, and I said to them, ‘I want you to be really honest, and I’ve done five of these now, is about 250 in a room and each time, I still have

wanted to be really honest. Hands up who knows that they quite regularly cancel their team meeting because everybody is too busy to have the team meeting?’ And a whole forest of hands went up. And I said, ‘Well, how can you support and model high-performance? How can you support your probation people? And by probation, I don’t just mean people who are coming new into the organisation, but those who are new into a role. That period of time where we’re trying to make sure that they’re able to work with our team. So, I asked them all to promise me that there was one thing they would stop doing, it would be to stop cancelling their team meetings because they were too busy. It’s an hour a week, really. You need to do it.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Then we think about who’s making the decisions. How are things being done? Here are some of the questions that people need to ask themselves as they going through. Have we got a range of people in the room? And I don’t just mean have we got gender, which is the one that everyone talks about all the time, and that sometimes drives me crazy. The reason it drives me crazy, by the way, is because there’s not that many female professors. So, I get to do a lot more recruitment than a lot of other people, because you have to have a female professor on the panel. And I keep saying, well, how about you just say we need somebody from all four schools, because that will give you really, really different perspectives, because we have an engineering school, and a mathematical school, and a humanities school, and a business school, and what would happen if you had a professor from each of those schools in the room? Was taken off a lot longer because we are academics and we talk too much, and we’ve not a lot to say when it’s that different, but, more importantly, we’d have really different views in the room, so that would probably be much more valuable than trotting me out as the female professor. Oh, well, we don’t do that. I know you don’t do that! Why don’t we give it a go? Why don’t we see what would happen? So, who’s making the decisions? How different are they really? Why are we doing it that way? It comes back to Trudeau and his ministry. Who has access to critical information? This is another of my favourite ones when we come to do this. Yes, we do know that, but we can’t give it to you. Right. So, can you give your trends? The kind of information I’m talking about, one of the really big ones is, currently, who has access to somebody’s performance management review?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: In the, apparently, excuse to do with merit, many organisations say that we don’t use the performance management reviews as part of recruitment, or internal transfer. Which leads me to find people about to promote somebody to the middle management role at one side of the organisation, when they’re on performance management in their current job. And there’s all sorts of reasons given why it’s not possible to do anything about that. Remember, the organisation does not choose, we do. Now, some of it’s around… some of it’s around the issue of unions, I understand that, but those are the kinds of things that we need to think about the long-term.

What we want to be different? Who has access the information? Because it’s not just about the negative performance, it’s about the positive. It gives us the evidence that someone has a different set of skills.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: I’ve put job security here only because it frames the way everybody looks at the world. If people are feeling insecure, there is a biological thing that happens, by the way. It’s not well tested, but I am absolutely sure of it, which is that as there is any form of insecurity, and people’s ears seize up. Now, you’re HR people, you know this. It’s a magic flap. It goes with the word change. That’s it, my ears are shut, I cannot hear. So, one of the things we try to think about is how

you keep the ear flaps open. Right. So, job security is one of the triggers for problems with your ear flaps. So, people are feeling insecure, that will always be an issue. You can’t change that, necessarily, but it means that you can think about how you sell the ideas, who do you talk to, how do you think about developing capability later on?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Again, with our managers, one of the things I find quite strange at the moment, and I find it everywhere, is we have business as usual here, we have change management here, and we have performance management over here. And I look at them, and I go, you have to be doing all those three things together. But we don’t think about it that way. So, that’s when we can start to think about it… How do we integrate those things? How do we use some of those processes? And one of the ways we can do that is to start to think about which of the capabilities that the skills which help us integrate those things with our managers, and one of them, one of many, will be inclusion. That mixed with individual well-being, and also workgroup and social integration. That comes back to why don’t we cancel team meetings? One of the reasons is because everybody knows the team needs to know each other well. For many of us it is automatic, that we bring our teams together on a regular basis, but for some it is not. We’re back to what are the skills that we learn? So, one of the managers that we did some coaching with, quite honestly confessed that he didn’t have team meetings because he felt threatened when his team is in the room. Why? Because he’d never had any management development. He’d gone to the whole process, and he didn’t really know what to say to them. He knew we should have one, and that, of course, is when team meetings become about a briefing. So many of you will have been into meetings which are just a briefing. I’m going to tell you everything I found now, they can go. Because I can control the room. So, when we are thinking about developing management capabilities, let’s start thinking about what did they really need to do so that they feel secure? So our middle managers feel comfortable doing the job we want them to do? Because they get focused on task, because that’s what they understand.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, where are we going next? Well, I think where were going next is, we need to be able to evaluate some of these things, and I think we need to think carefully about how we evaluate. Some of that will be about targets, but some of that will be going back to what we want to be different. If I have articulated, you will be able to see it more clearly. Have we got higher levels of engagement? How are retention levels? Have we got different tools? Have we got different skills? What are the things we want to look at? What will be working better? We need to start changing some of the conversations, so that we can start thinking about how do we achieve some of these things in a different way. And, primarily, we also need to stop weighing the pig. So, thank you very much. I’m now going to open it up for questions. Thank you. Company much on time. Oh, I’m bang on time according to the computer here, anyway. So, are there any questions, either for me or private-sector commission, or have I put you all gently to sleep?

OTHER: (inaudible) …Public Sector Commission. In terms of… you spoke today about recruitment and selection. The message we quite often try to convey in our recruitment process is that we want a diverse workforce to mirror the people that we serve, or our stakeholders. Is there a better message that we can be using? Or a better reason to be giving for actually saying that we need to be inclusive?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: it’s a very good message, that we need to be inclusive for our workforce. But I think it’s also about thinking about how do we actually do our work? If you think about what

we’re supposed to do. We are supposed to develop policies, and implement policies that will benefit the community as a whole, which is partly about reflecting our community. But it’s also about the range of ideas or things that we can come up with. So, I think one of the reasons why we need to be doing it is thinking about how likely is it we’ll be doing something different in the future if we don’t change.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: This comes back to the pool, and the bias, or the groupthink, or whatever you might call it, which is that if you’ve got the same people in the room, they’re going to have the same conversation. So, if we want to change the conversation, if we want to change the way we develop policy, if we want to think about implementing in a different way, and it’s often about implementation, it’s often about, maybe there’s another way we can think about doing this. That’s when we need to have a whole range of different people. So, yes, it’s partly about reflecting the population, but it’s also about saying, the reason we need to do that is because we can actually change some of the ideas of what we do.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: So, to give you a simple example, again, going back a few years, when we were working at the hotel, it was always a classic thing of, we have a job, we advertise. One day, we decided we’d do a big open house, and anybody who thought they might be interested in working hospitality could come, and then we would try and work out what job they might be suited for. So, we turned the whole thing on its head, and one of the things that happened was that somebody came in who’d been the executive assistant to a very, very… He was the CEO of very large organisation in the States for a long time. And she just come back for family reasons, and she was for a job. She had no history, and she was finding she couldn’t get… There are lots of jobs you couldn’t get because you have a history or experience in any of those things. And I realised she had the most amazing skill set, she was really good it’s crowd control, she was very good with difficult people, she was used to managing four or five different tasks all at once, she was great at project management, and she was extremely charming and personable. And she was the best Guest relations manager that hotel had ever had, but it should apply the job, she would never have got it. So, it was about changing the whole way we thought about doing it, and one of the ways we can do that is about having different people coming in. So, we change… If we think about inclusion, it’s everything we do all the time, we develop an inclusion capability by having a range of diverse perspectives. It’s a long answer, but I hope it makes sense. OK. Any other questions? Thoughts? Comments? Arguments? You’re talking rubbish, woman. Whatever. High!

OTHER: I wonder if you find it effective to include different generations in your inclusivity programs, because motivation is that, much as I hate to admit it, millennial’s and younger ones actually do have some very good and inclusive perspectives.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Aren’t they brilliant? Yes. Absolutely. And it is about different perspectives. I tend not to think about it as generational, but only because I think a lot of the generational differences, some of it is about the context, a lot of it is about age and experience, so I tend to think about it in terms of what the experience that the cohort in the room has got.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: And so, you might want some people who have come straight into the organisation and are young, you’ve got your graduate program, you might have had some come in who might have tried something else. So, I tend to think about it in terms of what’s the experience level that they’re bringing in, but should we have youngsters and a whole range of different…

Absolutely. And the other reason for thinking about it on the experiential level, is that you can have the same age group, but some of them will have come through a very difficult background and they’ll be very resilient, and some of them won’t. And, in fact, work is the first time… I was talking to someone the other day, and they were reflecting on the fact that the first time anybody had ever told them that they weren’t perfect was when they had the first performance review. And up until then, you know, they’d been graduating with a certificate from ‘kindy’, you know, because everyone gets to play. Well, it’s lovely, but it’s got a huge issue in terms of building resilience. When we think of resilience again, we don’t always think about it as a capability, but it’s actually something we learn, and we talk about it. But management… developing resilience in our future managers is something we really need to be thinking about much more, going off on a slight tangent. And what we mean by that? But that’s why I would say you could have some early 20s who are incredibly resilient, and they will have the same problem, and can pick a completely different way from a group who have come straight through, and never had a negative thing. So, I think it’s about the range of experience in the room, rather than necessarily just thinking about it in terms of age. If that makes sense? Yes? Hi.

OTHER: Do you have a view… Everyone seems to concentrate on performance management, but what’s your view about performance development? As a preference (inaudible), because it seems to have a different conversation, virtually impossible to fire someone, so you got to do something with them.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Well, my view on performance management, is it does need to be… development and moving it forward, anyway. And if we start… If we think of performance management, rather than as a system… I’m currently writing an article about why performance management should not be seen as dieting. Right? Now, there’s a reason for that, which is what happens is, we tend to do dieting by going on a diet, we lose weight, we come off the diet, we all know that it magically comes back. And then we do it again. And I see performance management, if we’re not careful, like, you know, we do it here and it goes away for you, then it comes back. We all know that the only way to change our weight or our shape, or whatever it is we trying to do, is by changing… It becomes about the way that we live, it becomes core business. So, performance management, if we see it is about what we’re trying to do is shape the way people do their job, from when they arrive to when they leave, then it becomes about probation, development, all of those things. And then we can start to think about modelling it, and thinking about what it looks like if it’s working. We’re always going to have some underperformance, and we have to have a process for that, even though as you say, it’s incredibly difficult to do. But, at the moment, it’s still… although people talk about performance development, they tend to still go back to thinking about it the other way. Now, how does that fit with this? Well, because if you want to then think about inclusion… If you’ve worked out what your capabilities are, if you think of inclusion as a capability, if you think of agility as a capability, then you realise that your performance development conversation needs to have those things as part of your skills. One of those things that suggested is that the senior team sit down, doesn’t have to be the same every year, and you’re very much the people need to frame this… What do you want your performance management to do for you this year? It’s not a

conversation people have. I say, did you talk to them and ask them? Well, we want to do it. Yes, I know you want to do it, but that’s like doing the Atkins diet, right? You’re going to do it. Why do you want to do it? Right? What… Performance management can be different this year. Is it that we want to talk about inclusion? Or your new diversity policy? Or have some thoughts about what that would mean for every person in the organisation? So, for the managers, for the senior managers talking to their managers talking about how you want to be changing some of your practices? Let’s pick a practice. Let’s talk it through. How would we make that more of an inclusive practice? So, yeah, we can start to think about it that way, rather than… And I don’t know if that’s answered your question, but I think it sort of does. Sort of, but does it (inaudible) sorry?

OTHER: (inaudible)

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Yeah, but one of the things I would say is alignment, and alignment is really important, but we have to start the conversation… We going to these how to have difficult conversation courses, which many of us do… By the way, you could take the entire content, rename it, and rebadge it, as how to have a high-performance conversation, and it would be just as valid, but help you think about it that way a bit more. But one of the things we’ve got to do is always put the individual in the middle, and then come to the organisation. I love this because when you become a professor at my university, you get half-an-hour one-on-one with the Vice Chancellor, right? Whoa! How exciting would that be? Off you go and sit in your… Half-an-hour talking about me and my future in this university, and now…

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Because being a professor’s quite weird, by the way, because it’s one of those things you aspire to be, and then you become one. First of all, you realise that they’re just like everyone else, and that’s rather a disappointment. And then you think, now what do I do? So great, going to the Vice Chancellor. Perfect. And I got in there, and he said, ‘Well, I have two main messages, one of them is about being collegiate, but you already are, the other one is about leadership, but you already do that. So, how we should reorganise the business school?’ And I was so miserable, because my half-hour was all about the organisation. So, I’ve learnt that even though you want to talk about the organisation in performance review, start with the individual, always. And my question, which some of you will know, is always, ‘What you most proud of this year?’ It’s a great question, because you’ll find out all sorts of things that you didn’t know about, and it doesn’t have to be work, and you can go from there. And then that’s where you can start to bring some of the stuff in. The lady at the back first, and then this one here.

OTHER: Thank you. Just quickly, at the onset you referred to HR not always having that seat at the executive table, and yet, we trying to introduce strategies into organisations. In your experience, how have you found that in the public sector? Not necessarily in the unis, but the public sector? Has it been a problem for that HR strategic direction?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Yes, is the simple answer. I don’t know if anyone wants to come in on this. One of the difficulties is that you have to be saying something really interesting to get to the table, and to stay there. And sometimes HR is not strategic enough in the way that they talk about things. And the other issue, I’m not saying it’s happened, it has happened in many places I’ve worked with, not in, but with, is in order to be heard there’s been too much focus on risk, and not enough about

future skill development and workforce planning, and the future, and not enough understanding of the business. And I don’t mean in terms of money, but what is it we need to be thinking about in the future? And I think that’s the reason why HR sometimes has had a problem being at the table, is that they’re not engaging in the conversation in the way that they really need to.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: In a way, it comes back to what I’ve just said, you’ve got to put… There, it works the other way round. If you’re talking at the exec table, the organisation in the middle, and then what does that mean for HR? Moving sideways, so, yes… It’s about the conversation. If the conversation is about, ‘no, you can’t do that’, then we don’t get heard. And too often it is… Too often I hear HR explaining why something can’t happen, and when I’m talking to my students I always say, the answer is never no. The answer might be, you really can’t do it like that. What is it you want to be different? Let’s see how we can do that, but too often the answer is, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ And then you don’t get heard. There was a gentleman, or a lady here, hi…

OTHER: I want to talk about the unconscious bias…

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Okay.

OTHER: ..And link it with recruitment. Now, I’m from the local government industry, so we haven’t had the freeze that state government has had. We recently advertised for a role, a graduate role, and we had in excess of 350 people applying for the role. Very experienced people, as well as young graduates. The bias was that the experienced people, they would be perfect, but as soon as the mining boom comes back again, they will be out of here. We couldn’t have those conversations in our organisation. We generally get the selection panel together, we go through the resonance together, we have discussions. It was impossible. How would you… What would you do with 350—

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Sorry, what was impossible?

OTHER: To have three people sitting around a table, assessing 350 applications together at the same time, and discussing whether this one would be... It was just…

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Yeah, no you can’t, I agree.

OTHER: But how would we overcome the bias that, well, this very experienced person would be perfect at the role, would not just leave in the next six months?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: OK.

OTHER: So, it was those sort of discussions, and we struggled.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Yeah.

OTHER: We got the right person eventually.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: In the end, so how did you do that?

OTHER: It was not easy.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: OK.

OTHER: It was really an exercise of yes, no, yes, no, yes, no… It was a nightmare.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Well, the usual way that I would suggest it is done, because if you’ve got 350, of course you can’t, but some of them will clearly be not what you want, because in every pool there always are. And then what you work out is, what’s your deal-breaker? Right. There will always be a deal-breaker, which you can say, it doesn’t matter whether they’ve got experience, whether they haven’t got experience, I must be able to see that they have this skill, or this potential, or something. There will be something that will be a deal-breaker, and you can usually, not always and it may be not in that case, but you can usually say, right, that will leave us with maybe not all the experienced people, but a group of people who we can now look at. But by not using the experience, but with something else, you can end up with a wider pool still in there.

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: Then you have a discussion about the smaller pool. The other thing is, that I’ve always said to everybody, bring… you know, we’ll do the smaller pool, but, if in that we’ve got rid of two people that you really liked, but they didn’t quite fit, bring your two outliers. Right? I always encourage people to bring their two outliers. So, when we’ve done our, you know, ‘please send me your top ten out of your 350’, or whatever might be, and then send me the two… It might be that you didn’t include them because you didn’t think there were quite there, or you read them and you thought this person could be really good, or really not. But wouldn’t it be good to talk about them? So, I think it’s about, again, trying to keep some of the outliers in the system, not about your biased. Sometimes if someone says ‘no’ straight away, I’ll ask why. Sometimes it’s obvious, and you don’t want them. So, we normally end up with, ‘yes, they look really good’, ‘absolutely not’, and

the… Well, usually there’s three, and three of the maybes, I have four, I have yes, no, maybe, and it would be completely different if I employed that person. That person, I had never thought of. And instinctively I am saying no, but actually maybe not. Does that… One group I know said we only want to, we want your five most likely, and your five who fit the criteria, but looked the most unlikely. And they brought those in. And they went from there. So again, changing the conversation. The other thing is if then somebody will sometimes say, and this happened in another role quite recently, you know we’ve forgotten one that we rejected, and they went to bring them back in the pool. So, yeah, it’s hard. But I guess it’s about maybe changing the ways we normally do the process. Are we there? Oh, gentlemen over here. Hi.

OTHER: (inaudible) I’ve been an executive and a CEO for a very long time, so I might be talking about a situation that no longer exists, but if the discussion is about bringing (inaudible) to the management table, to what extent do you need them to be their advocates for the rest of the people in the organisation? Because (inaudible) when I was in middle management, the view was HR was just there to do whatever the executive or the CEO wanted done, but they didn’t look after the employees (inaudible) rest of the organisation. How do you balance that out, so it becomes fairer? And agents for change in a fair way, right across the organisation?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: That’s a fair question. I would suspect that that may have changed. Many people in the room would have a better feeling of that than I have in your situation. But I think the other thing is that they shouldn’t be the only voice. So, if you’ve only got, if you’re only talking to one person, then you can have that problem. But if we go back to the conversation earlier on, the lady earlier on, talking about who she should be talking to, if your HR are giving you a different perspective from everybody else in the organisation, that would be unusual. So, I think it’s about who you are talking to, and how you are having that conversation. I dunno if anyone else wants to comment. I would suspect that’s not the case for most of your organisations now, but I don’t know. No? Any comments?

OTHER: It seems to me that what we’re really talking about is the inheritance of HR, particularly in public sector (inaudible) in normal organisations, having been about compliance and hygiene, not about strategy and innovation, and that’s regrettable because that perceptions (inaudible), because HR have been effectively the rule makers and the enforcers of rules. Not a particularly innovative place to be, nor necessarily encouraging of strategic thought, but if you’ve got HR which is actually aligning itself with one of the objects of the business, you suddenly cease to be about compliance and hygiene and risk, and much more about how do we get the major resource of this organisation working in the most effective way?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: That’s right. Anything that’s the changing perspectives that happen in some places, and not in others, and that astronomers say earlier on. It is about, how do we achieve the organisational outcome? So, if we think about it in terms of having an organisational outcome in the

middle, how do we... Let’s face it, in the public sector, our biggest resources are people, always. Depending on the part of the organisation, it will be somewhere between 80% to 95% of the budget will be on people. So, we’ve got to manage that the best way we can. So, I think there was a history of compliance, but I’d like to think that that’s really changing now, but to be continuing to be heard, that I to think about the long-term future. And thinking about skills and capabilities, and the long-term future of workforce planning. I mean, workforce planning is another one with HR, where it used to be very much looking at it in terms of numbers, but now when we think about workforce planning, with thinking about it as how do we develop an agile organisation? That’s a whole different question for workforce plan, then how many people we need in five years’ time? So, it’s about changing the questions we are asking ourselves. It’s also about the CEOs asking more interesting questions, because CEOs used to ask, how many people will I need? And HR would comply. Whereas now, HR need to say, that’s an interesting question, but maybe we should try a different one. Back to our conversations, let’s start, that’s performing with performance, that’s starting with a performance conversation, let’s go back. I don’t know how many people you are going to need, because I don’t know what it is you want to do. Right?

PROFESSOR BLACKMAN: I don’t know how (inaudible), but I think things are changing. But again, it’s about inclusion, who are you listening to? Who are you talking to? I’m always quite surprised how often people are not talking… I mean, going to the organisation where I was working with the middle managers, that started out of me asking a question of the senior team, when did you last have a conversation with your middle managers about what you think their role is, what you want them to do and what happens if they are good at their job? It’s an organisation that employs thousands of people, and they stared at me completely blankly. Well, we talk to the SES all the time. Yeah, that’s not the people I’m talking about. So, that was about me saying, you to go and talk to these people, you need to engage with them, and would you believe they’ve learnt a lot? Go figure. And so sometimes I think I’m talking about stuff that’s obvious, but we all know it doesn’t happen. It’s quite weird. Yes, OK, I’ve got to stop now, apparently. Thank you.

TRACEY CULLEN: Wow, thank you, Commissioner Wauchope and Professor Blackman for your insights. I think the whole point of this conversation series is to generate conversations, and I think that will happen a long time after the event finishes today. So, thanks everybody for coming along. I’d like to just take this opportunity to highlight a couple of colleagues of mine: Linda Delaney, who is the key contact for the See My Abilities strategies, so I know you’ve all got a copy of that, and again, my colleague, Giacinta Smith and Janelle Walker who is over here, a show of hands everybody, and they are a contact for the Time for Action. So… and, of course, you all know Rebecca Harris, who has the final say in all those sorts of things. OK, so, in closing, I’d like to acknowledge the talented W.A. artists, so when you’re having a look at your strategies, you’ll see that we’ve engaged somebody to pretty them up. The artist has agreed to allowed us to use the artwork for the visual identity of the strategy, so easily accessible on the shelf, where they won’t be gathering dust. Ms Jane Ryan is the artist, who lends her work to both of the policies, and she’s a talented Western Australian artist who practises painting, sculpture, printmaking, weaving, and coiling. So, that’s something that’s different. So, more information on the artist is available in each of the strategies. So, thank you for your attendance and good morning.