The four Cs: How to rebuild a department after robo-debt

As an executive, how do you organise your day? How do you prepare for the day? As a leader in a highly varied portfolio, how do you stay on top of the many demands for your time while pursuing longer-run objectives?

Of course, most of the day is actually organised for me.

When you take into account ministerial requirements – I have three cabinet ministers that I report to – government processes, parliamentary processes, a lot of those are immovable and you have to plan around them.

What I try to do is to get the organisation to wind out its planning horizon as much as possible so they can assist me in navigating what’s coming. If you can wind that planning horizon out, people start to think well ahead, and you can actually become less reactive and more responsive.

I do try and carve out a couple of hours a week where I can focus on longer-term thinking. I won’t say what day of the week I do that, because then people will start filling it with things. But I do have a system where I try and carve that out and I say to my EA: �?The only people that can gazump me during that time are ministers and my wife.’

Across your career as a leader what have you learnt about getting the best out of your reports?

I talked earlier about having an adaptive leadership approach. This will sound contradictory, but I think it’s crucial that you have a very adaptable leadership approach but also to be consistent in your responses.

They need to be able to anticipate with some certainty what issues are important to you, where they need to focus. Otherwise, they are double- and triple-guessing, which takes their mind off trying to achieve it.

I think you need consistency, approachability and a genuine willingness to take on advice and change course when you need. If your reports don’t think you’ll do that, then they won’t bring things to your attention that you actually need to hear.

I’ve used a mechanism for about 25 years now. My senior team and I have an expectations agreement that basically lists what they expect from me and what I expect from them.

We review that about three or four times a year with the whole senior executive. It’s a really good anchor point to have a discussion about how they are travelling and how I’m travelling as far as they’re concerned.

The other really big thing in leadership generally is knowledge of self. If you don’t know your strengths, don’t know your weaknesses, you don’t understand how you impact those around you.

I put a lot of that down to that expectations agreement process, because what I’ve done over the 13 years is to be constantly reviewing how I am leading with the team.

It’s incredibly valuable. One challenge for most senior leaders is that they simply don’t get that unvarnished feedback.

Post robo-debt what have you sought to do to reset the department’s culture and operations?

I came here, to DSS, in July 2021, before the royal commission. I was obviously incredibly conscious of what had happened.

Whenever I take over an organisation, I do my own cultural stocktake. I set the cultural agenda here pretty much within six weeks of arriving, and continued to build on that throughout and obviously post the royal commission.

It’s distilled into four things, which I call the four Cs – things I want to see in the department and see people demonstrate.

First, being curious. Curious about their jobs, curious about the issues, policies that we will develop and being forever curious. Not just transitory but being a foundation feature in the way you think.

Second is people who instinctively collaborate across the department across the portfolio across government, with our stakeholders. There’s a lot of talk about partnership and co-design, trying to make that meaningful so we can develop policies that work.

The third one is that people who can and will respectfully contest ideas. So contestability is the third C.

It’s not about a headbutting activity but a genuine opportunity to contest and improve ideas and proposals. If people hold on to things from cradle to grave and not accept different perspectives, that’s when you get into trouble.

The final one is really important for me, and that is to have the courage to call out what needs to be called out, to say what needs to be said.

If you look at the royal commission, those four were probably in short supply. The four Cs are not a direct response to robo-debt because I think those elements are important in any organisation.

It’s a formulation that’s come out of decades of my own experience, thinking about organisational health as a leader.