Podcast transcript: How HR practitioners can become cultural leaders

Beth Hall: Welcome to Season Two of Let’s Take This Offline, a podcast from the Australian HR Institute that brings you closer to the minds helping to shape the future of HR. My name is Beth Hall, and I’m the General Manager of HR Standards and Capability at AHRI. I’ve been in people and culture for over 15 years, working with dynamic organisations globally that focus on strategies to enhance workplace wellness and performance and passionate about advancing HR to create positive work environments. And my master’s in Organisational Psychology has been instrumental in shaping my approach to HR. When organisations are faced with crippling complex and seemingly unsolvable cultural challenges, they often put sole responsibility on the HR team to fix the problem. But this rarely works because you can’t outsource culture to a single function in the business. It needs to be deeply embedded into all of our business practices. We all know as HR practitioners, we aren’t the keepers of culture, we are the cultural leaders and enablers. We set the scene and we provide leaders and managers with the tools they’ll need to help their teams live out the organisational culture in an authentic and impactful way. Someone who knows this well is today’s guest, Siobhan McHale, Executive General Manager of People, Culture and Change at Dulux and speaker at this year’s AHRI National Convention and Exhibition. In this episode, we chat with Siobhan about how do we frame our role in HR to have a greater impact at an executive level, how to embrace group intelligence within our organisations, and her seven year culture transformation project that took ANZ Bank from the worst performing financial institution in Australia to one of the best. Siobhan welcome to the podcast.

Siobhan McHale: It’s great to be here, Beth, thank you for having me.

Beth Hall: So before we jump into some of the great cultural work that you have been carrying out throughout your entire career, I’d love to understand from you, what led you to work within such large complex organisations and cultural change?

Siobhan McHale: Well, I started as an organisational psychologist, actually, the first part of my career was actually in management consulting. And so I spent some time working as a management consultant at PWC. And then at Accenture, really working across four continents. And after a decade as a management consultant, I was standing in the freezing cold of O’Hare International Airport in Chicago while I was working at Accenture, and I really realised that I had hit a crossroads – that was at a U-turn in my career. And that after 10 years of consulting, I was yearning for something more, I actually wanted to roll up my sleeves and do the change work rather than just simply advise about the change work. So that led me to the second half of my career, which is really being in HR and being the person in charge of transformation in a series of large, complex international firms. And it really was borne from a desire to get involved in change to step into my role as a change leader, rather than jetting across the world just advising about change. 

Beth Hall: Yeah. Oh, and very different, isn’t it in terms of driving sustainable change within an organisation when there’s so much going on in the immediate reactive space that you’re needing to respond to, whilst also knowing that proactive long game, it can be really useful to be able to be embedded but also really challenging at the same time, can’t it in terms of being able to prioritize all of those different things happening at once?

Siobhan McHale: Absolutely. And I think we and HR has such a great opportunity to step into that role of change leader and to dial that up and to really help organisations not just to deliver but to go where they need to go and I see that as a big opportunity for HR professionals actually that change leader role. 

Beth Hall: Yeah, I agree. And look, I’m a self-confessed fangirl of your work, Siobhan, I’ve read all of the books that you’ve published and also follow you on LinkedIn. And what I love is that you don’t position HR as the culture. You know, we’ve moved from HR directors, CHROs and head of people and culture, and culture has become part of our title and part of our job description. And therefore, in some cases, it has become this expectation that if the engagement survey says we don’t have a great culture, then HR needs to fix it. And I love the way you talk about the role of change leader, can you share a little bit more around? How when you are in that unique position of HR, see all of the things playing out from an employee perspective, from an organisational perspective and have that unique position to be able to see the cultural change that’s required? How do you go about getting buy in and facilitating that change and leading from the front without taking ownership of it? 

Siobhan McHale: Yeah, it’s such a great question. And it really became apparent to me when I was working at an infrastructure company, and they were in big trouble. They were bleeding money on the balance sheet. And they really weren’t managing their budgets appropriately. And they knew they needed to change their culture. And they asked me to come in and have a look at it. And I was interviewing the senior executives who were my colleagues on the team. And after I finished interviewing the CFO, he was really, really clear that the organisation needed to become more commercial and to change its culture. And he shook hands with me as we finished our hour long meeting. And he said good luck with changing the culture. And at that stage, I realised that he believed as a CFO that it was my role in HR to change the culture and my role alone. And that happened quite a number of years ago, but I started exploring this notion of who owns the culture. And really, there was a lot of misleading information in many organisations, that it was HR’s role alone to shift the culture and it became HR’s problem. So I started to explore this more, and I talked a lot about it in various LinkedIn posts, but it really is shifting that lens from HR being the owner of the culture and culture being delegated to HR to the co-created nature of culture, and that each part of the organisation plays a role in maintaining the culture and creating a new culture. And HR is unique role in that can be a change leader, but from what role do you lead that change? So often, the role is to emerge what’s needed, and to help the organisation to see what’s needed. And then to take up your unique role in terms of specific people culture and change tools that you can bring to bear in creating that culture change journey, if that resonates with your experience, Beth?

Beth Hall: Yeah, it doesn’t look, I totally agree. I think everybody is the CEO of culture, don’t think it’s one department, one function, one leader, we all contribute, whether that’s through deposits or withdrawals from culture every single day. It’s co created to your point. So whether our unique position in HR and with our unique lens to be able to see all these things playing out as expert practitioners in our field, you talk a lot about the concept of a culture disrupter. So there’s this facilitator, this change leader that you speak of, but then you talk of this culture disrupter, can you just share a little bit around when you would switch between cultural disrupter and cultural leader, how that benefits the cultural change process? 

Siobhan McHale: There are a lot of different roles when it comes to culture change. And the difference between a disrupter is an A leader. I mean, they’re similar. But the disrupter is really about seeing what patterns are running the organisation, and being able to intervene in a powerful way to help break those patterns. So an example that I might give you is back to that infrastructure company where I was working, where they basically were having trouble in the shift from soft contracts to hard contracts. And that meant that they had to manage their budgets much more tightly on very big infrastructure projects. But the CEO was very frustrated by this, and he was not seeing enough progress. And I went to see him one day and he was complaining, he said, the head of marketing hasn’t actually put up a sign on the rooftop that I asked him to do over three months ago. And it’s very frustrating. We can’t even put up an advertising sign on a rooftop. What sort of a culture is this? Siobhan? And I said, okay, and who have you spoken to about this? And it turned out the CEO had had conversations with everybody except the head of marketing, who was the person that he needed to speak to. So in that culture, there was this avoidance pattern and it was fueled by a pattern that I call the nice guy or gal pattern. And basically, everybody in the organisation, including the CEO was putting more value on being less liked not having the tough conversations than they were on driving accountability and getting the job done and giving the tough feedback. Now, once the CEO saw that passion, and that he was also caught in the pattern was fueling that passion, he could step into a different role. So he stepped out of role of Mr. Nice Guy, had a meeting with his head of marketing, basically said, where is that sign? When are you going to get it and I’m gonna hold you to account for installing that sign the sign was installed within a week. So being a culture disrupter is often about holding up the mirror to the organisation, allowing the organisation to see these invisible patterns. And then allowing different people or parts of the organisation to step into a different role. In order to disrupt these patterns that can be holding the organisation back, 

Beth Hall: It does, like holding up the mirror to the organisation is a great way of positioning it because sometimes it is helping people see what they don’t see and just uncovering those blind spots, as you say. So you are a systems thinker, you can tell by your books, you think in patterns, you think in terms of frameworks and process drives a lot of your thinking, if you’re an HR practitioner that doesn’t necessarily see patterns, automatically. Any tips or tricks or practices that you’ve helped HR practitioners that you’ve been developing over the years to develop these skills, any tips in terms of how people can identify these patterns in order to become a cultural disruptor?

Siobhan McHale: Yes, and this is one of the reasons that I I’ve written my, my next book, it’s all about how do you start to think in this way, and I think, you know, if you look back at history, one of the things that you’ll notice from Newton times is that we really have focused on IQ, intellectual sort of intelligence, in order to solve technical problems. So that’s an intelligence that you need. If you’re trying to maybe design a bridge, or you’re trying to develop a plan for opening up a new store, or you might be trying to fix a software problem. IQ comes into play. Then we saw the emergence of EQ or emotional intelligence, which is the Daniel Goleman book of the same name emotional intelligence was, which was really about how do you develop those interpersonal skills in order to manage your own emotions and also help to manage the emotions of others. So that real one on one interpersonal skills started to create a flood of books in that realm, whether it might be developing grit, developing confidence, developing the ability to influence, etc, etc, we saw a lot of that sort of self help movement. And I think what’s emerging now is how do you deal with complexity. And often, our change challenges are not just about dealing one on one with each other, it’s often about dealing with groups are subsystems and systems within systems. So I believe that the next set of intelligences that are needed in order to deal with groups are complex adaptive systems is what I call group intelligence. So that’s really about moving to that higher plane, that systemic level, and starting to deal with that complexity. And we often see that one on one we can deal with individuals, but then we see that the group as people behave completely differently in a group than they would individually. So why is that the case and the first part of that is what I call looking beyond, you’ve got to look beyond the obvious, you’ve got to dig a little bit deeper. You’ve got to get in a balcony position as Heifetz would say, and you’ve got to really start to see the system. So my first tip would be take a step back, start to see the system start to see not just individuals, but groups of individuals I often talk about you need to move from just seeing the dancers often we see the dancers and the people and their behaviors, we’ve got to start seeing the dance, what’s the tune that they’re dancing to? What is the dance that the organisation is in, and that is, it is a different lens, it is starting to activate a different part of the brain. It doesn’t happen automatically. So I’ve been on this journey for a couple of decades now. And it is essentially rewiring our brains to move from the IQ lens, the EQ lens to what I’m calling the GQ or the group intelligence lens.

Beth Hall: I love that and look, I’ve got the hive mind at work on preorder already. I’m very much looking forward to being able to have a read of that. So what I’m hearing from you is potentially there’s an opportunity for HR practitioners to build in some workflow active practice into their work whereby, as you say, we’re automatically going to the individual and what individual do we need to solve within this conflict or within this culture, as opposed to looking at what’s happening environmentally around the players? So, in that reflective practice, mode, what kind of questions would HR practitioners be asking themselves in order to be able to identify those patterns? 

Siobhan McHale: So one of the things about understanding complex adaptive systems is it’s probably it’s good to do that reflective practice on your own, but it’s even better to do it with other people, because they will see the system from their perspective. So one of the things that you ask in a group that could be a group of two of you, it could be more is what is going on in the system? Very simple question. But that yields an enormous amount of data to you. Being able to draw that system, this is what I constantly encourage my own team to do get a pen, get a piece of paper, draw the system, what do you see when you draw the system? What roles are different parts taking up? And how is this system functioning? So by roles, I mean, not just what’s in your job description? Because people think, Oh, yes, well, they’re in the role of HR manager, or they’re in the role of CEO. I don’t mean that type of role, I mean, the systemic role that they might be taking up. So for example, in the example I gave earlier, at the infrastructure company, the CEO had stepped into the role of Mr. Nice Guy. So that was his systemic role. And everybody else in the organisation had followed suit. And the pattern or the hidden agreement between the parties, we would rather be liked than hold each other to account for performance. So that agreement was actually leading people to avoid the tough conversations, and leading people not to perform and basically causing a whole lot of dysfunction and moving non performers around the organisation and keeping them in place, even though they weren’t performing. So one of the critical things is to take that step back, map the system, ask what is going on in the system? What roles are different parts taking up? And how is this system functioning? 

Beth Hall: I love that. And that reflective practice, as a group is really driving that diversity of thinking, I’m seeing, you know, different centers of excellence actually coming together to be able to understand the culture from all of their different lenses and angles, as opposed to operating in silos across the people experience and not actually seeing it as a collective whole. So that’s a really great takeaway for our listeners, in terms of how do they build that group reflective practice into their operating with him as a HR function. And not only internally, having a conversation within HR, I’m assuming also, that this same group reflective practice can happen across the organisation within subcultures to be able to help understand the patterns within those different areas. And those groups that you speak of in terms of the group intelligence across the business? 

Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I think it’s essential that whatever management team you’re part of you’re constantly interrogating what’s going on right now in the system. So essentially, in order to be able to provide the best advice, as an HR professional, you need to be constantly assessing where the business is at right now, what’s required right now, in terms of the interventions that we may need to make, I found in the past that often things are launched. And that’s the end of it, or we sent out the comps or we, you know, we logged something into the system without really assessing Well, where did it leave the system? And how was it received? And what’s needed next? Where is the system now? So our intentions sometimes have unintended consequences, which is another feature of complex systems. But do we go back into check? Do we follow up with the next intervention that might be needed if it didn’t go to plan? So it’s constantly working with your colleagues and your executive teams to determine where the system is and what is required right now.

Beth Hall: One of the things that I think really resonates with me about your work is that when you’re looking at the system, you’re not just looking at it from a people perspective. You’re not just looking at through the lens of HR, you’re often looking at it through a commercial lens, through a business lens. You know, you’ve just mentioned there, where is the business going and where is it heading? And what is it trying to do? How do you support HR practitioners to be able to carve out the time and the thinking to be able to work in the business as well as on the business like often where support functions? that’s separate from those business units. And sometimes we’re transacting with those business units. Sometimes that leader is welcoming us in to be part of their team. But often we don’t necessarily understand or have the time to get across the bigger picture. So any advice to our listeners on how can HR practitioners really start looking at the commercial perspective when it comes to culture?

Siobhan McHale: For me, it’s not so much about the time the first step comes with the reframe. So the reframe and for a couple of decades now, HR has allowed itself to be positioned as a business partner. And this served us well for some time, because it allowed us to get a seat at the table, which was fantastic. But after a while, it started to have some unintended consequences. And those unintended consequences were that HR began to be positioned on the sidelines of the business. So there was the business and then there were the partners who were to the side. But HR needs to reframe its role. Now I believe, from a partner, to a business leader, with deep people culture, or change expertise. And that reframe is critical, because I’m not seeing my colleagues in finance, or the supply chain positioning themselves necessarily as partners. They’re just business leaders with a deep, functional specialty. And I think it’s now time for HR to take up its change leader role. So once you reframe your role as a business leader, what happens is automatically you start behaving in a different way. You’re now a business leader sitting as an equal around the table, but you bring your functional expertise to bear to solve business problems. So for example, when I was being interviewed for my role as head of HR EGM, people culture and change it to lux group, and I didn’t talk about culture. Basically, when they asked me if I had any questions, I said, Well, what are you trying to achieve? And the CEO and the executive team, we’re trying to grow the business. So my imperative then was how do I create a culture of growth? It’s not something over here, I’ll let me talk about culture in isolation, I’ll just talk about engagement. It’s actually looking at where this system is going? What is needed? And how do I create that type of culture? So we ended up on a journey of creating a growth culture and from 2019 to 2023, we doubled the business in size from 4000 to 9000 people, we doubled our revenue to $4 billion. And we did an average of one acquisition every eight weeks. So we turbocharged our growth by creating a growth culture. So that’s the imperative. It’s not coming in with your toolkit around engagement, and the one hammer and you just keep hammering that you’ve got to step into your role as a business leader and see what’s needed in the organisation. And then you’ll start to get invited into conversations. 

Beth Hall: So I couldn’t agree with you more that we need to make the change. I think we during the pandemic, we got a seat at the table out of necessity. And it really did leapfrog us into different areas of HR, but I do fear that it is going back somewhat. Post pandemic in terms of is HR bought into execute after the decisions are made. HR still called HR business partners, they sit separately, and they don’t necessarily have a seat at the table. In many organisations, often, HR is reporting in to a CFO or a CEO, and therefore, again, is executing on a decision that has already happened without their expertise being in that conversation. We don’t challenge it when they suggest this is the best software or the best program to execute on their business strategy. Yet we seem to do that a lot with HR is question them on their subject matter expertise. Any advice in terms of how do you build that trust? How do you build that credibility within an organisation whereby you can be that change leader because you are privy to the conversation upstream as opposed to execute as downstream.

Siobhan McHale: So when I first joined Dulux Group in 2016 and I did an assessment of what was going on within the HR function, what I discovered was that HR was in the systemic role of order taker. So basically, general managers would say to the HR professionals, okay, I want this or I want that, HR would take down the order and say yes, of course and I will deliver that to you. Now that began In a reframe so I said to my team, listen, this is what I’m saying. They largely agreed with that and said, yes, that has been the role that we have been in, we’ve just taken the orders and been good corporate citizens and gone away and fulfill the orders. So the reframe that we agreed on was that we would step into the role of strategic partners. So we went on that journey for a number of years. And we started to hear the feedback and people saying, Gosh, you know, your team has really stepped up. We didn’t tell anybody about the reframe. We didn’t communicate it, we just collectively stepped into this role of strategic partners. And then after about three years in this role, I was chatting to one of my team and I said, How’s that competency framework going that you’re doing for a part of our business? And she said, are not so good. I presented it to the AGM and he wasn’t that keen. I said, Ah, okay, um, what happened then? And she said, Oh, well, nothing, he just didn’t want it. So we’re not doing it. And what struck me was that she was taking up the role of strategic partner, and she was just seeing herself as an advisor to him, not really, as a leader. So what happened then was another reframe, I realized we had to go from strategic advisor to business leader. So we started to reframe the function, again, into this role of business leader with deep people culture and change expertise, and that, again, lead to different behaviors with people, not just putting the competency framework on the table, but fighting for it, saying, No, this is the best outcome. And please, let me give it a go. And let’s do a pilot, and I’ll show you how it can make a difference. So the different role reframes, lead to very different behaviors, and very different feedback on the function. And now I get, you know, eg PMS and GMs, arguing that they need more time from my HR people, they want them, they want to pay more money, so they can have more time for their HR person on their leadership team, because they see them as essential business leaders. So that, you know, it’s taken eight years, and it’s still ongoing, but it is possible.

Beth Hall: I love that that you’ve not gone from where your business partner to where your business leader, you’ve actually taken the business on the journey with you. You’ve had very clear milestones around whenever you move from business partner to strategic partner, to business leader, and what does that look feel like in terms of the way your team are acting, responding, dealing with it, and I guess over time, you’ve built that trust and credibility throughout those wireframes that has really allowed that to happen, which hopefully helps our listeners see that there is an opportunity to move, it’s just a case of determining as a team, how are they we framing their offering to the business? And how are they reframing their position within that decision making problem solving group?

Siobhan McHale: Exactly, and how are they designing their operating model? Because I think that’s the other thing, if you really want to get to next level systems thinking is really about the role of the pilots and being able to design operating models that achieve the intention not just within HR, but the broader business. So that’s really where I think as a team, we’ve demonstrated our expertise and how we can help the business to achieve its outcomes by redesigning how the business operates, which is exactly the work that we did it and said back in the day when we turn the business around it was really stemming from redesigning the role of the parts and seeing the pattern that were stuck in and then redesigning that for a much better outcome for the whole business.

Beth Hall: So whether it comes to cultural change or changing the HR practitioners role, changes the ongoing thread here, it’s what your first book is all about with the changes across a N Zed. Every time you talk about HR practitioners, you also talk about them as change leaders at the same time, which is not necessarily their expertise, you know, they may have come from a certain specialism within HR, or there may have been an HR generalist that hasn’t necessarily had the skills, knowledge experience training within change. But I agree with you that everything that HR does is about driving or leading change in some way. Can you either talk us through and Zed or talk us through other examples or principles around change that our members may be able to latch on to and start to integrate into their current working practices.

Siobhan McHale: Yeah, and I think, you know, we’re experts in people. And it would all be fine if people just kept doing the same thing all the time. But often in organisations, we want them to change. And when we look around the table and think, Well, who can help us with this? Because they’re objecting or they’re resisting, or whatever label we put on it, automatically, we would look at the HR person and said, Well, what is your expertise? And I think, again, HR people tend to fall back on EQ, oh, well, maybe we can coach them. Or maybe we can deploy some interpersonal skills. And that’s not enough anymore, and complex adaptive systems that are moving so rapidly, which is why you know, in the hive mind at work, I talk about how you develop group intelligence. Now, group intelligence sits at the collective level, but it also sits at the individual level. And people can get better at group intelligence, which is actually the ability to enable groups to understand what’s going on in the system, solve complex problems, and adapt more quickly to change. So how do you develop that skill, it’s really very systemic in nature. So it a and Zed, what we did to solve those problems was take a look at what was going on in the organisation. And we discovered that head office was in role of a dictator, dictating to the regional offices, what it needed to do and what role loans it could give out or not give out. And we redesigned our operating model to deploy much more decision making capability to the regions and put head office in the role of the enabler. So this redesign of the operating model caused a massive shift in how the organisation operated engagement went up. Over a seven year period, customer satisfaction went up by 23%, the bank went from the lowest performing bank in the country to the highest performing bank in the country. And I’m the number one bank on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. So this was a real rewiring of how that organisation operated. And at the heart of that change, HR was playing a critical role. So it really is about HR professionals starting to get better at group intelligence, starting to understand how change happens not just at the interpersonal level, but more at this systemic level. And being able to step into that role, because executives today are looking for help. They’re not just delivering and running their business in a stable, steady way they’re wanting to grow, are they wanting to adapt? are they wanting to adjust to market turbulence? And I think HR has a fantastic opportunity here to step in and to be key advisors as well as leaders in this area.

Beth Hall: Yeah, agree. So you were speaking earlier about how people will launch things, communicate things and move on. And when you’re sharing the change process and the end story with me. And reflecting on a business that I worked with that went through incredible change and did the same, you know, the kind of Nordstrom inverted pyramid of how do we make the frontline the customer and the head office, the Support Center? And what does that look like? And it takes time, obviously, to be able to transition the business and the thinking and the culture. It’s not changed overnight. But how do you embed it? How do you make sure that with a leadership change, or with a changing in commercial landscape, or a growth strategy becomes a consolidation strategy? Like how do you make sure that that change is embedded within the business so that the culture is not flip flopping based on what’s happening in the economy.

Siobhan McHale: We did a lot of follow up work, including putting over 30,000 staff or employees through workshops to enable them to move out of a role of victim where they had a lot of stuff done to them into the role of basically leader leading at all levels. So each person saw their role as a leader. Having said that, if you don’t keep your foot on the accelerator, you can regress. And a decade after all of that work, you know that there was a Royal Commission into banking, and it skewered the big banks for their greed. It’s always greed and, you know, taking advantage of customers. So you’ve got to keep your eye on it, or the system can easily revert to the old patterns, particularly if you get a change of leader you can see a system sort of regress into that dysfunctional pattern again. So, again, it’s being vigilant and as management teams at all levels continuing to back to our earlier conversation, continuing to interrogate and to ask what’s going on in the system right now? What patterns are we seeing what’s happening in the external environment? How do we need to move and adjust based on what we’re seeing? out out in the environment and and internally. So it’s never getting complacent. 

Beth Hall: Yeah, it’s not that set and forget, it’s a constant. And to your point part of the operating with them, of checking the patterns, checking the behaviors, making sure that they’re still aligned with the cultural intent. And any examples of where you’ve just had so much pushback from executives or leaders that are hugely influential on the organisation that has prevented that change process from happening. Any advice to our members on how can we best influence those people that don’t necessarily want to change or see the need for the change? 

Siobhan McHale: I do get a lot of questions from people about what if the CEO does want to change? And I often invite them to shift their lens on this question. And to really start by emerging, what is the management team or the executive team seeing right now and from what lens, because often, HR is sort of seeing itself as I’m here developing a strategy for culture, or change that I will log in, and then it’ll get, you know, sometimes it’ll get rejected. If you’re talking about more sophisticated work, more sophisticated HR work, it really is about sitting with the executive team, and emerging, what are they seeing? What are the imperatives from where each of them stand, and therefore what’s required from a change and a culture perspective, and then going away and and creating that rather than sitting in isolation and lobbing something in and then getting disappointed when it doesn’t get accepted. So a lot of the work that I’m seeing HR professionals doing a very high level is emergent, it’s about emerging, what is an emerging what’s required, and that work then does not get rejected, because it is emergent to this truly what the system needs. And then my second thing is, whenever you’re facing resistance, or pushback, it’s really starting to dig a bit deeper, and look at what are the assumptions that are being held in the different parts of the organisation that are creating the resistance that you’re seeing? Because resistance is always logical, in some ways, there’s always a valid reason for the resistance.

Beth Hall: So you’re still staying at the group level, then because I expected you just to talk about that individual from an EQ lens, as opposed to from a GQ lens, in terms of how do I overcome their resistance, but what I’m hearing from you is, don’t go there, don’t go to the individual go to the environment, and the group that is impacting that person being resistant? 

Siobhan McHale: Yes, because I’m always seeing the one person that you think is resisting is often systemic in nature, so that one person is speaking on behalf of the system, usually. So it’s data for you about what’s going on in the system. So you need to look at it from that perspective and saying what subsystem is speaking? And what are the deeply held assumptions that that subsystem is holding? And are those valid? And how can I allow that part of the system to examine its Immunity to Change or if they’re valid, then I need to do something about it. But it’s always data that I believe sits as a more systemic level. But we all often deal with it as if it’s an EQ thing. So we go in and we coach them, and we have this sort of interpersonal lens on it without having the GQ the group intelligence that that systemic lens on what we’re hearing. So that would be what I’d be saying, it could be a combination of both. 

Beth Hall: Yeah, that’s great advice. But that understanding environmentally, what’s happening at a group level that is causing that individual to behave in that way, is a much more proactive, positive way of viewing it, as opposed to that individual is the problem, which can often be the default. So how does power dynamics come into play here? You mentioned CEO is the example of a CEO or Executive is resisting the change? How does power within the system start to inform what’s going on here? And what are the potential ways to overcome it? 

Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I think power is always a factor. And executives, because of their positional power in the organisation do wield an enormous amount of influence. And we can’t take away from that. But the other thing in systems is that change can happen from anywhere in the system. And it will have a ripple effect. So it doesn’t matter where it emerges from, it will have an influence because in complex systems, all behaviors are connected. That’s just one of the laws of group dynamics that I talk about in the hive mind at work. is the law of connectedness. So all behaviors are connected. And each behavior from any part of the system has a ripple effect. So you have power to influence no matter what your positional power might be.

Beth Hall: I am so excited about reading this book. I feel like as a HR practitioner, I’ve been on this journey from the IQ. This is the solution. This is the logical system or process or policy to put in place to hang on technologies doing that we now need to move to EQ. And I’m really excited about this concept of GQ. Because as AI starts to take over a lot of the doing work, the ability to leverage the group and to be able to really be truly diverse and inclusive at the same time is really going to be the future of the way we work and live. So I’m very excited about the book. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve shared in terms of sneak peek so far, we always like to end an episode by posing a made up scenario to our guests, and we say it’s made up but the reality is, it’s happening out there in Australia within our HR functions and organisations. And we’d love to share this scenario with you to see what your advice would be to our listeners. So are you ready? I’m ready. Ready? Okay, you are the HR leader for a large organisation undergoing rapid change with an up and coming merger. Employees are feeling uneasy and uncertain about their roles, which is contributing to a reduction in both productivity and performance. Meanwhile, the CEO is focused solely on short term gains, i.e. delivering the profit for the next financial year. And he’s pushing for quick results without considering the long term cultural impacts. You understand that in order to manage this change effectively, it’s crucial to design cultural initiatives that address immediate concerns, but also lay the foundations for the future success. What cultural strategies would you propose? And how would you effectively communicate the value of these cultural initiatives to influence a CEO? Who is primarily concerned with immediate financial results?

Siobhan McHale: Well, I wouldn’t be working in isolation on cultural proposals, I would be convening a one day workshop with the executive team, where I would be getting back on the balcony and examining what’s going on in the system. We’ve been mapping the system, and emerging a collective view of exactly what is going on what roles we are taking up as an executive team, what risks does that pose and agreeing what is the way forward. So emergent work, facilitating a systems intervention, and an agreed way forward. So certainly not just loving in my proposal, because that’s just going to get rejected. So constantly meeting the system where it is at. And you can only work with where the system is at. And if you don’t bring the system with you, you’re gonna get rejected, and your proposals and kind of get rejected. And there’s also the risk of what I call organ rejection. So the more you lob in these ideas that don’t meet the system, where it’s at, the more exposed you are to organ rejection.

Beth Hall: So when you’ve mentioned emergent work a few times, can I just play about what I hear your definition of emergent work to be just to make sure that I’m on the same page, when you’re talking about emergent work, you’re talking about laying the road as you go alongside your other business leaders, as a business leader in the room, as that leader of change, as opposed to building something in a vacuum and trying to plug it in, or indeed, proposing something to that group? So when you talk about emergent work, you’re meeting them where they’re at, with curious inquiry to be able to facilitate a plan together? 

Siobhan McHale: Exactly. And it’s emergent, because there’s not just the HR part, because when you go away and do a plan in isolation, it’s your part. But emergent is saying, Okay, what are you seeing in supply chain? What are you seeing in finance and CEO? What are you seeing? Are you really worried you’ve got to deliver to the shareholder and you’re up there is six months and telling them we’re not delivering that’s a really big imperative. And what are you seeing in marketing and when a sale is seeing or you’re seeing a dip, okay, well, all of those views together, what does that mean and trying to help make sense of that complexity in terms of what pattern therefore we stuck in, ah, we seem to be stuck in the short termism pattern. So we’re just focusing on short term results. And we’re neglecting investing in innovation or longer term horizons. So you allow the system to see the short term is in pattern for example, that it might be stuck in and allow it to step into different roles in order to break that pattern which is a risk. So the emergence is really a bounce hearing multiple perspectives, meeting the system where it’s at right now. And the emergence is allowing it to emerge the solution. But you’ve got to be quite skilled at doing that. It’s not something for the faint hearted as you can imagine, because you’re at the front of the room trying to do that work, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s a dangerous position to be in. So I always say to my team, before you go in, you’ve got to have the solution. You’ve got to know the passion, know the roles, know the reframe know, the new operating model, or at least have a very good hypothesis of where you’re intervening and where you want to take the system to. So it’s, it’s not for the faint hearted, I often say, you’ve got to know what you’re doing in that in that type of work, or else, you can just lose credibility.

Beth Hall: Yeah, so you’re going in there with the curiosity, growth mindset, but equally to your point, you’ve done the pre work in order to be able to facilitate and navigate the room. So it’s almost like you’re the executive sponsor of the work. That is bringing everybody together into your point, everyone plays a role in executing whatever that team agree on. But as the executive sponsor, you’ve already got your eye on the outcome. 

Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I think sponsor is an interesting word, I would probably say you’re, you’re really a systemic facilitator, and you’re not in a static just you know, endorser sponsor is often more static. This is a real expertise and being able to be a strategic consultant to the system, I would say, and be able to nudge it in the direction it needs to go in and bring insights into that conversation. Where were executives go? Yeah, that’s, that’s been very insightful that that’s really helped us to see, to see through the complexity to be able to have a way forward that we collectively agree on.

Beth Hall: Yeah, go and look, I’m excited about one of your first comments that we can all develop our GQ. So whilst it is a very skilled practice, it’s not something that can’t be developed, it’s not static. One last question. We’ve talked a lot about systems. So when you use the term system, I hear it used interchangeably. Sometimes the system is the organisation, sometimes the system is the culture, sometimes the system is the team that you’re working with, can you just share with the listeners when you talk about systems? When you get people to think about drawing the system? And what is going on in the system? What are the terms of reference would you use? For systems? 

Siobhan McHale: Yeah, this is where I’ve started using more the term ecosystem now rather than the system because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about systems and people automatically go to it’s an IT system. And so an ecosystem is a group a set of relations with a boundary. But there are ecosystems within ecosystems. So within an organisation, which is an ecosystem, you can have different departments, which are their own ecosystems. And within that you have teams, which is an ecosystem again, so you would start wherever the issue is. So if you’re talking about a team and what’s going on in a team, that’s the ecosystem you’re looking at, but you might broaden and build that we’re seeing this pattern here of short term ism, where is that related to what one is that connected to because that pattern doesn’t sit in isolation. So you’re constantly expanding your horizons to see how things are connected within the ecosystem. That’s the other thing I talk about is moving from a mechanistic lens to an ecosystem lens. So I think what many of the things we’ve been taught from Taylorism times is, is that we sit in hierarchies within boxes, and that decisions come from top down, and that there’s command and control. And the lens is now shifting much more to from that I and I sit within the box, and I’m at the top of the hierarchy, much more to this sense of ecosystem, this sense of way, the sense of connectedness, and co-creation and emergence and being agile in complexity. That’s a big shift that I’m seeing that I I very much talk to and believe in, and how do we then within HR take up our role to have that ecosystem lens and be able to nudge our organisations to just see themselves more in that way, rather than a strict hierarchy and boxes within that hierarchy. 

Beth Hall: That’s great and looks so exciting for the future of HR, this concept of GQ and the business leader that’s able to have a seat at the table facilitating these changes at a systemic level. So thank you so much for everything that you’ve shared. Siobhan and we’ll put all the details of your books in the show notes for our listeners, really appreciate your time.

Siobhan McHale: Thank you for that great conversation. Really appreciate it, Beth.

Beth Hall: Thanks for listening to this episode of Let’s Take This Offline. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts and share with your colleagues and network. To learn more about the Australian HR Institute, visit our website, ahri.com.au. 

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