Frequently asked questions.

Amanda Cattermole, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency, provides her advice to others on taking on new opportunities and explains how it is incumbent on leaders to encourage and grow the next generation of leaders to feel safe in being pressed in the right way to make choices and take on opportunities, in this frequently asked question. Listen to Amanda’s full episode here.

Having led the Australian Digital Health Agency through the pandemic and also having previously served as interim CEO of Services Australia during the 2019/2020 bushfire season, you may presume that Amanda Cattermole has always been one for taking up challenges. Listen as Amanda explains the two common threads that have led her career journey in this frequently asked question, including how her sense of making a difference and seeking purpose stems from her childhood and upbringing and how leaders she has worked for have seen things for her and were caring enough to press her in the right ways to take them up. Listen to Amanda’s full episode here.

Amanda Cattermole, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency, reflects on one of the most enduring things that struck her most about working in a post-COVID or co-COVID world is how the collaboration and partnership that went with what had to get done during the pandemic now has to serve as a fundamental tenet of how work is done now and the only way to affect change at a systems-level is that the capabilities and behaviours of leaders need to be deeply aligned with the ability to collaborate in that way, they need to be spirited in their engagement and have the skills to join the dots in an agile way. Listen to Amanda’s full episode here.

Amanda Cattermole, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency, talks about how crucial it is to hire the right people, especially in the leadership group of an organisation, to drive a collaborative culture, and how every leader needs to add something to that culture. Amanda also goes on to talk about how in her organisation, they create an environment where the artefacts and daily ways of working exemplify what they said they were going to be, as that brings clarity to their workforce, which helps to build trust. Listen to Amanda’s full episode here.

Today's world has too much complexity and interconnectedness to go back to how whole-of-government problems were solved before COVID. Amanda Cattermole, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency, explains how tools and ways of working, and culture are the critical ingredients you need to have to approach uncertainty and solve problems and that every single leadership role needs to add something to the collaborative culture network and be focussed on that in their working week. Listen to Amanda’s full episode here.

Amanda Cattermole reflects on stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency at the height of the pandemic in this frequently asked question and shares three key critical things that she did in setting the direction for the agency moving forward, which included reading the room in seeing how the conversation had changed, recognising that the players within healthcare ecosystems had to come together in completely different ways, and how, as an agency, they needed to change too and the role that leaders had at every level of the organisation needed to play. Listen to Amanda’s full episode here.

There has been a significant increase in reported mental health workplace injuries in Australia over the past few years. Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, explains some of the reasons behind this in this frequently asked question, which include how the conversations have changed and matured with the stigma around mental health being removed, how there is increasing acknowledgment that workplace injuries do include psychological injuries, and how the architecture in the laws now better supports these conversations with both workers and employers knowing their rights and obligations. Listen to Marie's full episode here.

Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, talks about how important it is when you can start to have self-doubt to back yourself – especially if you know that you're a person of integrity and you're in the job for the right reasons, it's not about ego, and it's about what you can do in the job for others. Marie also explains how she is a great believer that your time will come and provides an example of this in this frequently asked question. Listen to Marie's full episode here.

It's fundamental that leaders constantly talk to their staff and keep up-to-date with what's going on in their organisation. They also need to monitor statistics, red flags, and other signals and quickly get on top of them regarding psychological risks to their workforce. Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, explains how the approach to dealing with psychosocial hazards in the workplace is no different from the approach you would take in regards to physical risks, but often where the complexity comes in for psychosocial risks is the controls relating to work design, staffing and resources, where work, health, and safety than crosses over with human resources and industrial relations. Marie's full episode is available here.

Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, is no stranger to having to have tough conversations with families that have lost loved ones from workplace incidents. The relationships she has built with those families continue to drive her to do the work she does. Marie also explains her professional drivers in this frequently asked question, around the opportunity to work at Safe Work Australia and the privilege of being involved in tripartism, where unions, businesses, and government can come together for consensus outcomes. Listen to Marie's full episode here.

Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, explains how her background in the history and experience of being a part of the harmonisation of the work, health, and safety journey throughout her career continue to help her understand and remember the importance of the context that you are working in and the question of voice, both from the perspective of the voices in the room and which voices are missing. She explains this further in this frequently asked question. Listen to Marie's complete episode here.

Listen in as Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, explains why work design is the first stepping stone in the prevention of both physical and psychological hazards in the workplace in this frequently asked question because it's at this point that leaders have the opportunity to identify and eliminate potential hazards at the point of designing how work is done. Listen to Marie's full episode here.

Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, explains how it's fundamentally important for leaders to take a risk management approach with their workforce to stay ahead of potential psychological safety risks emerging in this frequently asked question because if they are doing that well and taking a consultative approach with their staff, they will identify hazards and address them regardless of if it is written in a code or not. Listen to Marie's full episode here.

Marie Boland, Chief Executive Officer at Safe Work Australia, explains how it's fundamentally important for leaders to take a risk management approach with their workforce to stay ahead of potential psychological safety risks emerging in this frequently asked question because if they are doing that well and taking a consultative approach with their staff, they will identify hazards and address them regardless of if it is written in a code or not. Listen to Marie's full episode here.

Martin Hehir, Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer for the Governance and Corporate Group within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has put together several multi-disciplinary teams throughout his public sector career. In this frequently asked question, Martin talks about how essential it is to have role clarity for members of these teams so that you have the critical skills needed for everyone to be able to question things, but also have something to add to the conversations.

Being authentic as a leader requires you to take a look at yourself to see if you are part of the problem, especially when your team is experiencing ongoing friction. Martin Hehir, Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer for the Governance and Corporate Group within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, explains this further as he looks back over his career in leading others. He also speaks about how, as leaders, you have to be willing to change how you lead and be able to question why people are responding the way they are and adapt accordingly.

Martin Hehir, the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer for the Governance and Corporate Group within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, talks us through how many organisations can experience a level of friction when putting together teams in organisations, especially when they haven’t typically worked that way previously. He explains how, as leaders, if done respectfully with everyone engaged, permitting people to disagree can help determine and achieve the best outcome possible.

How would you adapt your leadership style when faced with the opportunity to take on a senior leadership role in a new department with 20X the number of employees to lead? Listen in as Martin Hehir, the Deputy Secretary, and Chief Operating Officer for the Governance and Corporate Group within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, explains how, in his earlier career, when taking the step into senior leadership roles, he adapted part of his style in terms of how he communicated, thought about the work itself and engaged. Martin talks about the importance of keeping part of his style so that he felt he wasn’t entirely out of his comfort zone but that stretching in new ways and experiencing a degree of discomfort was worth it for the results achieved.

Listen in as Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, discusses the critical success factors in approaching organisational transformation being people, systems, and processes, and shares her direct experience working on the transformation of the Victim’s Compensation and Support Scheme at the Department of Communities and Justice. Mandy provides her perspectives on how critical it is to involve the voices of the people that the change will impact the most from the outset and the importance of communicating. She also talks about setting short, medium, and long-term goals and how to keep building trust more and more throughout the process.

Have you ever heard the sayings “Culture will eat strategy for breakfast,” or “form should follow function”? Listen in as Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, explains these in context with organisational transformation and how people, systems and processes create the roadmap to follow and that you can’t think and approach these things unless you do it with people.

Listen in to Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, as she discusses the importance of testing, piloting, and pivoting, sharing her direct experiences working for Service NSW during COVID-19, where she was responsible for determining and delivering many initiatives with rapid turnarounds including the Dine and Discover vouchers. Mandy explains how, on the day of the launch of the vouchers, the system crashed and how they used the experience of this fast failure’ as a learning opportunity to ‘fix it fast’ and succeed for subsequent voucher rollouts.

Listen in as Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, discusses how vital leadership and the authorising environment are in enabling others to try and give things a calculated go while understanding the risks.

“Kindness is always the answer, and being inclusive is just about being kind and respectful of other people.” Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, explains this further in this frequently asked question as she talks about how important diversity is and the diversity of thought, which enables people to have real conversations that can achieve better outcomes.

“You can’t be strong for others and create the environment you want if you aren’t feeling safe yourself.” Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, shares some wise advice for leaders in starting to become more inclusive to begin by being kind to themselves, giving yourself space and time to retreat and rebuild if that’s the right place for you and that it’s all about getting the right balance and getting to know yourself too.  

Having a clear purpose and belief that something can work and potentially change people’s lives can help you and others to hang in there and keep trying when you hit snags and roadblocks. Mandy Young, Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, talks through how maintaining momentum takes time, grit, and resilience, but if you believe in the outcomes of the work you are doing, you will start to see green shoots and find people that believe in the purpose and become supporters too.