Episode 28: How failure can lead to your biggest success with Tania Rishniw

Do your employees operate with a license to innovate? It's an interesting concept. When you have a real problem to fix where usual solutions haven't worked, understanding the benefits and risks of innovating and articulating that to others around you gives you a licence to try a new and different way forward. But you have to be prepared for failure to be a part of that. Tania Rishniw, Deputy Secretary of Employment and Workforce at the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) joins us in our latest episode to talk about this and much more about how failure can lead to your biggest success.

Listen to episode twenty-eight:

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About this episode:

This episode showcases an engaging and authentic leader whose experience in crises and uncertainty offers excellent advice on overcoming challenges, managing risk, innovating, and building resilience.

Tania talks about how it's necessary sometimes to know not what to do before you can figure out what to do, and you need to think through contingencies and plan for those when you're innovating.

In a point often made by senior leaders in past episodes on overcoming setbacks and building resilience, Tania also acknowledges that you can't get to becoming an SES leader or manager without having made mistakes or experienced times when things haven't gone according to plan.

Tania looks back on those times in her career. She shares a specific example from when an environmental impact assessment's advice that she was involved with to a minister didn't go according to plan. That experience helped her learn an important lesson: Sometimes, the answers to ministers and government are that there is no actual basis for them to make a specific decision. You have to fight your natural inclination to try and give them different options unless it is robust and well-seasoned advice.

Tania also describes her time working on the crisis response to the Montara Oil Spill in 2009, an unprecedented time in Australian history. There was no playbook to follow, so they had to try different things to manage it and think about a different way of operating.  

As she looks back on leading in these times of uncertainty, Tania offers terrific advice that's helpful to anyone overcoming challenges in their workplace and working in uncertainty. This includes having clarity of objectives and a common purpose, building trusted relationships with others, having a team around you that gives you strength, and focusing on an outcome without blaming others when something goes wrong.

Another important element is storytelling because occasionally, you need relativity, perspective, and the knowledge that others have dealt with issues just as hard to help you keep going.

Find out more about this Trailblazer:

Tania Rishniw

Deputy Secretary

Employment and Workforce

Department of Employment and Workplace Relations

Tania is the Deputy Secretary of Employment and Workforce, in the Department Employment and Workplace Relations in the Australian federal government. She leads a range of programs that enable services to support and help people overcome barriers and develop skills to gain employment.

 Prior to commencing with DEWR, Tania worked in the Department of Health from 2015-23 delivering primary and community care policy and programs. She has worked for over 20 years in public administration, across areas of social, environmental, and economic policy.

 Before being appointed as Deputy Secretary in May 2020, she held senior positions in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Department of Finance, Department of Education and Employment, and Department of Environment.

 Tania has delivered policy reform at the federal level in environmental and financial regulation, First Nations' employment and education, primary care and mental health, and service delivery. She led the response to the Montara oil spill, has represented the Australian Government at the United Nations, and successfully negotiated with states and territories in areas of hospital funding, mental health and suicide prevention, primary care COVID arrangements and wider health reform.

 Tania has a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, as well as holding an Executive Master's Degree in Public Administration.

Tune in next week as we speak to a new trailblazer in another episode in our series on Thriving in Uncertainty.