Thriving in Uncertainty with Tim Bullard
Tim Bullard, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), joins us in our latest episode to discuss adaptability. Tim knows too well how adaptability can directly influence your engagement at work, having managed the Department of Education and then the Department of Education, Children, and Young People in Tasmania through tremendous amounts of change, including COVID-19, a merger of two organisations, and other significant events.
In this episode, Tim reflects on these experiences, and much more.
In many of our conversations with public sector leaders on the podcast, we hear about the strength of having a common purpose, a shared vision that you work towards, and how that can give you energy and motivation to keep going even when you are dealing with highly complex circumstances and environments.
Teachers continue to face increasingly complex circumstances in education but remain motivated to work towards that light on the hill, a common purpose, in making a difference in children and young people's lives. Teachers who use their knowledge, skills, and capabilities to adapt successfully in a constantly changing environment are highly engaged and thrive to achieve meaningful outcomes.
Tim Bullard, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), joins us in our latest episode to discuss adaptability. Tim knows too well how adaptability can directly influence your engagement at work, having managed the Department of Education and then the Department of Education, Children, and Young People in Tasmania through tremendous amounts of change, including COVID-19, a merger of two organisations, and other significant events.
In this episode, Tim reflects on these experiences, sharing that no off-the-shelf guidebook or download from the internet provided the way forward in these complex circumstances and how important it was to work with others around him to come up with innovative and creative solutions to solving the problems they faced.
Tim also provides his perspectives on how to develop adaptability within the workforce, the importance of having a growth mindset to always be learning and looking at how things can be done differently, how organisations need to inject some fun back into the workplace, how crucial it is to leverage the skills and talents of every generation in your workforce, and how essential it is to be responsible for your own wellbeing in taking time out for yourself which then, in turn, will make you more available for others.
This 30-minute episode is packed with practical, knowledgeable, and encouraging advice from an energetic leader in the education industry.
Listen to episode fourteen:
Also available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify:
Find out more about this Trailblazer:
Tim Bullard
Chief Executive Officer
Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership
(AITSL)
Tim graduated from the University of Tasmania in 1994 with an Arts/Law (Hons) degree. He initially worked as a lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor-General, before transitioning into policy whilst working in the United Kingdom.
From 2004 to 2016, Tim held various policy roles for the Department of Premier and Cabinet and commenced as Deputy Secretary Policy in 2014. During this time, he played a key role in education initiatives, leading the development of Tasmania’s Child and Family Learning Centres, and negotiating the ‘Gonski’ schools funding agreement.
Tim joined the Department of Education in 2016 as Deputy Secretary Strategy and Performance and was appointed as Secretary in 2018.
In 2022 Tim was appointed as Secretary of the Department for Education, Children and Young People. In this role Tim oversaw the bringing together of child safety, youth justice, and education into a values-based organisation that provides all children and young people with a bright life and positive future, through being known safe, well and learning.
Tim has been appointed to the role of AITSL CEO for a 5-year period, commencing October 2024.
Tune in next week as we speak to a new trailblazer in another episode in our series on Thriving in Uncertainty.
Thriving in Uncertainty – Episode Three
In today’s episode, we are steering off course - literally! Mandy Young, Chief Executive at the NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority or SIRA, joins us to discuss ‘Taking the path less travelled.’
Mandy has diverse leadership and public sector experience, with a background in social work at the Department of Communities and Justice. She has also worked as the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer for the NSW Department of Customer Service during COVID-19.
Thank you for joining us for our new podcast series on Thriving in Uncertainty, where we spotlight leaders who have gotten comfortable in ambiguity and hear their professional stories of overcoming challenges to navigate change successfully.
For the past two weeks, we have spoken with two prestigious leaders, discussing growth and adaptability themes and creating future-ready workforces.
In today’s episode, we are steering off course - literally! Mandy Young, Chief Executive at the NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority or SIRA, joins us to discuss ‘Taking the path less travelled.’
Mandy has diverse leadership and public sector experience, with a background in social work at the Department of Communities and Justice. She has also worked as the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer for the NSW Department of Customer Service during COVID-19.
Over this 30-minute conversation, you will hear Mandy provide specific examples from her time during these roles and the significant involvement and subsequent impact of the initiatives that Mandy has driven and been responsible for.
This inspiring chat showcases a leader who exemplifies authenticity and resilience. Mandy has been involved in some amazing transformation and reform projects, and we hope that you will find this episode as engaging and refreshing as we did!
Listen to episode three:
Also available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify:
Find out more about this Trailblazer:
Mandy Young
Chief Executive
State Insurance Regulatory Authority
Mandy is a proud Aboriginal woman whose mob is Gamilaroi (Quirindi in north west NSW).
Mandy Young was appointed the Chief Executive of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority in June, 2024. Prior to this, Mandy was the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer for the Department of Customer Service responsible for enabling 14,000 staff in multiple portfolio agencies with responsibility for a $4b budget. She drove significant reforms across corporate functions to better enable portfolio agencies to deliver to the citizens of NSW.
With a NSW Public Sector career spanning over 20 years, Mandy has dedicated her career to driving better outcomes for people and communities, improving service delivery, and implementing large-scale socioeconomic and justice changes for the citizens of NSW.
Mandy has diverse leadership and public sector experience, having held Executive Director and Deputy Secretary roles within the NSW Departments of Customer Service and Communities and Justice and its predecessor agencies.
Mandy holds a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of New South Wales.
Tune in next week as we speak to a new trailblazer in another episode in our series on Thriving in Uncertainty.
Thriving in Uncertainty – episode one
In today’s episode, Janet Schorer, a senior public sector leader and Chief Delivery Officer at TAFE NSW, joins us to discuss growth and adaptability.
In this uplifting chat, Janet shares her experiences from her early career, how other leaders helped her grow and develop, and how she leans on these experiences to help others grow and develop today. She also explains how important it is for leaders to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, acknowledging that the world is now different from what it was, that workplaces themselves are different too, and that it’s through a connection with purpose that you can keep yourself, and your team, motivated through times of continuous change and uncertainty.
Thanks for joining us as we kick off our new weekly series of Trailblazing with CorbettPrice!
Each week, we will spotlight senior, inspirational leaders from across the public sector who have gotten comfortable in ambiguity as they share personal experiences throughout their careers around the importance of adaptability for growth, developing the next generation of leaders, taking the path less travelled and learning from failure to achieve success. They also reflect on the key leaders who inspire them and have helped them become the leaders they are today.
In today’s episode, Janet Schorer, a senior public sector leader and Chief Delivery Officer at TAFE NSW, joins us to discuss growth and adaptability.
In this uplifting chat, Janet shares her experiences from her early career, how other leaders helped her grow and develop, and how she leans on these experiences to help others grow and develop today. She also explains how important it is for leaders to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, acknowledging that the world is now different from what it was, that workplaces themselves are different too, and that it’s through a connection with purpose that you can keep yourself, and your team, motivated through times of continuous change and uncertainty.
Listen to episode one:
Also available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify:
Find out more about this Trailblazer:
Janet Schorer
Chief Delivery Officer
TAFE NSW
With 20 years of senior public sector experience, Janet has led educational and community transformation programs, including the National Disability Insurance Scheme, workforce strategy, and the Families NSW strategy for the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet. Janet has a passion for children and young people, with a background in nursing and child and adolescent psychology, previously serving as the NSW Children’s Guardian and receiving a Public Service Medal for outstanding service, particularly through the protection of children. She is a National Fellow of IPAA and the Vice President of IPAA NSW.
Trailblazing with CorbettPrice Podcast - Episode 7
This week concludes our podcast series on organisational health and the seven dimensions of wellness. We hope you have enjoyed the series and find the insights and perspectives of all our trailblazers helpful. In the final episode of our first series, we explore the seventh dimension of organisational health, the relational dimension, which is all about learning and development.
Listen to episode seven:
Also available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts:
With changing employee expectations around the learning and development opportunities organisations offer to improve their overall wellbeing, L&D managers face meeting these expectations to future-proof their organisation and attract and retain the best talent.
How and what must L&D managers focus on to provide these opportunities to employees in a hybrid working environment, and how can they empower employees to build and maintain an A-grade team?
David Powell, author, founder, and life skills mentor of The Golden Thread, joins Andy in this enlivening discussion to provide ways that L&D managers can offer learning and development opportunities that build self, relationship, and team interpersonal skills to empower their workforce in their lifelong learning journey to mastery.
David and Andy discuss the importance of mindfulness and provide examples of how powerful meditation practices can be at both the individual level and the potential contribution this can unleash at an organisational level.
This episode is jam-packed with practical advice, real-life examples, and different perspectives on boosting the relational dimension of organisational health. Listen now to hear David’s meditation based on Alpha Dynamics to get you into the blue…
Download the full transcript of episode seven (with references):
Find out more about this Trailblazer:
David’s passion lies in empowering people to achieve the success they seek in life. David is the founder of The Golden Thread’s online toolkit, Life Journey Skills and recipient of The Visioneers’ 2022 global award in recognition of his work to benefit humanity.
Born in the UK, David gained a first-class honours degree in chemical engineering at Edinburgh University and worked in the resources and IT industries for 24 years, leading many teams to success.
Realising that his passion lay in empowering people, he became a business skills trainer, facilitator, and mentor. Over almost three decades, David has helped individuals and teams in hundreds of organisations, across 30 countries and five continents to improve their lives and business performance.
After finishing university, David spent a year driving a Land Rover overland from the UK to Australia and became fascinated with the different religions and cultures that he encountered. These travels were the genesis for his lifelong research into history, religion, gnostic wisdom and psychology - to discover how to best empower people. The result is his unique ability to synthesise the latest scientific thinking and the ancient wisdom to address, and inspire the whole person - body, mind, emotions and the deeper inner being.
This is the lifetime of experience and learning that David has condensed into his online Life Journey Skills program. He teaches the essential life skills - that people don’t learn at school - so that they can thrive at life. David’s book, Life Journey Skills, is also available for free on kindle or to purchase in hardcover from amazon.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/david-powell-89539276/
Amazon: Life Journey Skills
That now concludes the first series of our Trailblazing with CorbettPrice podcast. Stay tuned as we will announce details of series two coming out soon!
Missed an episode?
Trailblazing with CorbettPrice Podcast - Episode 6
Thank you for joining us for the sixth episode of our podcast series on organisational health and the seven dimensions of wellness. In this episode, we will cover the essential topic of organisational purpose and leadership.
Listen to episode six:
Also available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts:
The leadership style of an organisation can profoundly impact an organisation's health, affecting the workplace culture, employee experience, engagement, performance, and organisational agility and resilience.
The prolific global expert in open and digital government and former public servant Pia Andrews joins us as we discuss how public sector professionals must lead and navigate their teams now and in the future.
Hear Pia's thoughts on how we need to get back to servant leadership, how any leader's first strategy should be to slow things down, and how human-centered design approaches require you to come from a position of being your best human in the first place.
Listen to also hear Pia share three practices from her background in Gung Fu and Chan Buddhism martial arts that play an important role in her work and career every day.
Download the full transcript of episode six (with references):
Find out more about this Trailblazer:
Pia Andrews is an open government, digital transformation and data geek who has been trying to make the world a better place for 20 years. She usually works within the (public sector) machine to transform public services, policies and culture through greater transparency, democratic engagement, citizen-centric design, open data, emerging technologies and real, pragmatic actual innovation in the public sector and beyond. She believes that tech culture has a huge role to play in achieving better policy planning, outcomes, public engagement and a better public service all round.
She is also trying to do her part in establishing greater public benefit from publicly funded data, software and research. Pia was recognised in 2018 and 2019 as one of the global top 20 most Influential in Digital Government and was awarded as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Australia for 2014. Pia has also studied martial arts since 1990, and brings the philosophies and practices of Gung Fu and Chan Buddhism into her work every day.
Pia is currently taking something of a public sector sabbatical, working as a Strategic Advisor to the Public Sector in AWS. She is in a newly formed team made up of experienced public servants who provide futures oriented policy and outcomes focused advice, support, exploration and experimentation, to agencies and departments across Australia, New Zealand and Oceania.
In 2023, Pia joined Apolitical’s Advisory Council on 21st Century Government, where some of the world’s most distinguished government leaders, innovators, and thinkers have come together to help accelerate Apolitical’s mission to help build 21st century governments that work for people and the planet.
Web: pipka.org
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/pia-andrews/
The Mandarin articles: www.themandarin.com.au/author/pia-waughgmail-com/
Tune in next week as we talk with David Powell on our final dimension of organisational health – recreational health, learning and development.
Missed an episode?
Trailblazing with CorbettPrice Podcast - Episode 2
Welcome back to our second episode in the Trailblazing with CorbettPrice series on organisational health. This episode will explore the 2nd dimension of organisational health: Mental – organisational agility and resilience.
Listen to episode two:
Also available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts:
The past few years have been tough on organisations with constant uncertainty. As these shocks grow in numbers and complexity, organisations must focus beyond crisis responses to build resilience to survive now and into the future.
Scott Johnston, Deputy Secretary of Revenue, New South Wales, Chief Commissioner of State Revenue, and Commissioner of Fines Administration, joins Andy in this episode to discuss how Revenue NSW has applied agile principles to transform their organisation to become adaptive and responsive now and in the future. Hear how Scott manages to be a regulator while also delivering excellent customer service to Revenue’s three-and-a-half-million customers, his thoughts on empowering the whole organisation to innovate, his top tips for how leaders can respond to changing customer priorities, and much more.
Download the full transcript of episode two:
Find out more about this Trailblazer:
Scott Johnston is a highly experienced senior leader with a career spanning the Australian and United Kingdom public sectors.
An internationally recognised statistician specialising in economic analysis, his work at the UK Office of National Statistics guided key decision making for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and European Union.
Scott joined the Public Service Commission in June 2014 where he held the roles of Director Workforce Information Branch and Assistant Commissioner, Performance and Analytics Division.
He then moved on to the NSW Public Service Commission as Acting Public Service Commissioner, leading the NSW Government’s agenda - driving diversity, work of the future and reform across the sector. In April 2020, Scott was appointed to his current role of Deputy Secretary, Revenue NSW, Chief Commissioner of State Revenue and Commissioner of Fines Administration.
Since joining Revenue NSW, Scott has focused on providing flexibility and an improved customer experience for Revenue’s 3.5 million annual customers, with a focus on digital transformation and supporting the State’s most vulnerable customers. Over the past two years Revenue NSW has become sought after for its automation achievements, collaboration skills, innovation, and customer centred design.
Scott is passionate about shaping future workforce strategy through evidence-based decision making, innovation, diversity, and inclusion, and building digital capability.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/scott-johnston222/
Tune in next week as we talk with Futurist Dave Wild on our third dimension of organisational health – organisational financial and performance health.
Missed episode one?
Trailblazing with CorbettPrice Podcast - Episode 1
Welcome to our inaugural series of Trailblazing with CorbettPrice. Over the next seven action packed weeks, we'll be introducing you to an amazing line-up of trailblazers who will share their insights on the fascinating topic of organisational health.
Listen to episode one:
In our first episode, Andy Corbett leads us through an overview of organisational health and the seven wellness dimensions that this series will explore. As a trailblazer in operating model design and implementation, Andy will switch hats to be interviewed by Associate Director and Head of Training of CorbettPrice, Lauren Chowdry.
Together, they discuss the first dimension of organisational health: the physical operating environment, which encompasses how leaders connect their organisation’s purpose with its operations, creating an effective operating model that includes people, culture, processes, technology, and more. If you have ever wanted a clear explanation of what an operating model is and how this can transform your organisation, this is a must-listen!
Download the full transcript of episode one:
Tune in next week as we talk with Scott Johnston from Revenue NSW on our second dimension of organisational health – Mental – Organisational Agility and Resilience.
Operating Models Whitepaper
For further information on Operating Models, download our free whitepaper which explains the drivers for reinvention with the WHY, WHAT, and HOW an operating model helps you to achieve it. We also provide case studies on how we have helped organisations scale and respond, improve their customer experience, and engage their workforce.