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Naomi youare the chief executive of a large public sector organization
how do you stay relevant to all your people. Can you tell us about
what would we see if we looked in the window of you in action.
How do people see you what are you doing
what tools do you use? I mix the formal and informal
so we'll use some of our formal communications challenges for
messages from you may be that you know video or
or word and you know, the informal so I'll go and visit some of our
sites a in the building I work in I run up and down the stairs and get some coffee
and chat to people as I'm doing it so you're human
with people and you just find different channels and different ways of having
that engagement
making sure you're at team leader events making sure you're at some
training events
on technical training and just popping in to say hello how's it going how's
this
helping you do your job and to really be out an about and be visible
and involved in the business And for me that's quite important that
I can go into a team
and understand the business understand what they're doing and how they're
contributing and can have a conversation with them
that experience and links that to what we're doing with transformation or the
part that they're paying some constantly looking for those ways to
connect parts of the organization together
because I think it's one of the things I bring is that over
and overarching understanding and so the ability to connect people
with the part that they're playing in our our current and part they're playing
in our future
is really important. And what about your SLT or your ELT
Are they out and about in the same way?
and having touch points regularly with your staff? Some more than others depending on
the role to one of the things we've just done is
is restructure the executive leadership team and but
you know my chief technology officer was down in our office in Dunedin recently
talking to
frontline staff there to understand how the services he provides
makes a difference to the job that they do which makes a difference to customers
as part of a restructuring you recently appointed a chief people officer
tell us what led to that decision so with my
senior leadership team as it was, we sat back and really thought about the
journey ahead
what we needed to do to lead the organization through transformation
and the skills and capabilities we needed around the top table
And that lead to a change
in the makeup of that top table and
a change in our governance arrangements And really
you know we recognized that as you say we are a large people organization
and if we're going to change then we have to take our people with us on this
journey we have to use the skills that we've got we have to develop new ones
so thinking about how we actually use our talent
how we build our talent for us is a key part of transformation
and really important that the person leading that work
was a member of the executive leadership team I'm thinking about that from
strategic point of view
and contributing to our transformation not just waiting until we all decided
what we wanted to do and then putting in an HR intervention
how much time do you reckon your ELT would spend talking about people things
I think it really depends what you mean by people things
so in some ways every conversation we have has a people element
because it's all about how we do our work the skills that we need
the place that we want to take the organization to what that will mean
so actually a lot of time how much time we specifically spend talking about what's
the
REM strategy
not you know probably every meeting there something of that technical nature
but actually every conversation we have is about how are we gonna move the
organization forward
And thatt for me is why it was really important that our chief people officer
was at the table to have those conversations