Latest / Cutting Through with Natasha Plowman / Cutting Through with Kathy Jones

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Cutting Through with Kathy Jones · Cutting Through with Natasha Plowman

• 0:11
  Welcome to Cutting Through with Me, Natasha Ploughman.
• 0:14
  Today I've got Kathy Jones on the pot.
• 0:17
  Kathy has worked for decades in Australia and in the UK on
• 0:21
  communications, stakeholder management, issues management.
• 0:24
  She's traversed governments business as well as really being
• 0:29
  able to understand the communities that she's trying to
• 0:31
  influence. One thing that we're going to
• 0:33
  talk about today though, is her visions and views on leadership.
• 0:37
  We hear so much around the needs of leadership, multi
• 0:41
  generational leadership. And what I've loved about
• 0:44
  getting to know Kathy in the last couple of months is she has
• 0:48
  a really unique perspective what leadership means for both now in
• 0:52
  the past and also into the future.
• 0:55
  So welcome to cutting through, Kathy.
• 0:58
  Great to have you here. Thank you so much, Natasha.
• 1:01
  Great to be here. And you'll notice there is a
• 1:04
  twang of of an accent which is very similar, which is always
• 1:07
  good. Although I think I've got a cold
• 1:08
  so I might either sound more Australian or less Australian
• 1:11
  people can tell me what's. I'm a Londoner.
• 1:13
  I'm a Londoner. Oh, you'll decide.
• 1:14
  OK, so you're you're Kathy has been the last six months in
• 1:17
  London is not feeling the ties to go back to Australia, but I'm
• 1:20
  sure we'll talk about that at some point as well.
• 1:23
  So we'll have her back in the UK very soon, which is very
• 1:25
  exciting. But let's get stuck into kind of
• 1:28
  leadership. And there was a question, the
• 1:31
  first question I'm going to ask you about it though is, is a
• 1:34
  question that came out of one question, which is a fantastic
• 1:37
  organisation that both Kathy and I are now members of.
• 1:40
  And it was stuck. It was do you lead how you were
• 1:44
  led? So what's what dictates or what
• 1:48
  builds your own leadership style?
• 1:51
  I think that's a really interesting question actually.
• 1:55
  And I look back to the very first excellent leader that I
• 1:58
  ever had. And that was when I was had my
• 2:01
  first job in the construction industry.
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  And and it was an Italian man who was a bit sort of mafioso in
• 2:08
  a very charming, very charming way.
• 2:10
  And he said to me, he said to me two things which really have
• 2:14
  stuck with me. And one is he said, look, I
• 2:18
  don't understand what you do. He was an engineer.
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  I don't understand what you do, but I have great faith in you
• 2:24
  doing a good job at what it is that you do.
• 2:27
  So you just go away and you do it.
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  And the second thing he said, which is also struck stuck with
• 2:31
  me, is he said, I'm here if you get into trouble.
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  And so if you get into trouble, come and talk to me about it
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  and, and we'll find a solution together.
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  But, and so that was an incredibly empowering kind of
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  leadership that has stayed that that leadership has stayed with
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  me throughout my entire career. That attitude of you go away and
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  you do what it is. I have faith because I've been,
• 2:57
  I have faith that you know what you're doing.
• 2:59
  So you go away and do it. But if you get into trouble,
• 3:02
  come and tell me and then we'll work it out.
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  That is such a mainstay of that trust and that kind of building
• 3:09
  accountability. And we hear there's some things
• 3:12
  we want to talk around like the different generations.
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  Do you think that ability to give accountability, that
• 3:17
  ability to just trust people to do what they need to do is
• 3:21
  something that's gotten less over the last kind of decades or
• 3:25
  few years? Because what you hear a lot from
• 3:28
  younger generations is around micromanagement, around not
• 3:32
  having trust about, not having about.
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  And here's so many horrific stories around people being over
• 3:37
  monitored. And do you think that's
• 3:39
  something that's changed or do you think you've been lucky in
• 3:42
  the beginning of your career to have such leadership that's
• 3:44
  giving you that I. Think I was very lucky, it was
• 3:46
  the 90s and it was the construction industry.
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  So you can well imagine I was very lucky.
• 3:52
  But I think in answer to your question, I think it depends
• 3:56
  there's a couple of kind of variables here. 1 is the size
• 4:00
  and the size of the organisation.
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  So I think that if if an organisation is a large
• 4:06
  organisation, for example the public service or the civil
• 4:09
  service, then there is there can be a tendency to over manage
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  because there's too many constraints and structures
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  around them that have to be followed.
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  So there's so that and it's difficult, I think for
• 4:21
  inexperienced managers to actually be able to empower
• 4:25
  people. And then, so the second thing is
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  that the is that I, I want to say the culture of the
• 4:31
  organisation as well, but I don't want to dwell on that
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  because I recently went to a very interesting discussion
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  about how culture isn't, it doesn't matter how much work you
• 4:41
  do on culture, you're never actually going to improve
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  productivity through culture only.
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  And it actually it, yeah, it was a really interesting discussion.
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  But the key to this discussion, and it's always been my maid's
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  day is it's about this empowerment thing.
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  So you have to find ways to empower and empowering and
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  accountability isn't just a cultural piece, and it can't
• 5:03
  only be answered by a cultural solution.
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  And I think that whole notion of empowerment and people being in
• 5:10
  charge of their own destiny, I suppose is something that do you
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  think that needs to can be taught or do you think that is
• 5:16
  just innate in how some people respond to to work?
• 5:21
  I I think it is innate. I think that people, if you
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  think back to, if you think back through history, people had to
• 5:28
  take responsibility for themselves.
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  Like back in the when there weren't these structures and
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  constraints, people had to take responsibility.
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  It was that flight or, or stand there and flight or fight kind
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  of mechanism and that and so that remains with us as human
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  beings. Yeah, I think that we do have an
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  innate ability to take responsibility for ourselves.
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  Yeah, I look back on my own early career and I was thinking
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  about this as I was preparing to, to have this chat with you
• 5:56
  and, and where like my own leadership and impact has
• 6:01
  changed over the years. And this is also and where the
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  opportunities I had early in my career either constrained or
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  shaped the leader I am now. And there's been bumps in the
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  roads as well like it. And it's kind of that whole
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  notion of being constrained. There's a big part of being
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  constrained with me that I will always rebel against anyway,
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  which I'm sure you relate to as well, Kathy, but.
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  Yeah, there are rebels and there are not so rebels.
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  And I may fall into be into the rebel camp and I think that's,
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  but exactly This is why we've always got along.
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  And I just think, but then I look back on time where that's
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  been constrained and my reaction to it.
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  And I wonder how I would have reacted differently now to how I
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  did then. And I wonder how we, the
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  conversations we can have with people for them to a know
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  themselves a little bit better, respect and understand their own
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  needs of empowerment or being LED or how they want to operate
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  in a work environment. Rather than I think often it's
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  just assumptions that people will be like them and and I just
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  think or don't think we have enough of the conversation early
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  in your career to help you shape and understand your own innate
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  needs from leadership or work. Yeah, I think that's right.
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  And so for the last 10 years of my career, the past 10 years,
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  and I see it as a personal responsibility to actually
• 7:28
  provide that kind of advice to as many people as I possibly
• 7:31
  can. And the interesting thing for
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  me, and we've talked about this before, is that in, in me giving
• 7:38
  that kind of that those kind of ideas and what has made me what
• 7:42
  I think is a good leader to, to others and sharing I actually
• 7:46
  has made me better. It's actually taught me more
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  about myself. And I think that so that's
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  something that we should never lose sight of as leaders, is
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  that it's not just about what you can give to others or how
• 7:58
  you manage other people, but it's also about what you can
• 8:02
  learn from other people as well. And it's this kind of lifelong
• 8:05
  learning process. And yeah, we people in at this
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  at every stage of your career, it should be a learning process
• 8:13
  where it's a shared kind of experiential piece where you're
• 8:18
  learning from each other all the time.
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  And we recently had a a lunch, which you came to Natasha, which
• 8:24
  was, and I loved it because it was all women who were in
• 8:29
  different stages of their careers, but also were quite
• 8:32
  high Prof like were good leaders and very entrepreneurial.
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  And we had people in, in these 30s, forties, fifties, 60s, and
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  I just, I felt there was such a, a positive energy in the room
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  because we're all learning from each other and there was an
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  awareness that we could all learn from each other.
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  And it wasn't just about networking.
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  I don't think that's really what it was about.
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  It was actually about, oh, that's really interesting.
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  I hadn't thought about it that way.
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  It's that openness, and I think that's a fundamental part of
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  being a really good leader, is that openness to new ideas, new
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  thinking, new thought processes. And I think you've coined it
• 9:08
  around just speak. It's about being curious, but
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  you can be curious and closed, but then you can be curious and
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  open to new thinking. And do you think that we've seen
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  a change in the way how open people are to either making
• 9:23
  mistakes or to acknowledge something that they don't know?
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  Or do you think we're being more adept at being a bit more open
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  to new thinking? Because it just feels like we're
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  in this fractious kind of world in some ways.
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  And I wonder if that fractiousness is like making
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  people scared to to acknowledge what they don't know.
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  I think that there's quite a bit of fear around having come back
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  to Sydney. It's been an interesting
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  experience coming back here because I am someone who is
• 9:51
  incredibly curious and wants to learn about things.
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  And I just get this sense that people have closed down quite a
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  bit here because there's a fear. There's a fear of of, of change
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  of what's around the next, what's around the corner, a fear
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  of being exposed for doing something wrong that and I
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  people are frightened to put their head up and fear is the
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  enemy of innovation. And yeah.
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  And when you don't have innovation, you're not actually
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  changing and you're not growing and you're not responding to the
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  incredible changes that are we're, we're facing in the world
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  today. And that the, the and I, rather
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  than quoting Boris Johnson again, we are in the middle of a
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  new industrial revolution and we and that requires incredibly
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  adept leadership and in the ability to not be afraid to
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  actually look at those changes in the face and move on.
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  Yeah, I think we are in a very difficult period in, in, in, in,
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  in history, in the way the world is operating.
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  I think that people, there is an enormous amount of fear.
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  And when there's fear, you don't get the best out of people, you
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  don't get the best productivity, you don't get the best
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  intellectual input, you don't get the best ideas because
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  they're frightened of what's happening, what's going to
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  happen to them. I don't think that's so
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  important for people to acknowledge that whole notion of
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  fear and it's fear of and we and as leaders.
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  How do you, how do people recognise that, that they're
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  operating from a place of fear, which then impacts the people
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  and their team, which then impacts the kind of the
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  customers and the stakeholders or the people that they need to
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  relate to rather than be able to intentionally change their
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  approach to, to impact into leadership?
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  Because I think, I don't think people realise that they're
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  operating for a place of fear sometimes so much.
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  Oh, I don't think they are. I don't think they do.
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  I think the answer to, to, to that question is around
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  collaboration. And, and when you collab with,
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  so a leader has to encourage and again, it's an empowerment piece
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  as well, has to encourage their teams and them and be
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  collaborative themselves. Collaboration is where because
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  what you're doing when you're collaborating is you're creating
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  a safe space and you're actually combining all of the ideas
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  together. And you've built, created, sold,
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  created again, big companies both in Sydney and also in the
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  UK. And I think a lot of people talk
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  about the loneliness of leadership and where, but I
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  think that's also something you can be intentional about is to
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  seek out peers and different people from different
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  perspectives so it isn't so lonely.
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  Is that something that you have done over your career when
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  you've, particularly when you grew your business quite rapidly
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  and then eventually sold it, that must have been quite a
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  lonely experience as a leader. No, it wasn't brilliant.
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  No, no it wasn't. I'm a very social person.
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  You are a very social person. And a lot.
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  Of people. Which is brilliant.
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  And I'm very curious about people.
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  Yeah. And, and I and people have said
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  I'm a bit of a collector. I collect people who are
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  interesting and I, and through the all of that, those different
• 13:14
  iterations, I collected more really fabulous people who
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  helped me through each of those stages of, of business
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  development and of leadership. And I yeah, no, I didn't feel
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  lonely. I didn't feel lonely.
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  Brilliant, in fact. I felt very enlivened by it.
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  And but OK, which is great. And that is a testament to
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  particularly either founders or leaders is around being open to
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  the relationships you build, being open to the community you
• 13:44
  build. But what do you see?
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  People who aren't like you and the impact that has on them.
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  Yeah. And generally they're people who
• 13:53
  aren't aren't collaborative and aren't curious.
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  They'll be working in a, in, in, in a tier and they think that
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  they belong in that tier and they're not learning from the
• 14:04
  people below them and they're not really learning from the
• 14:06
  people above them. They, they're working in that
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  tier And that that's lonely because if you've got other
• 14:12
  people working in that same tier, when I say tier, I'm in
• 14:15
  Tia. You know what happens is that
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  they become, it's tribal, and often they turn on each other.
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  And it's about power when it gets.
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  Lonely. And it's power and 1 upmanship
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  and fear of failure and fear of saying the wrong thing.
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  Fear of not knowing anything. We go back to fear again and it
• 14:34
  just feels in a time where fear and and disruption is high, the
• 14:41
  way people can really cut through that to want of a better
• 14:46
  phrase being on cutting through is to shed a little bit of the,
• 14:50
  I suppose the shackles that kind of constrain you off and be open
• 14:53
  and curious is the option. Yes.
• 14:55
  To have that's exactly right. Because if you shut down, then
• 14:59
  you're actually losing the opportunity to to grow and to to
• 15:04
  respond to this fear. Yeah.
• 15:06
  And that will respond to the situations that are creating
• 15:09
  that fear. And do you find you've also
• 15:13
  what's great experiences you've kind of been working in this
• 15:15
  space for so many long, Where are you seeing?
• 15:17
  And like you said, you build relationships across
• 15:20
  generations. You intentionally look for
• 15:22
  people who are interesting and curious and can kind of add
• 15:25
  value to you. And we had a lot of chat around
• 15:29
  the different generations in the workplace.
• 15:32
  And there's always this chat around Gen Z.
• 15:34
  And regardless of all the issues around any kind of stereotypes,
• 15:38
  there is some kind of areas that we can look at different
• 15:41
  generations. So what would be your message to
• 15:44
  people coming up in their career now in a time of great change,
• 15:47
  in a time that we're seeing their leaders be fearful?
• 15:50
  How can they prepare themselves to for the future of work that
• 15:54
  they may not know what that looks like?
• 15:57
  Well, you have to go into any job being prepared to be open
• 16:01
  about learning and also about providing your perspective.
• 16:05
  So bit, So it's that thing. And I think we've talked about
• 16:08
  this before as well about being generous and about sharing,
• 16:11
  sharing ideas. And yes, there are like I have,
• 16:15
  I have as a baby boomer, I have a completely different
• 16:18
  perspective on somebody who's in their 20s.
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  But boy, how interesting it is to talk to those people, and
• 16:25
  particularly ones who want to talk to me.
• 16:28
  It's when it's when they go, oh, Baby Boomer can't teach me
• 16:31
  anything. And that has been said to me.
• 16:33
  Let me tell you. Oh, I've learned as much as I
• 16:36
  can from you. Yeah.
• 16:37
  You don't understand my world. You don't understand that a lot.
• 16:40
  I get that a lot from my daughter, mainly the Gen alpha.
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  Kind of like you don't understand.
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  I'm like, tell me, did you? Exactly.
• 16:47
  Exactly. So it's about them being
• 16:50
  prepared to teach us older people and us being prepared to
• 16:55
  listen and modify. And also both all generations
• 16:59
  recognising that we're in this incredible, we're in this
• 17:02
  changing world and we're all responding into it in different
• 17:05
  ways and all, and that we're all learning from it in different
• 17:09
  ways. And so how I might respond to a
• 17:11
  particular challenge could be of interest to someone in there 20s
• 17:16
  because it might help them to respond to it in a different way
• 17:19
  as well and vice versa. And, and this is the other thing
• 17:22
  that you're, you have a very big interest in history and
• 17:26
  mediaeval history and going back and what you can learn from what
• 17:30
  has been hundreds of years ago and how that can then give
• 17:34
  advice and support now. Can you give me a bit of an
• 17:36
  overview of some of the threads that you're seeing around what
• 17:40
  you've learned from the work you've been doing around kind of
• 17:42
  mediaeval history into some ideas perhaps we can.
• 17:46
  I know this is going to be a whole thesis in a way, isn't it?
• 17:51
  So certainly please for. Example, for example, I did an
• 17:55
  amazing course a couple of years ago at Cambridge Summer School
• 17:59
  and was called 14th Century Catastrophes.
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  Now remember we were just coming out of the COVID catastrophe.
• 18:05
  At that stage it would have been about 20/23/24 and and it was
• 18:10
  14th century catastrophes. So it was all the things that
• 18:13
  were happening to Western Europe in the lead up to the Black
• 18:16
  Death of 1349. And so there was massive climate
• 18:21
  change due to sunspots and a huge amount of volcanic
• 18:24
  activity. There were crazy wars in all
• 18:29
  over, over Western Europe. There was animal plagues where
• 18:34
  whole herds of cattle and sheep and were being destroyed.
• 18:38
  The climate change was so bad that in the first three years
• 18:42
  before 1349, they had three black summers, which meant that
• 18:45
  they couldn't plant any crops because the sky was so heavy
• 18:49
  with, with the stuff that had come out of the volcanoes and,
• 18:54
  and all of that sort of thing. So when the Black Death
• 18:56
  happened, when the, when the germs came, they were most, they
• 19:01
  weren't ready to to deal with it.
• 19:02
  They weren't, didn't have the population didn't have the
• 19:04
  health to deal with it, particularly because of the
• 19:07
  wars. And so this is this all sounding
• 19:10
  a bit familiar. And then, but, and then the
• 19:13
  thing that I'm really interested in is what the impact of that
• 19:17
  was in where 50% of the up to 50% of the population of Western
• 19:23
  Europe was killed through the Black Death.
• 19:26
  What happened to the economy? What happened to the feudal
• 19:30
  structure? What happened to the laws and
• 19:33
  the Democrat, the democratic institutions that have been in
• 19:36
  place in the memorial system after the population had been
• 19:39
  decimated. And there are so many lessons
• 19:41
  that we can learn from that, that I, I just, I find it
• 19:46
  extraordinary that we know that we don't all talk about it all
• 19:49
  the time. And then another example is, so
• 19:52
  I think for me, it's always about learning these learning
• 19:55
  history. I started my career as a history
• 19:57
  teacher and learning all about this and then thinking, what can
• 20:01
  we learn from that, from moving it going into this period that
• 20:05
  we're in now? And so another more simplistic
• 20:08
  view, which is particularly around the built environment
• 20:11
  where I tend to work, is I did a course last year on Victorian
• 20:15
  architecture. And one of the parts of the
• 20:18
  course was around colonial architecture and what I and so
• 20:22
  in, in Australia, our colonial architecture is revered and was
• 20:27
  treated as heritage pieces in the same way in the, as in the
• 20:30
  UK, you would treat something that was 800 years old.
• 20:33
  And then and what I, what I hadn't realised is that
• 20:36
  architecture that we revered is actually, yes, it's only 200
• 20:40
  years old, but it all came off a pattern book.
• 20:43
  So you can see exactly the same buildings in Canada and India,
• 20:47
  New Zealand and Australia because they all came off a
• 20:50
  patent book. So they don't have an
• 20:54
  architectural integrity in the same way that other buildings
• 20:58
  do. Interesting.
• 21:00
  And I think, but that's, I think there's a real, on the one hand,
• 21:06
  it's people want to grasp at things that are just theirs and
• 21:09
  their own. And so that proves that we are
• 21:12
  all more interlinked and more aligned globally.
• 21:15
  And I suppose that also talks around British, British
• 21:18
  imperialism and British colonialism as well.
• 21:20
  So the colonies and colonialism was across all different
• 21:23
  markets, countries. But going back to that
• 21:26
  understanding of history and when we talk about history, we
• 21:30
  tend to and a lot of the discussions we're talking about
• 21:32
  history at the moment and reflecting on particularly at
• 21:34
  the moment around is going back into the 20s and 30s and I and
• 21:38
  but what when you were talking around what was happening in the
• 21:41
  1300s and 1400s, there is so many similarities to where we
• 21:46
  are now both we're. Human beings, after all.
• 21:48
  We are human beings and these cycles do happen.
• 21:51
  Now, that doesn't mean to say that we do nothing, and I think
• 21:54
  this is the thing that will get really frustrated with when
• 21:57
  people talk around climate change.
• 21:59
  These are inevitable things that happen like how Trump talks
• 22:01
  around. There is no human involvement in
• 22:04
  this, but it is the acceleration and it is the choices that we
• 22:08
  can make as a human race to Do we want to lose 50% of our
• 22:12
  population to a disease or and illness?
• 22:14
  Or do we want to work out how to do something differently?
• 22:17
  What we did in the what we did in the recent pandemic.
• 22:20
  We need to learn from what worked and what didn't work.
• 22:23
  And there's a lot that didn't work as well.
• 22:25
  But we just seem to have lost that ability to reflect and look
• 22:29
  back to history in an objective way and just say, what will this
• 22:33
  teach us to how we can act now? And I just, and I wonder why
• 22:37
  we've got that closed mindset to be able.
• 22:39
  To I wonder if we ever had. Maybe.
• 22:43
  I I think it's part of the human condition that we don't look
• 22:46
  back. Yeah, I think.
• 22:48
  So how can we change that? Then what do we do to change
• 22:51
  that? Because talk about it.
• 22:52
  Yeah, as individuals, we have a responsibility to learn from the
• 22:56
  past and to talk about it. And I talk, I talk about it all
• 22:58
  the time. Yeah.
• 22:59
  And, and I can see people saying, oh, that's interesting.
• 23:03
  I haven't thought about it that way.
• 23:04
  And I think it's it's a real responsibility for people to
• 23:08
  actually talk about what can we learn from the past in order to
• 23:12
  bring us into a better future, particularly now when you've got
• 23:16
  the revolution of artificial intelligence happening right
• 23:20
  there in front of us. And this is an extraordinary
• 23:23
  period of change. And we do have some awful
• 23:26
  politics playing out across the globe, really scary politics.
• 23:30
  And we do have, but at the same time, we have a the, we have a
• 23:34
  lot of capital available, which wasn't the same as in the 20s
• 23:38
  and 30s. And I think that if we can think
• 23:42
  strategically about the world, where the world is going, and
• 23:45
  not just could things like climate change play into that
• 23:49
  fear piece, and but if we can think strategically about it and
• 23:53
  be more holistic about, I think that will serve us much better.
• 23:57
  And that's the way we stay being human in an AI world.
• 24:02
  And I think history has often been something that's been for a
• 24:07
  few people and I think we talked about the great democratisation
• 24:11
  of information when we had the Internet age.
• 24:14
  And is there a there seems to be there is an even bigger
• 24:17
  opportunity to access information and democratise
• 24:21
  information as long as the information that's available
• 24:24
  through AI systems is is more open.
• 24:28
  I think history has always been slightly gendered.
• 24:31
  It hasn't been objective. It's what's been recorded has
• 24:34
  always been what supports called history.
• 24:37
  For nothing. No, it is not called history for
• 24:40
  nothing. Absolutely.
• 24:42
  So do you think we're we can get into a with encouraging
• 24:46
  curiosity, with encouraging openness, with encouraging
• 24:50
  conversation, questions and collaboration and just giving
• 24:55
  way, giving, giving way to fear and acknowledging that fear
• 24:59
  happens and why it happens and just breakthrough.
• 25:03
  It is something that the human condition can do in this time of
• 25:06
  great change or. You'd like to think so.
• 25:10
  You'd like to think so. It requires leadership all
• 25:13
  levels. So it requires political
• 25:15
  leadership as well. Yeah.
• 25:17
  And I think that the way this is a whole other conversation, the
• 25:20
  way that the Westminster system is structured with the bite with
• 25:23
  two party, two party politics, that's a very adversarial way of
• 25:28
  doing democracy. And I wonder if it is actually
• 25:32
  no longer appropriate. Yeah, and I mean, that in itself
• 25:36
  is a whole other conversation that we're going to do another
• 25:39
  time because the notion of, and I so want to have, we wanted to
• 25:44
  touch on a bit of that. Cathy does a lot of work around
• 25:47
  deliberative democracies and New Democracy and looking at the way
• 25:50
  the political structures need to evolve and change.
• 25:52
  So we will have that conversation again.
• 25:55
  But I think it's been an absolute fantastic time to talk
• 25:58
  about the role of history. Get curious your own leadership,
• 26:02
  what can you as an individual do differently that encourages
• 26:07
  people to be less fearful, to build bridges, to build
• 26:11
  collaborations, I think is a huge opportunity.
• 26:13
  And if one, if people take that away from listening to this
• 26:17
  conversation, then that is definitely a start that we can
• 26:19
  have better conversations with people.
• 26:22
  But Kathy, sorry to cut that short because that went speedily
• 26:26
  fast, but I'm so happy to have you on cutting through.
• 26:29
  Always a pleasure. And we will speak very soon.
• 26:56
  Music.