Communication in Leadership
Joe Calafiore, Chief Executive Officer of WorkSafe Victoria, shares his speech from the 2024 IABC Victoria Deb Ganderton Oration, held on 17 October 2024.
First, I want to thank the IABC Victoria for inviting me to speak with you tonight.
I acknowledge that tonight’s event is being held on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people, and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
I should begin with a few words about the woman for whom this oration is named. I didn’t have the privilege of knowing Deb Ganderton personally. But I wish I did.
In the briefing for this event Julia Loughlin, President of the IABC Victoria, described her as someone who led with her heart. She was described to me as an inspirational leader, positive, passionate – someone people gravitated towards, and wanted to be with. Not only an incredible communicator, but an exceptional human being.
So I confess to feeling extremely honoured to deliver the address tonight, thinking about someone who devoted her working life with communications as a power for good.
So let’s turn to this evening’s topic.
The role of communication in leadership.
As someone who came to a position of leadership through the corporate affairs stream, I feel extremely fortunate to be in the room with professional colleagues here tonight.
I’ve been forming my views on this topic for over 20 years now and have drawn inspiration and insight from various sources.
And still do each day.
I have the opportunity to work with so many amazing leaders, very different people, but one trait they’ve all had in common is that they were great communicators.
And by that, I certainly don’t mean they were all these extroverted performers.
More that they intrinsically understood not only the power of authentic communications, but of the deep thinking that has to go into it.
As a first year marketing student at the University of Melbourne, a long time ago now, I was lucky enough to be in Professor Colin McLeod’s class.
A fierce intellect.
About half-way through lecture number one, you already had some lessons well and truly imprinted in your brain.
That marketing is not advertising.
That effective communication requires a discipline of thinking and effort that most under appreciate.
Hard thinking.
That how you position an issue matters.
The second major influence on my views on the power of communication in leadership came working as a junior staffer for the then Attorney General Rob Hulls in the early 2000s.
As an aside it’s where I met my good friend David Imber, so lovely to reconnect with you again, David.
I was only in Rob’s office for a relatively short period of time, just over a year, but it changed my life.
I got to see up close what it took to undertake large, systematic social reform.
Think Koori Courts.
A Human Rights Charter.
A new Occupational Health and Safety Act – a green book that I’ve had to recently get reacquainted with having joined WorkSafe.
That process to renew the OHS Act, which hadn’t been renewed for 20 years, was a fascinating exercise of democracy in the raw.
Every word, every phrase, contested space.
Every line in guidance material, contested space.
The second reading speech. Contested space.
The phrasing. To use the word worker or employee? Employer or duty holder? Stakeholders versus partners versus citizens.
I remember arguments about the photos on the communications material. Smiling faces or serious? And on it went.
Not because people were being petty or side-tracked, it’s because the messages mattered.
What was being conveyed? Are we here to Educate or Enforce? The power of communications, whether conscious or unconscious, central to the debate.
On each of these areas or battles, I observed the varied ways ‘communication’ in all its various guises could help, hinder, influence, or kill a reform.
It was normally early Friday afternoon where the media adviser would arrive with the “I’ve just had a request from the Sunday Herald Sun, and what they’d like to know is…”
This is where the fun would start.
Media adviser wants to ‘rule out’ whatever an initiative was.
Policy adviser trying to keep it alive.
A poor Chief of Staff trying to juggle multiple contradictory messages.
People clashing because what ends up in print matters.
This cycle would happen each week.
You would win some and lose some.
But I started to form a view that communication could either turbo charge what you were trying to achieve, or as the Americans say when you hit that ‘third rail’, electrocute you.
Regardless of people’s political stripes, what Rob had was a vision of what success looked like. He was a relentless communicator, and by that I mean he spent hours and hours listening.
He could listen without judging.
To his colleagues, to the community, to experts.
He was also prepared to cop criticism. Even ridicule. Because he knew what he was fighting for.
We used to say, “You’ve never seen someone prepare so hard to appear unrehearsed.”
He would work to keep a reform or an idea alive above the cut and thrust of the day-to-day media cycle, because he was a strategic communicator.
And after working in a number of Ministerial Offices, I observed the same pattern.
Senior officials working away at a knotty public policy problem.
Leaders like the then Justice Secretary Penny Armytage strategically working to modernise justice and mental health systems.
One of the incredible things about Penny was her ability to describe a complex system, such as the justice system, in a room with diverse audiences that could range from corrections staff, to lawyers, to police to policy officers, and do it in a way that was insightful and yet accessible.
And making things accessible, it certainly was never dumbing things down – she would speak ‘up’ to people’s intellect.
She had the ability to articulate areas of hard terrain, complex areas, but it never had a blame overlay of ‘who or what is failing?’
More a ‘how could it be better?’ I would always walk out of her office not feeling overwhelmed at the size of a problem, but feeling inspired.
What she was masterful at was making conversations count.
So when I was lucky enough to join the TAC, I felt very privileged to join a place that has used communications to inspire the Victorian community to change over many years.
Day 1 at TAC
In fact I remember day one, being at 222 Exhibition Street, slightly nervous as I didn’t know what to wear, so I went the full suit, white shirt and tie.
Show people that I’m serious.
My boss at the time was a man by the name of Phil Reed, some of you may know.
For those who don’t, Phil has a certain look, say a cross between Richard Branson and Kenny Rogers. So out of the lift strides Phil to greet me, the full white hair everywhere, the beard, cowboy boots, I think the cord pants, but I’ve tried to block it from memory.
“You look ridiculous,” he tells me. “Get that tie off for a start.”
Then in the lift, he turns to me and says, “Let me tell you this – do not become a do-nothing bureaucrat. If you’re going to work here, do something and make an impact.”
Do something and have an impact.
This, remember, is before I’ve sat down and got a security pass.
And like my time in Rob’s office, it stayed with me.
So my mind was already racing when he said he’ll take me to the TAC marketing team.
Here I am thinking it would be a team of 30 people, taking up a full floor, studio booths, graphic designers – basically Mad Men without the smoking is what I was expecting.
Instead he pointed me to four non-descript desks and said, “That’s marketing and sponsorships, those four over there are road safety, and those six are your team, get to it.”
And after the introductions, I think the first meeting was to discuss the Annual Report which by this stage was nine months away.
Followed by a meeting to discuss the next staff brochure…which was to be printed. This was 2009, by the way.
Total buyers regret feeling kicking in.
That real “what have I done?” feeling when you start a new job.
Leading Corporate Affairs
So when it came to leading the Corporate Affairs team, my thinking was really based around ‘what are we trying to achieve here?’
When I asked the team what we did, the responses were exactly what you expect from such a team.
We produce the Annual Report.
Do the internal and external communications.
And a Government Relations Team of one person serving a Minister’s Office.
All good people. All good things.
What was missing for me was what I’d call the genuine, cut-through-the-crap view of “how are we helping?”
And not in a corporate fuzzy way of ‘as an enabling function we support the business to achieve outcomes of…’
One of those sentences that makes your soul die.
I mean who are we helping?
One of my favourite communication texts ‘Buck Up, Suck Up’ by strategists James Carville and Paul Begala state:
“Not nearly enough goes into the big, existential questions like “What are we doing?” and “Why are we doing it?”
“Those questions seem simple. And they are. But simplicity and importance are not mutually exclusive”.
So we would have these conversations all the time. Are we helping or taking up space?
Would anyone notice if we all stopped today?
So as a corporate affairs team we went with ‘we have basically an access-all-areas-pass to this place’. There isn’t a meeting we can’t go to, a paper we can’t see.
We positioned our role as not just to ‘defend’ and kill bad stories, but to promote, influence, cajole, advocate for change.
In short, it’s to help the place get on with it.
Now we had made up the ‘we have access all areas’ part, but I had observed enough media advisers interrupt Cabinet meetings, so I though let’s give it a crack until someone says no or slams the door.
Which never happened.
I remember walking into JB Hi-Fi with Tony Sedunary, the internal communications manager, and we bought $50k worth of filming equipment.
No formal plan, no expertise, no frameworks – but we knew handing out the printed staff brochure in March 2009 with pictures of the Christmas party didn’t exactly feel like modern cutting-edge communications.
And two weeks after opening the box, we had TAC TV started. Hosted by none other than former ABC journalist and now Director of Strategy and Research at WorkSafe, Emily Bogue, who may be here tonight.
Led by staff and clients, and not the bosses warbling on with people pretending to be interested.
And when I think back, what we were able to achieve as a little team of six people is something I was really proud of.
And it’s less of what I’d call just the content creation, and more of what we contributed to the staff engagement.
Dare I suggest many people have jobs that aren’t the most exciting? They can be laborious. Monotonous. But they matter. The people that do the work matter. And helping people feel genuine pride, not corporate guff, I think matters for organisations.
It was referenced in the qual and the quant.
People felt prouder when we could showcase the work.
And as an aside, it’s why I’ll always be of the view that a corporate affairs function, and its practitioners, are so much more than the line functions they deliver.
It’s a function that can see a whole business, from the inside and outside lens, and really shape an agenda if you’re up for the deep thinking and the hard work.
As communication professionals, seeing a whole business or issue, it’s such an asset as you move through organisations, as I feel it really helps you understand people’s different perspectives.
That’s true whether you’re an in-house practitioner or come in as a consultant from outside.
Leading Community Relations
After a couple of years, Phil Reed left and I was lucky enough to get the Community Relations Divisional Lead role. It was a real transition process.
From being a peer of the group to leading the division.
Once again this was a great training ground of how to harness the power of really different types of people.
Researchers, more introverted by nature, who used to glare at me every morning as I was listening to what the 3AW Neil Mitchell promo was.
And at the time it was Mitchell or Faine for the news junkies. For me this was critical because as communications professionals you’re constantly trying to assess the mood of the community, and in particular, the appetite for the change you’re seeking to achieve.
There were the marketers who were more extroverted.
Also capable of giving you a decent glare when you dared to ask if a Board paper would be coming in on time.
Media people who responded to the suggestion of a ‘business planning day’ with that look firstly of dread, then followed by a smile, as a daily crisis appeared or concocted so they had to very regrettably apologise.
But this time taught me so much about how to create healthy conflict.
A skill which I’m still trying to hone every day.
How do you create a psychologically safe workplace, with high levels of trust, while at the same time acknowledging that any form of change will require challenge? And periods of uncertainty. Levels of discomfort.
This time taught me about developing talent. Hiring and firing people. About the importance of cutting to the chase, especially when it’s the latter.
That there are things that you would lose sleep over, and still do.
But it was similar types of discussions and debates over the years.
Are we genuinely helping or hindering?
Does our work matter? What works? What doesn’t? And if we know what works, what lever to pull, why aren’t we pushing harder?
What gets in the way?
And when people say the usual things: ‘silos’ ‘resources’ ‘etc etc’, learning to live in the uncomfortable space of assessing – are these real?
Or are they excuses?
It also taught me that the way we think about risk taking in communication fields isn’t confined to creative concepts that push the limits or are too edgy.
Upon reflection the bigger risks, and the far more valuable ones, are so much more about how we as messy human beings decide, consciously or not, to play along.
As Heifetz and Linsky argue in their seminal text ‘Leadership on the Line’ 2002:
“The hope of leadership lies in the capacity to deliver disturbing news and raise difficult questions in a way that people can absorb, prodding them to take up the message rather than ignore or kill the messenger.” (page 12)
This is the act week in, week out: you try, you fail, you get put on your backside. You bruise. You replay what was said, and who said what to whom?
And then you realise it’s all noise, you dust yourself off, learn, recover, pull sleeves up and away you go again.
Leading the TAC
So after a few years as Divisional lead, my boss decided to retire. The CEO role was being advertised, and I remember a couple of now former Directors giving me what I call the ‘don’t be disappointed speech’.
Which went something like this.
“You’re probably thinking of applying for the role, but what we’re looking for is an external candidate to shake things up, so don’t be disappointed when you don’t get it.”
Now, I found this to be very curious.
A, I actually wasn’t thinking of applying. Our daughter was at the time 1 year old, and becoming a parent seemed 1000 times harder than anything that work could bowl up.
A view I still hold, by the way.
And it actually didn’t look like too much fun.
But my pride was dented, so I thought, here I am, all care no responsibility.
And as a minimum I’m going to make the panel listen to me for an hour as I lay out this grand agenda.
As communication professionals know, a captured audience - too tempting to pass on.
And that’s what I did: leaned back in the chair and gave the “you know what we should do?” spiel.
When it was done, I jumped in the car and called my wife and said, “That was actually very cathartic”.
And I remember her saying, “You don’t think you’ll be like that ice skater bloke Steven Bradbury, what happens if the people that are really good drop out and you’re left standing?”
Ouch.
But bang on.
So I’d promised the shake up, and as an insider, got the ‘well you wanted to drive, so here’s the keys, and don’t stuff it up’.
TAC CEO
When I started we kicked off a process called ‘state of the business’, a standard stocktake internally and externally of what people thought was working well, and what wasn’t.
I remember driving to Melbourne to attend a focus group of clients. Having been to hundreds of these things, I remember quite smugly thinking: I’ll stick my head in for the first half an hour, grab a sandwich, have a listen, then head back to Geelong.
So that was the plan, until a mother got on her feet in response to a question: “How have you found the compensation process to support your son after his catastrophic injury?”
She felt the process was dehumanising, combative, and despite a large payout, had absolutely destroyed her.
“I hate you people,” she stated. And I could tell she meant it. And she sat down.
It was said so quietly, yet so fiercely, so beautifully, it soaked all the oxygen out of the room.
And at the end of the night, all I could muster was an approach to her and mumble, “We’re sorry, and we’ll try and make it a bit better.”
Her look of disdain said it all.
I remember the de-brief with the team a few days later, it injected a determination among the group to make it better.
And I think back now, we’d all read similar types of remarks countless times in market research.
But the power of communication in the moment. The moment of looking into someone’s eyes, and feeling the emotions: sadness, fury, anger and courage.
This, and many other moments like it, really fuelled us to reform things. To try concepts such as restorative justice in the world of social insurance schemes where the adversarial nature was nearly expected.
One of the insights I’d really come to appreciate over the journey is that if you truly want to ‘shake things up’, or better phrased ‘have reform stick’, you have to be systematic.
The ra ra speeches that we’ve all seen, sometimes entertaining, sometimes things to endure, nice little sugar hits that quickly fade off.
But systematic change also has to be simple and accessible so people can buy in.
Clever people that I’ve worked with have tried to boil it down to:
Set a direction – this is where we are going
Win the hearts and minds
Right tools in the hands
Then systems to reinforce
Really easy to say.
Much harder to do.
Especially winning the hearts and minds.
At TAC we knew there was disparity between the external view of TAC from the ads, versus what our people were living and breathing internally.
Cutting edge versus miles of red tape.
So we spent a lot of time talking to people, listening, reflecting on who we were and what we wanted to stand for.
And what came from it were four strong yet simple values that genuinely resonated with our people:
We value life.
We make every conversation count.
We will find a better way, today.
We make the complicated simple.
While most organisations have values, it’s rare there is real alignment in the hearts and minds of the people, everyone from the leadership to those at the frontline services.
But we all knew what we were there to do, and we all really believed in it.
The values are something that I know everyone at TAC was – and still is - really proud of. They’re a legacy I am incredibly proud of too, and in revisiting them for tonight I reflected on how intertwined they are with both communication and leadership.
Such is the power of the words you choose and use – they can change not only the people but the trajectory of an organisation.
One example I’d like to share.
While TAC was well respected for campaigns over many decades, the market research kept telling us the public had long stopped being overly concerned about the road toll.
The view was ‘yes, it was really bad and now it’s pretty good’, and the shock ads can’t really compete with the reality of what YouTube serves up each day.
Yet every time we’d had a bad weekend there’d be a request to ‘do something’.
What we decided.
We had seen Sweden in the ‘90s boldly starting to position their work as Vision Zero.
Interestingly, the market research on the word ‘vision’ back then didn’t come back so well – sounded too lofty, airy fairy.
Zero got people going though. From ‘this is absolute crap – will never happen to…’
“Why not?”
In market research sessions people would nearly punch on.
What it did though is enable conversations like ‘okay, zero seems too much of a stretch – where do you think we could land?’
Is 10 per cent better? 30? Half? Do you think halving the road toll would be possible? What would have to change?
So we stuck the chin out and went for zero.
It was a strategy exercise, with communications a part, not the other way round.
Doing all of the meetings that I used to call as the corporate affairs manager “boring but important ones”.
It involved pulling the levers that the experts said worked as hard as possible.
Not just more roads spending. Or more speeding fines. Or more ads.
Really working with transport planners about how do you get better bang for buck out of the infrastructure dollar.
This took hours and hours. Plenty of inertia. Plenty of cynicism. Plenty of drives on the way home thinking ‘this is genuinely too hard’.
Let’s stick with making the ads and let others sweat this.
And then you’d meet another parent whose life had been shattered.
Or meet another client who had to endure the compensation process.
And it would fill your cup back up. So you’d recover, reload, once more with feeling.
And before we knew it we would see change.
Challenging police on the enforcement models, not an easy thing to do, but we had amazing leaders like Assistant Commissioner Libby Murphy, who is both a leader of people and a natural collaborator.
Challenging people to think differently about measures of success.
And make no mistake: we took heat.
I sat in many a ‘please explain’ meeting with my superiors in the authorising environment.
Every time there was a bad weekend there’d be a “Whose idea was this? Who signed this off?”
Our reputation is being damaged.
But Towards Zero launched late 2015.
And in 2018, Victoria produced a record-low road toll of 213. Pre any COVID impact.
Plenty of things went right. Plenty of things tanked. But everyone who was involved in that work at that time could look each other in the eye and say ‘we made a difference’.
WorkSafe CEO
And speaking of making a difference, in closing tonight, I’d like to ask for all of your help in my current endeavour.
I’m very privileged to have been appointed the CEO of WorkSafe Victoria.
A wonderful organisation full of skilled and passionate people.
People who, like at the TAC, are values-led and driven by a compelling and clear purpose – to reduce workplace harm and improve outcomes for injured workers.
Like the road toll, too many people die at work.
And no one should die at work. No one. Zero.
But more than 50 last year in Victoria did, one person a week.
One a week, in a so-called modern country.
Thousands more are injured every year. And this requires a very different leadership and communications approach.
We’re currently in the process of building our strategy for the next 5 years, and what has struck me is the breadth and depth of workforce talent in the state, but similarly in the challenges:
How do we keep our health care workers safe from the violence we see every weekend in emergency wards?
How do we keep our construction workers safe in a high risk industry?
How do we all get better at creating workplaces that are psychologically safer?
In a state where our multicultural make up is our strength, how can we make sure our messages are understood by employers and employees alike?
In short, how can we help make Victoria an even better place to live, work and run a business?
Better workplaces, better leaders, and dare I say it, great communications professionals such as those in the room tonight are a key part of healthier, safer workplaces.
So in closing tonight, in a world of increasingly polarised and amplified opinions, where what are facts is even contested now, there are lessons for us all:
Listening without judgement
Make every conversation count
Have a bias towards action
Be authentic
And as our kids teachers say, marvellous mistakes and fabulous failures are gifts, because it’s how we grow.
In a world of hybrid work post COVID, I am fascinated about which companies will be able to truly develop healthy cultures that will drive the high performance we’re all looking for.
One thing is for sure, the role of communication, and its practitioners, will be critical for future success.
And I look forward to learning from you all as we experiment together.
Thank you.
