Phil Volkofsky [00:00:00] I’m speaking today with Dr. Lisa Griffiths Chief Executive Officer at OzChild. Doctor Lisa Griffiths recently completed her doctorate in business leadership from Torrens University while working full time as chief executive. Lisa’s career has seen her work overseas in the United Kingdom and in the United States leading the successful turnaround of a charity in that country. Back in Australia Lisa worked in the government sector and emergency services during the royal commission into the Black Saturday fires in 2009 in Victoria. Lisa provided testimony over two days at the royal commission and ultimately helped shape the modern policies that now exist and introduced the concept of primacy of life into the policy framework. Lisa was awarded the National Emergency Medal for her significant service to the people of Victoria during the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
Phil Volkofsky [00:00:49] Among Lisa’s other outstanding contributions she competed and medalled at the Commonwealth Games in 1986 and 1990 in judo and was ranked number two in the world for her weight division. Since Lisa joined OzChild in February 2014 the organization has undergone a genuine transformation with growth of more than 130 percent and radical new programs and service delivery into new states and territories.
Phil Volkofsky [00:01:17] My name is Phil Volkofsky Director and Founder of Brakten consulting established in 2018 to work with executives and directors to improve the adaptability and performance of organizations for a better society. I had the privilege of working for OzChild in the early phase of Lisa’s transformation journey.
Phil Volkofsky [00:01:36] Lisa thank you for joining me today to share your insights and some of OzChilds’ transformational journey so far. Lisa let’s start at the beginning. Could you give us some context and share the situation you found yourself in at OzChild when you started.
Lisa Griffiths [00:01:52] Thank you Phil. And a real privilege to be with you today. When I started at OzChild. The organization was one hundred and sixty five years young and clearly had a history of being very innovative in the state of Victoria. And as is usual when you are in a leadership position, particularly having the privilege of being the chief executive officer ,From my previous experiences in those roles I felt it was really important to sit on my hands and assess the current landscape and talk to all the key stakeholders both internally and externally. There had been a long serving CEO previous to me for 22 years and also the chair the board had been in that role for 14 years. And um there was a concern by the board of ensuring there was continuity around the key leaders in the business.
[00:02:52] So I worked closely first of all with the chair to discuss with him the priorities as he saw them for me. And the picture that became obvious quite quickly was that we had been typically run like a family business. There was not a lot of accountability around day to day budget management. It was pretty much, we spent what we felt we needed to deliver on our commitments and the reconciliation of that ,wasn’t probably transparently provided throughout the organization. And I articulated the problem at the time as death by a thousand cuts. Because we had lots of particular areas of the business that were bleeding financially.
We did have significant assets which kind of falsely masked this this uh deficit funding problem that we gotten ourselves into. So I needed to do something about that. And then the the strategy of the organization was quite outdated it hadn’t been refreshed or renewed for nearly a decade. And the governance structures were um also needing to be refreshed and an updated and in line with common practice and best practice.
Phil Volkofsky [00:04:39] Thank you for that Lisa. How did government, how did agencies like OzChild think about their role in the sector?
[00:05:13] Well OzChild operates in the child welfare sector. And to sort of unpack that a little. What that what that means is there are children that are at risk every day and they may be exposed to abuse or neglect.
Oz Child is a large service is deliverer of what is known as “out of home care” with children out of their home and living with foster carers or as Kinship carers which are family members. Or placed into the residential care system. The other part of that system then is the prevention and early intervention of children and families that are at risk from from such abuse and neglect. And so that’s the make up of the sector we work in and it goes back to our roots.
My observation coming into the sector was well first of all to analyze what the sector looked like and in the state of Victoria there were at the time, this was five years ago now, about uh five to six thousand children living in the out of home care system and of that um that 800 lived in the residential care part. Uh but fifteen hundred in foster care. Um bit more in kinship care. And if you then had a look at the number of kids coming into care each year they were increasing rapidly.
Around this time as well in the in the context there were issues around family violence which become very prevalent as well as um amphetamine use was on the rise. And there were more more notifications to the department on abuse and neglect issues and more more children being removed. In fact today that number has doubled.
[00:07:46] What I noticed in terms of a mindset was less about the mindset but more about the process of how the system worked so the system worked in a way where we didn’t ever have the client in mind.
[00:08:12] So we were measured and and funded on bed nights. So you must have a bed available for a potential child that might be removed. But what happened to that child in our care , there was there was no system to sort of capture whether there was any positive outcomes for them or negative outcomes for them., it wasn’t that the conversation wasn’t going on so many people were having the conversation. But what people were struggling to have a conversation about was “What are we going to try and what do we know that isn’t working” in the current context or even defining what the problem was.
[00:08:59] Child abuse neglect which is well known and documented in multiple systems around the world. And the investment into sort of ,the prevention of the system was very sparse and there was a huge amount of investment going into the crisis end which is where children are placed into the residential care.
[00:09:34] And there seemed to be a reluctance to want to look at that system and change it. And I found myself being in a very good and convenient position of being fairly new and being able to challenge the thinking and my approach was very much about , with the current practices we’re running, How effective are they?
[00:09:54] Fundamentally what is the evidence to say that they are working? Which led me then on the journey to determine Um there must be a better way of doing this because as I spent more time in the sector I realized that the numbers of children being removed are getting higher and higher and something wasn’t quite working and still isn’t working to this day.
Phil Volkofsky [00:10:19] Yeah. So so your observation was that there’s a system that’s in place. It’s essentially looking after these children and to a certain extent the families after the event. There’s a bed available. There’s a series of providers whether they be kinship carers or foster carers who can help. But this is all after the event and um the prevention side of things really was an area that wasn’t being focussed on enough.
Lisa Griffiths [00:10:51] Absolutely. And whilst there was investment in the system into prevention and early intervention. Most of the interventions that were occurring, were again not focussed on the client but were focussed on activity.
[00:11:07] So , I said very very early on in my time here that , that I felt it was no longer good enough to keep a child what’s available. We must give them what is needed. And what’s backed by the evidences to be highly effective for them.
[00:11:28] Because what was happening in the early intervention prevention side was there would be a notification to child protection. They would then, if they felt that the threshold hadn’t been met to remove the child, to then notify something called Child First ,and which is like a hotline, to then refer that family for support and rather than there be some sort of rigorous assessment they know what that family needs and match a program to need. Instead it was – oh you’re funded to deliver X hours of Y. And then we would get the referral OzChild and we would just give them the six hours of service, twelve hours a service, 20 hours or longer, If the family was lucky enough.
[00:12:18] And to me that was a bit of a lottery with a bit of a randomness to it. And when you look at the data about families that are recidivists – as in children that keep re-presenting to the child protection system it’s 76 percent. So something’s not working in that part of the system which is.. Hence that means that there’s a high probability they will be removed at a point in time.
Phil Volkofsky [00:12:46] Now Lisa, when you made those conclusions did you have a view at the time that you wanted to intervene in the broader system or was this something that came later in your tenure at OzChild?
Lisa Griffiths [00:13:00] No I think very early on and having had a fairly significant career in Victoria in the public sector I was very comfortable working at the systems level and ultimately knew that whilst OzChild was within my control and how I run that business um the system itself can become a barrier to the effectiveness of the organisation. And if I have the child in mind as is the key client um I also have to think about all the other children that aren’t my clients but fundamentally would benefit from a system that can be more responsive to their needs. So I felt uh very strongly and you know quite intuitively really that with the skills I had that I could contribute at that level and was invited to sit on ministers committees quite quickly and uh and provide that perspective and that experience.
Phil Volkofsky [00:14:03] With with that perception uh did you start looking elsewhere for inspiration in relation to the alternative ways in which the system might serve the needs of these vulnerable children?
Lisa Griffiths [00:14:18] Well having worked in multiple systems and probably the way my mind organizes itself. In analyzing the data in Victoria I then started to look at other systems within the context of Australia and saw that they were equally failing children and young people that were experiencing vulnerability and at risk of removal.
[00:14:43] We had , and All of the relevant jurisdictions in Australia we’re having increases in their removal of children and there was an incredible overrepresentation of Aboriginal children and Torres Strait Islanders um being removed year on year. Uh at about the same time the Children’s Commissioner of Victoria also did um a report into residential care services and it was quite a damning report about the sexual exploitation of kids that were living in the residential care system and it was a probability of about fifty one percent that if you went into the residential care system you would be sexually exploited.
[00:15:23] And for kids that stay in the residential care system 20 percent of them go on to the youth justice system and then on to adult incarceration. So there didn’t seem to be ,from the data and the evidence in the Australian context ,any good news around the outcomes for children and young people that we were serving.
[00:15:42] So I determined to look elsewhere to see where else in the world , um and I had the benefit of course of working in the US for three years and being a CEO previously there. I’d also introduced some evidence based programs when I worked in that context so I was very familiar with the concept of robust evidence program logics. Um understanding the problems you’re trying to solve.
[00:16:09] And this was all new language here in Victoria, while some of it was around it was very not around in OzChild so we’d never done a program logic at OzCHild when I arrived um we talked a tiny bit about outcomes but it wasn’t prevalent or top of mind. So we were almost like subservient to the system and what it wanted from us. It was we want bed nights, we want activities. I had a far more mature approach in the previous systems I’ve been involved with that had moved well past that.
[00:16:43] So I did look um internationally over to the US to see how they were managing the child welfare system and there were some standout um jurisdictions in the US that were doing exceptionally good work and out of the box results. So uh that led me to then do to make contact with um the City of New York and try to understand better how they had had incredible success in reducing the number of children entering care and also reducing the number of kids living in out-of-home care. And their data was quite phenomenal. Uh.
[00:17:22] in the 90s in the state of New York, you know they have a population of over 18 million people in the state of New York. Back then there was a crack epidemic and they had huge number of kids being removed and placed in out of home care. Fifty thousand children living in out-of-home care. Whereas today I am going back in. This would be three or four years ago. That number is significantly reduced down to about ten thousand. How on earth did they do that? Today It’s actually under eight thousand which is lower than what we have here in Victoria.
Phil Volkofsky [00:17:58] That’s amazing results in New York. I’m speaking to Lisa Griffiths. Dr. Griffiths is the CEO of OzChild and she’s talking about the transformational journey that she’s had with this organization since 2014. Lisa you were just mentioning that you saw in the United States some extraordinary results over a sustained long period of time. What was the response to such concepts as evidenced based services from your board from the government sector here in Victoria and other places from other organisations that you might have been collaborating with? What was their reaction to these ideas?
Lisa Griffiths [00:18:42] Well we um the first thing I did after I understood there was other parts of the world having good success with the same kind of problem statement as what we were having was to make a personal investment to To Travel across and meet with the relevant providers that had been part of a system change or transformation in that part of the world and gathered more evidence and did some ground truththing and then brought that information back and shared it broadly with the sector and with fellow CEOs and the minister of the day and it was a mixed response.
[00:19:23] You know probably one of um some of the most instant reactions were -” Well that’s America” you know it’s uh they have different almost you know people would say “the kid’s are different over there”. And I know from working in three different continents being the US the UK and Australia that kids are the same everywhere in the world.
[00:19:46] Yes the context we operate is, its often the system that’s different, but people like to label the kids and um. So there was a lot of people that gave opinions that were based on their own, probably past, Information that they carried in their heads and not necessarily grounded in any truth. I was very respectful of that because when new information from fairly new persons is mentioned you have to take your time garnering support.
So I took an approach to be very thorough in documenting what I was learning and sharing that with individually with a range of providers. And I really sought out providers that I felt would align with the thinking around – well do we want to try something different because clearly what we’re doing now is not having the best results for kids.
So I did uh I went to meet with all of the key CEOs,got to learn all of their businesses, went and shared with them about what I’d learned in New York and one large provider and actually put their hand up and said well we would like to be involved in any any work you would do. So we struck up a partnership and um the work that we then concurrently were doing with OzChild, was to get the organization across this concept – because OzChild in and of itself as we started with um was in a difficult position financially.
We had a lot of work doing a turnaround during that , we had to get renewal of the board. We had to do some renewal of some key positions, we had to strike a new strategy and I had to start to introduce some language into the business around moving to outcomes and getting the best for children rather than just living delivering activities. And that in itself was an intense internal process, whilst externally trying to engender the sector to think differently. Um but both run kind of parallel and the. fortunately the minister uh of the day ,,at the time was equally very passionate about having some significant legacy while she was in role and um took herself off to New York. And uh a team of uh helpers from the department, to learn almost the same things that I’d learnt and that gave a great confidence then that to introduce some of the programs that could really um hit the pain points we were feeling in the system.
[00:22:22] So for us we recognized that we needed to do something to prevent kids being removed from family and keep them safely home. And we needed you to do something that was robust and matched to need. We also needed to um work with a couple of age groups because there was a lot of young moms that would have children nought to five that really had poor parenting capacity. So we looked to see how we could intervene there. We looked of course at really high risk families that were experiencing the issues that I mentioned earlier and at real risk of having children removed. And then we looked about ,at children that were in, living in the residential care system and how we might provide some evidence around an intervention to get them out of that part of the system and at least either back home or into a more permanent arrangement.
Phil Volkofsky [00:23:14] So this is a this is a very expansive vision. Most people would have thought that just trying to tackle one of those things might be enough you know for a CEO to come in and claim some sort of success. The way I hear it you’ve really started to form different relationships with the key stakeholders. You mentioned the government. How did you reframe the relationship with the government? And you also mentioned you know you’ve got one other partner from the sector. How did you begin to reframe those relationships because you did work hard with the internal staff to get them to start thinking about outcomes and different types of information,however that has to be aligned to the broader system doesn’t it? I mean you can’t achieve success in the system change without bringing on those other people outside the organization. Tell us a bit more about that part of your transformation in terms of those relationships.
Lisa Griffiths [00:24:08] Well previously OzCHild had largely been absent from the very key senior meetings in the sector. So um the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services would have some key providers that they would meet with regularly. the minister had obviously advisory groups. There was the peak body for Child and Family Welfare Services in Victoria has is a membership body which OzChild had been a member too and OzChild had never been successful in getting anybody on the board. so I was actually encouraged to apply to be on the board of directors at the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare so I did nominate and was successfully voted in to to a board position.
The minister uh who I had taken opportunities to chat with when she got into her role in 2014 which was shortly after I joined OzChild and she appointed me to her ministerial advisory group and sitting underneath that Ministerial advisory group were a number of very senior department groups that were tackling different parts of reform. And I was appointed, joint chair ,of one of those groups that was looking at system redesign. So that gave me you know a strong platform for influence and and trying to build a coalition of the willing really. And one of the early successes was to identify a problem that was a problem for everybody that we could value add a little bit at OzChild.
[00:25:52] So uh everybody in the foster care sector was delivering foster care and everybody would try and attract foster care recruit, we were trying to recruit foster carers individually and people have different you know options, size of budgets, to do that depending on the size of the agency. And no one had ever thought to do it collectively. So a OzChild took the time to write a business case and work behind the scenes with government to say how about we come up with something where we’re all working collectively to recruit foster parents. And that sort of uh I think garnered a lot of respect from other agencies to say well OzChild didn’t need to do that and then once it was successfully funded it was handed over to The Centre of Excellence to run and manage.
Phil Volkofsky [00:26:39] This was a key sort of theme I hear is that you took a mindset of collaboration with everybody. Uh is that fair enough?
Lisa Griffiths [00:26:51] Yeah absolutely.
[00:26:53] I mean my personal philosophy, personal way I enjoy work best is very much through altruism and about trying to be as selfless as possible. And it’s the gain for all rather than for oneself.
[00:27:10] Um and this was hard actually for the organization to grasp to start with because they um were very reluctant to partner, were very reluctant to share intellectual property. Um and I pretty much would give anything away that we we found so our intelligence around the evidence based services that we we have. My own leadership program and a whole range of different things we shared broadly and now its become the way we work. But in the early days it was that I was questioned heavily by my executive about why we were sharing so openly with everybody and what about us.
[00:27:53] And uh to me we’re all part of a system that we are equally responsible for , and if someone else has a win one day in that system and we help set that up for success then we should be equally as pleased for that provider and not feel like we’ve missed out because somebody else’s gained.
Phil Volkofsky [00:28:11] That’s a real shift in thinking in terms of how you feel about your role in the system as you call it and to get your executives comfortable with that given that most of us have a competitive mindset and want to do things for our own perhaps our own egos or our own organizations even though it might be coming from a good place. I feel like Lisa you really take us on a journey where you’ve clearly focussed on developing new ways of thinking about relationships with the other organizations in the sector, participating, contributing generously time and effort. You’ve also donated your own time and effort in terms of sponsoring yourself to go to New York.
Today. Now when you talk about that true vision of transformation it’s not actually written into OzChild’s vision that um OzChild will try to shape the system in which it works but it’s clearly a fundamental driver of what you’re doing in this organization. I look internally now I don’t see, I don’t think I see any signs of an espoused set of values well is that something different? I do. There’s a lot of symbolism around I see much Aboriginal work. Is that some sort of symbolism that’s significant?
Lisa Griffiths [00:29:31] Yes.
[00:29:31] So on my continuous journey of continually learning and and what’s most effective to get the best outcomes and OzChild’s vision of course is that all children and young people are safe, respected nurtured and reach their full potential. But to do that you do need a healthy system and you do need to attract people to your organization ,to the sector. Absolutely are values driven um. But a lot of research and emphasis in corporate cultures and organizations over the many years who have adopted common values um in my experience have often had them thrown back in their face because , what, because you have to be very careful to prescribe a set of common values and you’re an executive, if you don’t live those every day ,your frontline worker will make the observation immediately. And I’ve seen that play out time and time again.
[00:30:26] But in our sector we , we are values laden. So. There isn’t probably an employee I have that doesn’t really have a strong connection – wanting to make a difference. But the way they make that difference is through their intrinsic values. And if you tap into that and say look my strongest value is for example human rights. And you allowed that to flourish in the organization then you’re gonna get the best out of that individual because they can live and bring their values to work.
[00:31:02] And for me I’d always wanted the opportunity for everybody to live their own values at work and respect everyone else’s. Because if we think about oh wonderful um Aboriginal community and we’re very privileged that we meet on Aboriginal land now and I pay my respects their elders past and present. And I recognise that today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders. And if we’re true if we’re true to the the notion that we are on someone else’s land and we have the privilege of living here we have to be very respectful of the many years of wonderful culture that we have now inherited and gifted with living with day to day but the values that drive that culture are quite different from Western values and not privileged by Western cultures and Western cultures have tried to stamp those values out of the Aboriginal community much to the detriment of Aboriginal society today. So in a similar vein if we inhibit people’s opportunity to live their values and self-determin what’s important to them then I feel it inhibits the growth of an organization. So at OzChild we don’t prescribe values we just say bring them to work.
Phil Volkofsky [00:32:21] Fantastic. So bring your values to work. And like I do assume that these Aboriginal paintings are a reflection of your desire and effort to connect more deeply with the Aboriginal heritage of Australia. And that’s great to see. I’m speaking to Dr. Lisa Griffiths the chief executive of OzChild. Lisa is sharing with us her transformational journey on a personal level and also with OzChild. Lisa you mentioned the relationship with the Aboriginal community. Was it something that OzChild demonstrated a value for when you arrived?
Lisa Griffiths [00:33:04] Probably not at all. In fact our appreciation of the very rich Aboriginal culture of Australia. And my own personal appreciation was, you know in not even in the teens if we were doing a scale of nought to a hundred and um It’s quite embarrassing to say but I think it’s really important in leadership to recognize when you know you have blind spots and you have failures and the opportunities and growth that can come from that.
And we were confronted with um a failure at OzChild where we had an Aboriginal child in our care that we had de-identified as having a cultural right to her identity. And that is a profound thing for an Aboriginal child and the Aboriginal Children’s Commissioner Andrew Jackomos um did his job magnificently in saying that was one of the worst things that he had come across in the sector even though it was not intentional by any of our staff. In fact the staff member that unintentionally did this work was no longer with us. It would happen before I came to ask child but for me it was a wake up call that when you run an organisation you don’t just stop on this day and everything that happened before you had nothing to do with you you step into leadership and you own the whole organisation’s past you its present and you have to ensure its future.
[00:34:47] So I stepped in and said Wow. What am I going to do?
[00:34:54] So I had a very candid conversation with the commissioner and I assured him that I would do everything to make it, To understand why we had gotten ourselves in that position how many children we had in our care that were Aboriginal. We didn’t even know the number ,with any degree of certainty uh how we were meeting their cultural needs and anything else that we need to be aware of.
And invested to bring in an independent party to look throughout the organization from the board right down to the front line with a very comprehensive review. It was an excellent report that we received. We were very fortunate we had a very senior person. Was known to me that led that piece of work and was quite happy to confront all of the senior leaders on how we can let this slip through the system because in the sector, to be fair there was quite a maturity about working with Aboriginal community controlled organisations and Aboriginal children and young people. Um and we weren’t even at the kind of the sector level which was hard to swallow for us and the executive.
[00:36:13] But um everybody took it on the chin and agreed that there was only one way and that will be forward, but it was transformational for us and our uh we re-did all our practices and we shared all of our learnings with the sector.
[00:36:28] We allowed the report to be used by the commissioner to share with others. Um he made subsequent changes. No one’s allowed to de-identify an Aboriginal child in any community service organisation. He was able to use the evidence to then demonstrate that there were a number of unidentified children um in lots of community service organizations like ours child who equally didn’t have robust practices and really changed the conversation about the way of working and really kind of authorised and legitimize the Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations to step in and say Well Aboriginal children should be with Aboriginal kin and be controlled by Aboriginal community controlled organisations.
Because of that work I was then invited to participate in the Aboriginal children’s forum which was uh for Aboriginal community controlled organisations and non Aboriginal organisations were were not invited nor needed to be but um there was a recognition that some providers would would be able to play a part and there was a couple of three or four large providers there and I was the kind of the fifth person sort of invited in and um and I think the Aboriginal leaders were looking for me to challenge the thinking of the white people that would attend these meetings because they held in their care most of the Aboriginal children and there was a reluctance to really shift thinking. It was probably more ,there was a good intent, but again there was a barrier. A system barrier.
[00:38:12] I’m able to kind of make those barriers not seem so insurmountable when I’m involved in those conversations and I just bring a different perspective that has people think “oh, OK can we do it like that?” And we’ve seen a tremendous shift in the sector around the empowerment of Aboriginal community control organisations and none of that is due to me. That is absolutely due to the government commitment. But in terms of the this the white organizations we we’ve all shifted our policies and practices now to align with the policy of the day. But and for us for an organization because we’ve had tremendous success and growth in the last number of years. Wherever we go we bump into, of course, the over representation of Aboriginal children and young people and not always the local Aboriginal providers to step in and care for these children.
[00:39:15] And the evidence around keeping children safely home with Aboriginal family is non-existent and the programs that we’ve introduced to help arrest that, are largely tested with Western um but other indigenous cultures around the world but never with Aboriginal community. So to make sure that we as an organization we’re going to be truly effective in trying to implement evidence based services that would help tackle that problem of removal of Aboriginal children um we hired uh an incredible leader from the Aboriginal community to um head up that part of the business as well as um asking the (past) commissioner for children and young people to come on our board and then become our cultural ambassador and really immersing ourselves in our uh ways of working around reconciliation and so that the organization could no longer be ignorant of its practice but could be held to account.
Phil Volkofsky [00:40:22] Fantastic. So Lisa. It seems to me again another transformation as in the relationship with the Aboriginal community. The relationship with Aboriginal controlled organisations, the relationship with the commissioner in terms of what was the role of OzChild. Confronting the ethical issues and the challenges that go with having that child de-identified and presenting that to the staff and asking them to take on responsibility and accountability for that. Again to me is another story of transformation through the changing of the relationships. I do remember the awkwardness uh in those early days talking about the Aboriginal community and people would worry about what language to use and how to express themselves. And that awkwardness is clearly gone now and there’s a far more sophistication, a greater ease when dealing with these issues.
[00:41:13] The other aspect perhaps uh is that ,on a personal level you continue to evolve your own understanding of your leadership practice and many genuine leaders do do that. They do invest in their own capacity to lead. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve done in that space over the last couple of years.
Lisa Griffiths [00:41:35] Yeah. Look , I think life is a continuous learning journey and um um I often share a story um about the “gentle way” which is the English translation of judo which is the sport you referenced to the beginning of the interview that I did from a very young age. In the sport of judo you start off as a white belt and as you progress you get graded and you get through your coloured belts until you become a black belt and then you’re kind of looked at as a master and then you go through the dans which takes you through levels and then you change colours to a red and white belt and then you go through a couple more and then you change colours to a red belt and then you get to the end of the belting system and you come back to white. Because if you get that far then you’ve got to start learning all over again. And that philosophy of continuous learning is what drives me to always evolve myself as a person to be the best person I could possibly be because it feels incumbent if I’m leading others that I’m acutely aware of the way I practice leadership.
[00:42:48] So I um I was encouraged by the interim chair of the board who is an associate professor to think about not just doing professional development around leadership but doing something academic to really test my that side of my thinking.
[00:43:06] I hadn’t really thought that I would go as far as ,taking on a doctorate and I found a program which was in business leadership that was very much a self reflective exercise, right from understanding what leadership is and all the theories that contribute to leadership, but testing then um through various coursework practices who you are as a leader.Along with doing significant research into leadership practice in your context and making a significant contribution to your sector.
[00:43:51] And when I look at that um program which is run through the Australian Graduate School of Leadership, part of Torrens University I was taken aback by how they thought that through because it matched really well because I could give something back to the sector so then it wasn’t just gonna be about me, it would be about what I could give back.
[00:44:12] And the board and the then director of people and culture was happy that it was that was a professional development approach that was and that was more than just for oneself and the that that journey was magnificent. Because I do work full time so I had to give up and sacrifice weekends for three years and, but the outputs of that have been fed into the business multiple times.
Phil Volkofsky [00:44:50] Yeah. So that’s that’s what’s probably I mean that’s very important at the end of the day isn’t it. The capacity to feed that back into the business. How is that taking shape for you since uh well since starting the program but also since conclusion of it?
[00:45:04] Well um you know we introduced a range of different things along the way. Um you know the executive were highly supportive when I was in the kind of, the development phase of probably some of the key questions that I was going to shape up in my research but we developed a strategic niche ,we developed a customer value proposition which were all borrowed from the business world of course. We put together the new strategic plan which on paper looks beautifully simple but we executed really really effectively and that’s demonstrated by our performance results.
And we put in a framework for success around the organization of moving forward. Those are kind of like a corporate set of learnings from it. But fundamentally I was really interested in developing people. And and ensuring that we had a learning system. I think as we speak there’s a cohort going through the leadership PASS ,is what it’s called today. And so far we’ve had fabulous feedback. We’ve seen a shift in common language around leadership, common practices. Um it’s helped embed something we call the OzChild way which are the sort of key behaviours that we look for in leadership.
[00:46:39] Uh what I started to think was we would look at developing a sort of middle leadership layer in the organization so they were the emerging leaders. But there was a cry then from the team leaders to sort of say what about us. And um and they are a large cohort of leaders and we put them through the program. And what I found fascinating was the appetite for learning.
[00:47:03] So when you get further up in leadership of course you got many blind spots and you’ve got lots of cognitive dissonance and lots of bias. This group didn’t have any because they were like wow, you are going to invest in me to become a leader. I’m only a team leader. I didn’t know I had a leadership role.
[00:47:21] And it was just wonderful seeing that I’m seeing them open up and become very empowered. And we’ve seen an unintended consequence of cascading down to almost the front line, that they now ask a lot of questions about the way we work and they manage up and they’re not just gonna accept a direction anymore they want to make an inquiry in a very respectful way and they advocate them maybe things look different.
[00:47:50] To the point now where we have initiatives happening that have got nothing to do with any of the executive or directors they’ve just happened because people have taken their own initiative because they feel that they’ve got the authority and permission to do that which is a really lovely thing to see.
Phil Volkofsky [00:48:04] That’s awesome. Lisa can you tell us a little bit about the OzChild way and perhaps what the PASS stands for.
Lisa Griffiths [00:48:09] That’s for sure. So while the leadership PASS um is an acronym for four domains around People, Action, Systems and Self and within those domains is a multi-dimensional sort of things. But fundamentally bringing yourself to leadership and understanding who you are is really really important.
[00:48:28] The People you pick and who you work with and how you develop them is equally important. Action the decisions you make are really critical and they have to be backed by robust evidence so we use evidence based management and decision making.
[00:48:42] And then of course the System, and understanding where you fit in the System , OzChild’s a system or part of a bigger system. And your, the consequence of your actions have an inter-relationship with something else. So we unpack all of that through the program and we do use action science to teach people the concepts.
[00:49:02] And one of the things which is throughout the program is this thing called the OzChild Way which starts off with , its five key behaviours really on what we try and say when we attach to our sort of point of difference and we deliver evidence based services.
[00:49:22] So we made that strategic decision that we would, if we were going to introduce something new ,what we would try and introduce a program that was rigorously backed by evidence and during the last couple of years we have done that 20 times. We now have 20 evidence based programs that are package models, manualised models, with robust research from either the US or the U.K.. And we have a very strong implementation science approach to setting those up for success .
[00:49:54] And then when there isn’t a packaged model, such as Foster care ,we capture outcomes and measure the client and what we do service with children and foster carers etc..
Phil Volkofsky [00:50:09] So you have really transformed the way you use information whether it’s about the client or the system or your people. You package that up in a way that helps to at least contribute to the foundations of evidence and that might inform decision making.
Lisa Griffiths [00:50:24] So we have somewhat of an expectation now that if you’re in any leadership role um you use four sources of evidence to inform decision making and it’s conscientious and is judicious and it’s explicit. And that means you look at the relevant scientific data.
[00:50:42] Um you also look at the quality of that, you look at the organizational data, and you look at the quality of that, you look at the client data and the quality of that you also look at your own tacit knowledge, because you do bring a wealth of information but more often than not, and in my research, with acknowledged leaders that is the preferred source of evidence , tacit knoweldge is, I trust my gut my intuition first before I go out and look at a journal.
[00:51:08] I might look at something glossy. So I might look at the Harvard Business Review which is fabulous publication but it’s not a peer reviewed journal for example. So you don’t know, if it’s not peer reviewed, what the quality of the information is presentedin there. So we try and we give people the skills and the tools as a framework for making decisions and they appear in every office. Now about acquiring information, assessing the information, appraising the quality of the evidence, asking key questions before you make a, particular if it was a big decision small everyday decision slightly different.
Phil Volkofsky [00:51:43] That’s awesome Lisa. You have taken us through a wide range of areas that have changed very significantly at OzChild. Clearly that’s something that’s flown into all the thinking of the staff and your executive , changed the nature of the relationship with the Aboriginal community which I think is awesome. And I think you’re leading Australia in that area and to be congratulated. I wonder how you see OzChild Services evolving over the next few years and what will that mean for your leadership practice and OzChild’s people practices going forward?
[00:52:17] Well I think um I appreciate you yeah your lovely uh remarks there but Success for us would be uh for every you know for Aboriginal children not to be removed any more. But for Aboriginal Community Controlled providers, to be providing the support services and and that they have control and self determine the interventions that are required and suit best and match to need.
[00:52:52] And so for us I just see an enabling and a capacity building role over the next couple of years that is actually led by our aboriginal unit. So we play a capacity building role to set them up for success and don’t want to direct in any way how our leader of that unit takes that forward.
[00:53:16] And in terms of the organisation we would like to continue to grow our evidence based services. Um we’re the largest provider in Australia. And we are getting some fabulous results. And we have learned the art of implementation science and and being agile and getting products to market quickly and we’ll continue to do that while waiting until the demand stops and the demand is still high. There are still children living in hotel rooms because there’s no room in residential care. There still poor outcomes.
[00:53:50] So until we start to get a bit of critical mass around that then we’ll still be uh advocating really strongly and investing heavily in both ways of working because they are at this point. I’ll give you rough numbers ,in New South Wales where we are one of the partners that provides some evidence based services. they just released some data where there is five hundred families now been seen across a number of providers that deliver evidence based programs and of those five hundred families , that would have to three or four children, would have normally had them all removed. Only 20 have been removed.
Phil Volkofsky [00:54:29] Thats awesome. What an outstanding result .
Lisa Griffiths [00:54:32] So we’ll continue to advocate to invest heavily into things that work and a match to need. And for our people practices um you know become a very human centric organization that really allows people to bring themselves at work, become more flexible in our working arrangements use technology. We’re doing quite a bit of that now. But for people to feel free at work and that they can integrate their everyday life with a work life so they get real true kind of balance because there’s been this artificial thing that ,work life balance ,you work on during the week and get the weekends off. But the fact of The reality is we all have to blend the two all the time. So we can create a workplace where people truly feel that they can come to work but they can work at home and they can feel quite free to be who they are and do their best work.
Phil Volkofsky [00:55:25] Lisa that is a wonderful interview I’ll call it that. Uh let’s just say that it was great to hear you express your insights and knowledge about the changes you’ve led in this organization but also that OzChild is leading in the sector. Is there anything you’d like to say in conclusion?
Lisa Griffiths [00:55:45] Oh I think that um. People make the world go round and don’t underestimate the value people make, when you value them. Truly emplore leadership to never lose sight that it’s not the leader that gets the results. It’s the people that you have the privilege of setting up for success and if you focus on that and understand that then you’ll get the best outcomes you can imagine.
[00:56:22] Lisa Griffiths thank you very much.
