Organisations Don't Change Because They're Criticised

Robert Winter We tend to speak about leadership as though it rests on the power, the capacity to direct, to decide, to require. The mandate, the budget line, the name at the top of the chart. And yet some of the most consequential leadership happens precisely where that authority runs out, where you cannot compel anyone to do anything, and the people you most need to move are under no obligation to listen. My guest today has built a career in that territory. She began with authority of the conventional kind, running a retail bank as a local chief executive, with a balance sheet, a team, and the power that comes with both. What has followed is a steady movement away from positional power and towards something considerably harder to exercise. She established ANZ's operations hub in Manila, transitioning more than a thousand roles offshore, a transformation that, by its nature, required people to take part in a process that did not always serve their own interests. At the Asian Development Bank across nearly a decade, she spent six of those years negotiating governance reform with Pacific governments, sovereign states, where her institution held financing and expertise, but no power to direct, and where reform that was not genuinely owned would not survive the end of the program. She also led a task force examining her own institution's record on gender equity, reporting to its president and vice-presidents — which is to say, she accepted the particular exposure of being appointed to hold a mirror up to her own employer. She is now Head of Business Transformation for Asia-Pacific at DT Global, which places her on the third side of the same problem. No longer the bank that finances reform, nor the government that must own it, but the firm contracted to deliver it. Three vantage points on a single, awkward question. How you move institutions you do not control, in rooms where you are the outsider, and where even the seating and the form of address carry meanings you must learn before you can be effective at all. Pamela Wyatt, welcome to On the Subject of Leadership.

Pamela Wyatt Thank you. Happy to be here. That makes the problem sound huge, didn't it — that introduction?

Robert Winter Certainly, I will say occasionally when we pop our careers and the challenges we face into a script, it does suddenly sound — gosh, does that all sit with me? And I think that is one of the interesting things about leadership — that we so often become bound up in our positional authority. I've felt it myself, gosh, little old me? Earlier in my career, I'm just a junior manager what do I matter? Yet the reality is that the people who report to me — their daily lives, their psychological safety, how their private life unfolds. Am I that demanding boss? Get in here, where is it? How much stress do I create on them? That impact, even on just a handful of human lives, is so consequential that I think, yeah, we do ourselves a disservice if we downplay, shall I say, the consequence of our leadership.

Pamela Wyatt Yeah, that's a really interesting point and one that when I first started working in Manila, that was very obvious to me how different that culture was. And in Australia, yes, we might feel that, but I think it's a bit less obvious. When I started there, my team asked a lot of what I thought were very personal questions about my life. And it's like, this isn't right. Why are they asking this? It's week one. You don't need to know all this about my private life. But I quickly discovered that their leader is part of their family. For all the reasons that you just said, because there is an impact there. So things that happen in my private life will impact my work and my leader needs to be a part of that. So they wanted to know about me as a person immediately and bring me into their family. And I found they shared a lot more than perhaps an Australian team would right from the start about what was important to them and what their kids were doing. And it was quite an adjustment to start with, to take on all this information that I hadn't been offered before.

Robert Winter It is so interesting, the way in which our social conventions and social mores so dramatically affect our leadership approach. And I think certainly in Western societies and certainly a lot of the leadership training I've been in, it tends to bang on a little bit about always think about your communication. Communication doesn't start at your mouth, it starts at someone's ears, walk a mile in their shoes. We've always got the platitudes I think around it, but do we do the doing or do we just do the saying? And I think that it's only when you work with a team, to your, to your example in Manila, where they do want you to kind of get to know their children, maybe not physically in that sense, but at the very least how they interact with their children, what their family life is like, what pressures that brings on them and brings into the workplace. And I think it is so interesting when leaders are in that position of having to literally walk the

Pamela Wyatt Yeah, absolutely. And being invited to lots of kids' birthdays and weddings and even parents' funerals and that again wouldn't necessarily have happened in Australia. But I was part of the family. And that's hard when there's a team of over a hundred. You have to manage that quite closely. But it also gives you an insight into the people and it makes you understand those people so much better and why they act the way they do at work, when you see them in a different light.

Robert Winter So true, so true. And I think that sort of brings me to my first question, which is that your career resists easy categorisation. Certainly I find in corporate life we like boxes, we like people to be in a box. You're the engineer, you're the innovation person, you do sales. But your career I think certainly resists that, which I find particularly fascinating. Retail banking, multilateral development finance, consulting, and now you're transitioning into the delivery side of international development. When you look back at it, is there a coherent logic to it or is it more honestly a series of decisions that made sense at the time?

Pamela Wyatt I think it's probably a combination of both. I think I often say I always got the next job because of the one before. So I learnt something, I met someone, I saw something. I feel like every job I wouldn't have got if I hadn't done the one before. So I think that provides some cohesiveness. I think what runs through them all is a lot of curiousness — is curiousness even a word? But being very curious about things led me to ask questions, led me to different things. And I think change is probably the other thing. I think if you look at them all, there's an element of change and growth happening within the organisation or the team in each of those roles. So that change aspect, I think, is probably the one stream that runs through them all. But yes, they all have been very different. And I think what that's meant is Had I ever been the expert somewhere? Probably not. I've often, as a leader, been leading a team of experts in an area that I don't have the expertise, which has been interesting, looking back.

Robert Winter That is actually fascinating because certainly I think when I look at some societies, they have a high expertise approach to the practice of management. It's quite rife in some Scandinavian countries and certainly in Germany, where the notion is: what is it you do? I'm an architect. You simply become the best possible architect that there is, and then when you're made a manager, you effectively leverage your architectural knowledge. in the management of your team — but the real focus is your expertise. There's a lot of value to that approach, but certainly in countries like Australia and arguably the US as well, what that can occasionally shift to is management becoming a little bit of a side hustle. Our actual job is being a financier or an engineer or a product manager. Yes, I've got this management thing to do, where I approve some leave to go to a kid's birthday or something, but it's almost secondary to what is my real job. And I've often seen that as problematic. And what seems to surface from your career is that what you were doing was building structure. And arguably that is the key role of management and leadership. How do you take a team of hopefully very diverse, very brilliant individuals and then draw them into a cohesive whole? And perhaps that is the structural theme that I think runs through your work and leadership.

Pamela Wyatt Yeah, I think just because you are the best technically at what you do, it doesn't mean you're going to be a great leader. And I think, really self-aware people know that and don't want to move into those leadership roles. I worked with someone just recently who she was an SME and great at what she did and was offered a promotion into a management job and she said, No, I don't want to do that stuff. I enjoy doing what I do. And I think organisations have got to be really cognisant of that. And I think some do it, some don't. I know ADB after I left were doing some organisational structure changes and one of the things they were looking at is this ability to promote people as technical people without putting them into a management role, which I think is really smart and I think more organisations should do that.

Robert Winter I strongly support that, yeah.

Pamela Wyatt So it's a hard one, not everybody wants to be a leader. Some people feel it's the only way to take the next step. So they take the role and they either don't do it well or don't really take it on. They take the title, perhaps, but don't take on the responsibility that comes with it.

Robert Winter So true. A number of people I've mentored over the years, they were direct reports, but we had both a line manager and a separate mentor relationship where I'd very much take off my line management hat and try to advise them on what is actually best for them in their career. Yes, I want to keep you in my team, but I'm not going to stifle your career just because it's convenient for me. And a lot of the conversations we had with them was they'd say to me, Robert, I really don't want your job. I see the headaches of managing people. I just don't want that in my life. But to your point, my problem is, but where do I go next? And the organisations we were working in had no real career development path. This was mostly software engineering. So they were a software engineer, maybe they could get the title senior, but that was basically it. And they were very passionate people, very ambitious people, certainly with cost of living, mortgages going up, rents going up, I need a bit more cash. How do I get that? My option is either manage people or just accept my salary band for the rest of my career.

Pamela Wyatt And I think there are a lot of people who think that you can't manage those technical experts unless you are the best technical expert. So it's coming from both ends. I think it can be a real advantage, and I've used it to my advantage in my career. So I think when you're not the expert, as long as you are curious enough and you're willing to ask the questions and you ask all those questions, you sometimes ask a question that wouldn't otherwise have been asked. Because when you've got a room of technical experts, everybody thinks they know the answer. The answer's obvious. We all know that. So sometimes you need someone to ask that question that nobody else is asking. So I think it can break a cycle or put a little bit of a wedge in and create a distraction to look at things a little bit differently. And I think that's how I've used it in the past. The difficulty is asking the questions, asking the questions, asking the questions. And not everybody loves to be asked a million questions all the time, but I think that's it's really important to do that. And when you are a leader of technical people and you're not the expert — for me, that's how you've got to manage it.

Robert Winter Certainly asking better questions is something very close to my heart. I mean, perhaps special pleading on my part, running a podcast, I spend most of my time asking questions. But there is certainly in the practice of management this issue that when we are so technical, we get so close to the detail, it becomes almost an unconscious sense that but there isn't a better solution. If there was, I would have proposed it. Do you think I just go around proposing bad solutions? No, no, no, no one's suggesting that. We're just asking, have we actually asked all of the questions, or do we simply have a process that we've got so accustomed to following, we just keep following it time after time, client after client, irrespective of maybe a very innocent, perhaps in some people's view a naive even question. Is that the wonderful prompt to find a much more innovative way to a better outcome?

Pamela Wyatt We often talk about leaders as being the person who can remove the roadblocks, and I think that comes into play. Let me give you an example. There was a team of trainers that I had and they had a training room that just from when I arrived, it was obvious it didn't work for anybody — the layout was just all wrong. So I said, Well, let's fix it. Let's sit down, let's brainstorm it. Blank whiteboard, what do we do? So after about an hour I said, stop, stop, stop. We've still got the same layout. Everything's the same. You're moving some chairs around and they said, Well, we can't move that projector because it's on the wall or we can't do this. I said, no, now imagine an empty room and start from the start. And they designed something completely different, but they had that kind of ‘we can't change that, we can't authorise that’ — but I can. So what if you had that blank sheet of paper, what would it look like? And it was a really tough process. They really struggled to do that. So sometimes, as a leader, that's the power you can bring to the table. You're the trainers, you're the ones that work in this room every day. You're the ones that are struggling with these things not working. Tell me what would work, and then that becomes my job.

Robert Winter So true. And I think that is that way in which a leader can open up imagination because people do put these constraints in. I mean, great example, but the projector is on the wall. I can't get a maintenance crew in to change that. Well, imagine if you could, and I'm the one that can. So let's start reimagining the room based on what is possible, not what we think is our socially constructed construct. In other words, it's that sort of normative thing. We've invented that rule. The projector must be on that wall. But we could put the projector on any wall, frankly. And therefore it's not a law of nature. It's just that normative element that we can change. I want to return a little bit to the Asian Development Bank, because I think that's a space that does interest me a lot, particularly because diversity is such a — I term it — vogue term, particularly in Australian management culture. I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I just mean everybody is trying to be far more diverse, they're trying to understand their teams a lot better, they're trying to create more of that family sense, which I'm always a little nervous about because certainly the more Western-centric organisations I've worked for, they usually use the term family generally as a reason to get you continuing to exhibit to exert effort without any actual reward. And it's, but yeah, but we're all one family. Come on. You know, if you're my brother, you turn up and help me move and I would you wouldn't charge me. And it's well, now hang on a second, that's that's slightly distorting it. But I'm very interested in an institution where the culture of the people very much drives more of that family approach. And also where shall we say, diversity becomes a challenge because there is that tendency to step back into one's regions. You know, like tends to flock towards like. And if we both come from a similar district, from a similar village, from a similar culture, we will naturally sort of flock together a little bit, but that almost starts to Put up small silos in teams. And so I'm kind of fascinating. I think there were something like, what, sixty-seven nationalities in one office, which is quite a lot. Did you notice nationality-based cliques forming inside the institution? And is that an irony, or is it simply human nature asserting itself regardless of an institution's mission?

Pamela Wyatt The answer is yes, and I think it's human nature. And I think if you think about ADB in Manila, so all these people have come from somewhere else to Manila. So they're all transitioning to a different country, probably with just their direct family, some of them just on their own. So you have to build friends and family and I think it's human nature to look for, as you said, like people and that can be culturally how you move towards the people that have come from your own country because you have shared experiences, values, you know the same places, you might have lived in the same cities. So I think it's a normal thing to do. It's a really interesting environment to be a part of. And the many times I sat in a meeting and looked around a room of eight or ten people and went, every single person has come from a different country. That means around a work table, they act differently, they expect different things. There's language challenges. I mean, I remember sitting in a meeting once with a Spanish person and the American had to translate what I was saying to him in English. But my accent, which I don't think is terribly Australian, the Spanish person just couldn't pick up what I was saying. The American had to keep repeating things in that American accent that they understood. Quite bizarre. But I think diversity is almost a dirty word now. And diversity — is it a cultural thing? Is it a nationality? Is it just different people? You know, people are diverse, so that's the reality. I think it's hard to work in those environments when some cultures are very forthright, some will sit back and listen and so managing meetings in that way can be really difficult. And it means that everyone round the table has to be aware of that. And be willing to participate in it, and understand that person is very loud and talks and talks, but that's how they are. I'm different. So they have to adapt, but I have to adapt as well. And how do you manage that? Leaders in that environment have to be very cognisant of that. And that's tough.

Robert Winter That is actually quite challenging, that mutual adaptation. because one could argue, well, hang on a second, Robert, if you're a manager of a very diverse team, it's your job to adapt to them. But do we necessarily have the same compulsion in the opposite direction? And not specifically to me as their manager, but more to each other as colleagues. And definitely I found when I have managed very diverse teams, some of the frictions have actually come between two colleagues who just have very, very different approaches to How they talk, how they approach their role, even the order in which they'll choose to prioritise things based on their mental model of the world. And sometimes resolving that is quite hard because in their view it's the other person that needs to understand them. There's not that mutual connection. I think that comes even harder when there is that language barrier. certainly in all the organisations I've worked in, English has been the main language, and so that seems to be the unifier, but Again, I think that maybe gets even harder when you do work through translators because you start to lose the ordinary signals the pace, the tone, the micro-hesitation that makes me think, hang on, I don't think that person's quite bought in. They're using all the supportive language, but just I can feel that hesitancy. But once that runs through a translator, I think most of that gets lost. How did you adapt to that environment?

Pamela Wyatt The first time I sat in a meeting using translators — I'd been given some tips on how to do it, but it was still: who do I look at? The person who's speaking another language — I obviously look at them when they're talking. But then when the translator translates, do I look at the translator or do I look at them? Because they will still nod and react to what the translator is saying. So and you're exactly right. Are they nodding, is that exactly what they said or have they sat back because that's not right, and it's been translated differently? How much of the translation do they understand? Or are they just smiling and nodding as someone's talking? You know, when I was in a meeting and a translator was translating in Russian, I don't speak a word of Russian. So I don't know if what she was saying was exactly what I was saying, but you can't sit stock still, you kind of sit and smile and react. And if you do that at the wrong time, then the message is completely different. You just have to learn to work with it and be very clear, very succinct. Try not to waffle because the translator has to work with that. So I think there's a lot more preparation I would put into a meeting with a translator, perhaps, than I would when I'm speaking with people in English.

Robert Winter And that would come back, I guess, to this thread I feel running through the conversation, which is around structure. That sense of so often I've been a manager for years, I'll just roll into a conversation and I'll just work it out as I'm going. If I'm really blunt, it's a little bit of laziness, it's a bit of time poorness, it's a bit of ‘I've done loads of these meetings before, I'll be fine’. But there's just this subtle erosion of structure. And I particularly see that I think whenever there are recurring meetings. You'll start with a team, brand new team. Great. I've really got to think about this. Good structure. Day one, it's brilliant. But over the weeks and months it just slowly, slowly erodes. But I think the having a having translators in the mix would almost keep that honesty, if I can use that term, to it. Because you do have to have that preparation. You have to have thought ahead and thought about it rather than just rolling in, waffling a little bit, and hopefully we all come to a consensus. We actually need to more actively work towards something.

Pamela Wyatt Yeah, and I think more generally that time at ADB I hope has made me better at that preparation because every meeting was with people from different nationalities and it's like, right, what country am I in today? What government am I dealing with today? How does that need to work? What do we do differently here that I wouldn't do somewhere else? What are the points that I need to make and how do I make them in this country, in this environment, in this culture? So I think that preparing and having a structure for meetings had to happen every time because of those things. It was much harder to go in and wing it when you're not in a natural environment.

Robert Winter What about the institution's formal culture versus its informal culture? They're often quite different things — what the business carves into granite at its entranceway and looks very nice in the brochures versus what people actually do in meetings. Did you find that ADB, the stated identity and values in its self image, ever actually overcame the informal national structures? Did it act as a unifying function, or was that more left to you as a manager to bring the team together and create the cohesion?

Pamela Wyatt You know, I don't think any organisation matches the brochure. You know, there's a you know, the rhetoric around a culture and the reality is always different. And it may be better or worse in different pockets, but it's I don't think it's ever the same, to be honest. ADB is a very formal, hierarchical environment and that's how it was built and that's how it remains in my eyes. Again, since I left I know that there have been some structural changes, so I can't comment on what's happened. But the reality is in the office when I was working there, all those international staff who had technical expertise sat in offices and a lot of the local staff then sat in an open plan environment in very nice, large, big cubicles, but not in offices. So there was a physical, obvious difference right from the start. When I first started there as well, when I went into meeting rooms, a lot of the local staff — there were always chairs around the outside of the room and they would sit back and then the international staff would sit at the table. So it's like, why are they back there? If you're in the meeting, you're in the meeting. So trying to break that slowly with my team initially — we all sit at the table. If you're in the meeting you have a reason to be here. And that's one of my bugbears — the entourage of people who come to meetings. But I think if you're there, sit at the table, learn to have a voice, and that's hard when you're breaking down those informal cultural issues. But yeah, it definitely existed. Does it still exist? I'm not sure, but I did my little piece where I could to help break that down.

Robert Winter That's very interesting. And I've certainly seen that where a person sits is very much a power play in a particular meeting or in a room. I mean, I suppose one has the archetypal sense of the board table, the chair sitting at the head of the table and then authority almost flowing down from that. But I find that very interesting when it's more cultural or social than it is necessarily positional authority. And I think that probably makes one of the challenges — how you address someone, where you sit in the room, to your point about translators earlier, whether you make direct eye contact or not. They're both very different, I would imagine, from what you grew up with in Australia and yet highly consequential. What did that teach you? How did it adapt your methods for management and leadership?

Pamela Wyatt I think a couple of things. I think it's fairly embedded and not everybody feels it. It's just how it is. So some people sitting around the outside of the room would go, that's okay, I'm just here to take notes anyway. Other people would go, I want to sit at the table. So not everybody is affronted by it. So just because I think it's inequitable doesn't mean everybody agrees. So understanding that firstly is important. I think there are other things around the table that I found somewhat amusing when I first got there that people refer to each other by their titles. So if there was a director general in the room — a DG — you would refer to them as DG, not their name. That's bizarre to me. I can't do that. I can't call someone DG. It was just bizarre. So I think you've got to find a balance between your own principles and what's right. But also understand what's going on in that room and why. And you can't just come in and say, right, everybody around the table, because there will be some people then around that table who go, I don't want to be here. I don't want to be sitting at this table. I'm here for a purpose, to take notes, or I'm here just to listen, or I don't want someone to ask me a question. My God, if I'm sitting around the table, somebody might ask me a question and I'm not here for that. So I think you've got to be really conscious of why things are the way they are. before you start to change them because in your mind that would be better. And I think I can take that to lots of different things. It's that seek first to understand — going back many, many years to the seven habits. I actually think that's really sound advice — seek first to understand.

Robert Winter I think that is so interesting because I'm thinking particularly in some of the context you worked in, the decision-makers were overwhelmingly male, but not just that, they were working in explicitly patriarchal societies which have thrown up explicitly patriarchal institutions. Being both foreign, being both a woman, representing a bank, how did you build credibility in that configuration? Did the financial leverage, or your position with the bank, make it easier, or did it actually make it more complicated?

Pamela Wyatt You know, I think the organisation, the title gets you in the door. But I think then credibility goes very much hand in hand with trust to me. So I think it's doing all the things we've talked about. It's going in and listening and understanding and hearing. In international development, people often talk about the coerciveness of being the organisation with the finance. You have to do the reform we want you to do because we hold the money. There's an element of that, and there certainly has been in the past, no doubt about it. But if you go in and start right from the start with: I understand this is your country and your reforms. Now my organisation have rules, as does your country and your government. How do we make them work together? So right from the start, credibility is about trust. So if the government ministers and secretaries I'm dealing with believe and trust that I understand where they're coming from, We're not always going to agree, but we can then have a conversation. So I think credibility comes with trust. They go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other. Again, I'm not always the technical expert. So I would often take that technical expert with me. I'll give you an example, and that patriarchal environment is very, very real. There was one meeting where it was very in my face and used for that purpose. I was in Papua New Guinea, and there were some tough discussions going on about reforms. And there was a bit of political unrest at the same time. There were lots of things in play. I was there with one technical expert and we went into the meeting room and it was a big table and quite a lot of people came in, more than would normally come in and they all sat on the other side of the room. All men. All sat on the other side of the room. It's like something's very odd here today. So we start the meeting and then the secretary of that government department came in sort of ten minutes later and they kind of parted the ways and he came and sat in the middle and it was just a tirade. Luckily I had on the phone I had a couple of colleagues back in Manila, again, all men, so I was the only woman. They used that male PNG persona to pass on a very clear message to me. It's probably the only time I've really felt like the white woman in the room. And it was a little bit confronting. But again, something's really bothered them. It's not me, but there's something horrible going on there. Keep that in your mind. Let them do whatever this is, and we'll sort this out outside of the room. Because there's a lot of politics, there's a lot of hierarchy on that side of the table. I don't think it's all to do with me. Let it happen, sort it out. Which is hard to do because in those moments where you're being accused of all sorts, and you and your organisation are being accused of all sorts of things that you know are not true, you also know that person hasn't been briefed completely accurately. And you can see some people in the background when he's saying things going, no, that's not quite right. We probably shouldn't have told him that because he's using that now. So those environments are interesting. Having said that, I didn't often feel like the only woman in the room despite the fact that I was. Because if you can build those relationships and that trust and that credibility, often that can get past all that. And this will be a controversial thing to say, but I think I choose to not feel like that too. I choose to not think about being the only woman in the room. I'm a person around the table and we've all got a role here and I'm going to play mine.

Robert Winter I think that is very interesting because I mean glass ceilings are certainly a thing, but I think there's a very interesting question. Is the institution, is the society creating the ceiling, or am I actually creating one of my own? When I was at a training program for female managers, the board chair came in and she'd been working in industry for decades. I think she was in her late sixties. She was very much coming up at a time in sort of the seventies, she came up through engineering where frankly seeing strong pornography up on the wall on a man's desk was just a thing in an engineering office. Today you would be mind-blown, but back then nothing was thought about it. And she said, certainly there are still glass ceilings. Certainly we have a huge amount of work to do, but she said it's really essential that you don't create the ceiling yourself. You don't say, well, hang on a second, I'm not getting a promotion because I'm a woman. Assess it. If you are genuinely being discriminated against, absolutely. Let's address that. But if that's actually not happening, your boss might be a woman who has no issue with your sex whatsoever, it's something else. But you've created this construct. You're not seeing yourself very clearly. And I think that's very interesting — the way you are able to separate this particular individual's view of you versus seeing you as the emblem of the institution. And that is often such a challenge. particularly I think when we're in customer service roles, it's a bit more apparent. Somebody calls up, maybe it's Telstra or NRMA, giving it an Australian context, they're angry with the general service they've received from the company, not the service I'm specifically giving them, but I'm the only person they have to talk to. So they want to offload about the institution to me directly. So that's such an important element for people to take away, particularly as the stakes get higher in negotiations, if I'm going to feel embarrassed, if I'm going to feel personally persecuted and I can't step away from that, I'm going to now start to get my judgement clouded when I'm supposed to be speaking and thinking on behalf of the institution.

Pamela Wyatt Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Robert Winter You've obviously worked across some very, very interesting areas of the world. I mean you spent quite a bit of time in Central Asia, which certainly in Australia is an area of the world that's very little talked about. Did you notice meaningful differences between, shall we call it, the authority problem in Central Asia versus the authority problem in the Pacific?

Pamela Wyatt Yes, it's very different. In some of those countries hierarchical is not quite the word — it's more authoritarian. So meetings are very much about who sits where, who speaks, who speaks next. And then it's done through a translator a lot of times. So it was a really different environment to work in. I found it a lot less collaborative as well. In some of those meetings in the Pacific there was a lot of conversation. In some of those countries — sitting in Tajikistan — it's more of a one-way conversation. Here's how we want you to do it is being directed at me. And that's harder when you're not speaking the same language to do through translators to try to create that. So it's different, it's just more challenging. Again, it's that ability to adapt, which I think is one of the key things a leader needs to be able to do. How do you adapt to that? How do you work with that? You absolutely can't do it the same in Tajikistan as you would in Tonga. Different conversations. You have to adapt to that.

Robert Winter And there's also, I think, a version of cross-cultural leadership that is essentially adaptation. You know, it's that notion of read the room, adjust. I need to keep making those micro-corrections as I'm beginning to understand the people I'm working with, understanding the engagements. But there's another that holds that some things should not be adapted to, perhaps on the grounds that accommodating certain power structures, even tactically, begins to normalise them. And it makes negotiation that bit harder because, as they always say when you're asked a very difficult question reject the premise. But it's by accepting the behaviours, by accepting the structural approach, you're in a sense, yeah, accepting it and normalising it. Did you think about that tension at the time, and has your view moved since?

Pamela Wyatt Normalising any bad behaviours is obviously something you don't want to do. But when you're talking about cultural behaviours, they are the normal. So how do you and should you try to change those? You've probably been asked in your career a lot as well — describe your leadership style. I think adaptability for me is a leadership style and for my career has been the most important thing. I'm going into somebody else's environment. I'm going into your country, your government, your way of doing things. I'm the one who should be adapting because that's respectful. So me going in and saying, you shouldn't be doing it like this. We shouldn't be running a meeting like this. We shouldn't be having these kinds of conversations. Unless it's a very principled, value-based issue. I don't think that's my place in these environments.

Robert Winter I do think that's interesting, because if I move up to sort of world-leader level a prime minister goes to meet a president one head of state meeting another. There are often particularly when there are shall we call it systemic disagreements between the countries, there's the assumption that, well if the US president can't say this to the Chinese president or if the British Prime Minister can't say this to the French president — whoever it happens to be — then who else can actually have the discussion? And so that does raise that there is a time and place. And what is the purpose of the meeting? What is the purpose of the overall engagement? Is it to foster good business relations, or are we actually engaging in, to use a grandiose term, the activity of nation building? And that is such an interesting one, because we do worry — if I let that one small thing pass, but then if you start to try and pick up everything, you're just going to end up with a dysfunctional relationship.

Pamela Wyatt That idea of the time and place is really important. So if I think about meeting with government ministers and the kind of conversation and detail I get into with them is very different to what I have with the secretary who reports to them and then the people that work for that person. So at each level there are different nuances. And again, you have to adapt to those. You don't have the same conversation with the people who are doing the work as you do with the minister. A completely different level of conversation. That minister is never going to be into the detail of that process. But the person who's doing it is. So I think in that example with the world leaders, maybe that's not where those conversations happen. It's a level down, or it's technical experts, or different working groups or they're not in front of cameras. So again, culturally sitting around a boardroom sometimes is not the place to have the serious conversations because there's that concept of saving face in some cultures as well. So that having this conversation here is not going to help that trust that I've built, those relationships that I've built. If I have this conversation here with that person sitting at the other end of the table, that's going to impact their relationship and that impacts my relationship. So you have to be really aware of that. And I think that comes back to that preparing and thinking about who's in the room, what conversations to have, how will I structure it, how do I make it succinct and clear is really important. And taking that into your natural environment in coming back to Australia is more difficult, but helps. So it's creating some discipline around that and making sure what I learnt in that other environment I've been able to bring back.

Robert Winter To raise that challenge of measurement in the management space, we do always like to measure things. Are we on budget? Are we on schedule? I think from the work, there's obviously a lot of outputs one could use to measure. For example, policies reformed, frameworks adopted how many officials have been trained and are now functioning in this new language. But impact in many ways is a little bit harder to measure. Over your time, particularly working in the Pacific and even Central Asia, what's your honest assessment of what actually changed and what did not?

Pamela Wyatt I think there's a combination of both. Some things were embedded and changed and some things didn't. And I think that's the same in any organisation. You look at a bank doing technology uplift in Australia. Some change sticks and some doesn't. I think you have to grow sustainable change and not deliver change. And they're two very different things. There has to be an element of delivery, and there are all those measurements you talked about. So certainly at ADB we measured those more immediate things, but also longer term impact. It's hard to sit there at the start of a program and go, in ten years, what will this look like? But if you don't do that from the start, then you don't make the right change in the first three or four years. We're very quick to say, in a project we've got a budget and a time and these other things that we're going to measure along the way. But it's that longer term success factors. So I think a lot of reform fails because we have the wrong measurements and we have the wrong incentives. you know, I've seen projects in Australia where there are the T-shirts and the water bottles and we'll give you this if you log into the system three times in the first month. And then they never log in again, because they work around it. And I've seen the stick and the carrot. There was a system in a Pacific country where they were just getting no leverage. So they were putting the system in and there was a whole workaround happening and they were still using the old system. So when they went to the next ministry, they turned on the new system and immediately turned off the old system. So there's no option. And that caused chaos, because the new system, you know, new systems have glitches. There are technical problems. So that wasn't ideal. But it meant that people scurried to create a manual workaround. So everything was then being done twice, because they had no trust in this new system. You turned my old system off, so I'm going to put it all in spreadsheets and write it down in notebooks, which was disastrous. So I think not thinking through that long-term impact, because they hadn't thought about that. So once that experience had been had in that particular ministry, you've turned my system off, you've given me this new one, and there are technical glitches. So I've now got another way to do it. I'm just going to keep doing it that way because there's nothing that says that I can't. And nobody's measuring that longer term. Nobody's thought that through. So it's a really hard thing to do to think about longer term impact. But if you don't do it at the start, I don't think you're going to do that delivery portion right to create that growth of sustainable change.

Robert Winter I'd very much agree with that because when we come in on change programs, particularly if it's a program where we're seeking to change the entire process or the software that's being used to run a system, there is a very strong temptation to have a little bit of a one-and-done approach. By the fifteenth of March, the new system must be operational. How do we incentivise that? And as you say, people either go to water bottles and T-shirts or they'll go to just shut the old system off. There's nothing they can do. But in either instance, we actually haven't accommodated for how long change takes at that personal workflow level. Even just simple things such as I log into my computer and my shortcut's on the desktop and now my shortcut isn't on the desktop any longer. It now creates cognitive load on me. And the more nervous people become, and the more pressure we apply, be that a positive pressure, you can have two water bottles instead of one, or we're going to have an even stronger sanction on you. All it does is ramp up that tension, rather than think about how we can get to the impact faster rather than just the delivery date quicker? But I think that is always such a hard conversation to have.

Pamela Wyatt It is. I think we talk about change a lot. And I think companies in Australia are better at talking about change and we have change teams and we have change managers and we have change champions. I think we still often bring it in too late. Change is often training, or some really nice PowerPoint packs and again the T-shirts and water bottles. In one small Pacific country we were doing a national technology rollout and I managed to get some funding to do change impact assessments before we even had the business case approved, which was very unusual. And it brought out stuff that was just gold that we wouldn't have known. So in starting to talk about this system around the country, there was resistance. not so much in the main cities but more regional — a lot of resistance. We couldn't quite work out what was going on until we did a really deep dive into the change impact assessment. What we discovered is in the regions, everybody had mobile phones, but people didn't use computers. So we were going to bring in desktop computers and it was mostly women working in these environments, had never used a mouse before, had never typed on a keyboard. So they could work their way around an app, but they'd not used a computer. That's what the resistance was. I don't know how to type, and this mouse thing — I've never used a mouse. We would never have thought of that. It just wouldn't have occurred to us. If we hadn't done that change at the start, we wouldn't have known how to manage that right from the start and provide that kind of training and coaching. We taught them to touch type. We taught them how to use a mouse. Not something you would normally put into a normal technology rollout. But if we hadn't done that in those regions, those notebooks they were using would have continued to be used and they would never have thrown them out. So change from the start, or before you even start — we still don't do that. We talk about it, but most projects don't.

Robert Winter So true, so true. I want to move on, if I may, to the gender task force because this is one of particular interest to me. I think institutions like the notion that they will hold up a mirror to themselves, warts and all, we want to understand, we want to report. But then there are institutions that meaningfully do it, and are aware of what change of the type those reports generate actually means. It does require a particular type of trust, and also it requires a particular type of willingness to be exposed at the end of the day. How did you think about the political risks, and how did you approach that as a challenge?

Pamela Wyatt I think I knew they were there, but I underestimated them. It was a really challenging role. And every time you approach these gender questions, it's political and it's hard. The question of quotas, is it as simple as we're going to have fifty per cent women in these leadership roles? I think the environment answers the question, it's not the same answer all the time. But finding the answer is really hard. In that case I was coming from an institution where there was a very strong male hierarchy. There were some quotas in place that weren't necessarily being met. And it was a sliding scale. So at the more senior levels the percentage of women required was less than at the lower levels. Which to me speaks volumes right from the outset. But it wasn't just my decision to make. I think I approached it by going out and talking to lots and lots of people. I was reporting to two vice-presidents, and they were a bit surprised, I think, initially at my approach because I was speaking to men as well as women and they said, why are you doing that? Because their perspective actually matters too — if the answer or the recommendation we come up with is to change or enforce quotas, that impacts men and how men see it. So talking to all those people, hearing those stories was really powerful for me. Unfortunately, when you put it in a report, people want numbers and facts. And it was really hard. And I don't know that I necessarily succeeded in getting those stories across because it's those stories and those perceptions that actually drive how people feel. The numbers are the numbers. But the perceptions of the numbers, the perception of what's actually happening, it is what's really important, I think. It was a tough one. Would I do it again? Not sure I would.

Robert Winter That is one of the really challenging aspects to dive into, because reform tends to stall at the implementation phase. Gathering information, talking to people, having interviews, hearing from staff feedback, particularly when you get people to open up — I certainly don't want to underplay it, because it's very important work, but arguably it's easy-ish in the sense that I can have a view about what I think is happening in the organisation, and you can do me the courtesy of asking me and writing it down. But then the ability to go: collecting Robert's view at scale, we're seeing a trend. How and when and why are we willing to take the steps to try and reverse that trend?

Pamela Wyatt Look, I think for me the positive was that the timing was right to start having those conversations. I was seconded out of my role to focus on doing just this. That's a positive sign. So people wanted to hear, they wanted to know what was going on. Getting some of the numbers wasn't as easy as it sounds. People say, well, it's easy. How many men have you got? How many women have you got? What levels are they at? It's not that simple. There's a lot of data to retrieve and then try and model and work out and look at trends and look at other companies, all those things. I think coming out of that, what I learned is that organisations don't change because they're criticised. And I think writing a report like that is a criticism. They change because enough people are feeling uncomfortable. And I think the process maybe helped more people feel uncomfortable. And so the change didn't come directly from that final report that I wrote, but it came not long afterwards. And I think it was some of those conversations that had other people who weren't uncomfortable become uncomfortable and created that groundswell. All those gender issues are really hard, and some of the stories I heard were pretty awful. Things like putting in mandates that in every interview process there had to be a woman on every shortlist. I got a call one day from somebody leading a panel, a recruitment panel, saying, We've got this shortlist, but we haven't got a woman on it. Do you know someone we could ask to apply, so we could put them on a shortlist? That's not really how this is supposed to work. You want someone who wants the job and you want to be interviewing someone who you would actually consider employing. So if you haven't got that in the shortlist, you need to go back and look again at the long list, or go out and advertise again. But that's the behaviours that these kinds of things create. So there's no easy answer.

Robert Winter And it is such a challenge when, as we know, the broader societal construct is a key element. I mean, we've particularly seen that in a lot of science and engineering roles. If you don't have a lot of girls in school taking an interest in STEM, to go on to study at university, to then get the qualifications to be in a position to apply for an engineering job — and societal norms are just militating against that. So as a result, we go out to market, 400 applicants, one woman. Obviously much harder to get that person into the interview process than it is if you're finding, well, roughly forty to fifty per cent of applicants are female. Then that — probably a bit harsh to say — simplifies your hiring process a little bit because there are a lot of really strong applicants out there and then it's more a question of bias. Why then aren't you hiring them versus they're simply not applying? And when it is far more we're not seeing enough people come through the system, then as an organisation you can certainly run grad programs, there's a lot of work you can do, but you are to an extent limited. And I also wanted to pick up on the note about how sometimes the numbers change as you get further up the organisation. I think when one's an executive or a board director, it's great to say, yes, not enough people in junior management roles. Let's ensure it's a fifty-fifty divide. But when it's suddenly now the board that is one hundred per cent men, there are no women on the board, well hang on, does that mean I might lose my job? You know, who gets replaced here? And suddenly that number shrinks and it's less of an issue at this level. But it is not — that ability of people to be willing to put in a policy and to take a decision that might potentially negatively affect them. I think that's often where the courage of conviction comes in.

Pamela Wyatt It does. But then it goes the other way where we must have three women at this level, but for the reasons that you just said that there aren't the women coming up, so there isn't the experience and they're not available. So a woman gets put into a very senior position who doesn't necessarily have the right skills, but they wanted a woman, and they perhaps don't do the job at the level people are expecting, and then it's because they're a woman. So it works backwards. Well, we don't want another woman in that role. Look what happened with the last one. It's a really, really complex question. We worked with an organisation in the Pacific, particularly around board roles because there were very, very few women on boards. So we collected a list of women who could potentially be board members in the future. We worked with an Australian university and we created a training program. We started putting women through this. And over time, all of a sudden, there were these women with a different profile that had been properly trained. And slowly we started to see the change. That takes years. That's not a case of, every time a role comes up we need to have a woman in there. You can't make it work. Sometimes, in some of these countries, you have to give them more credibility to be able to do the role and to have the perception around the table that they're an equal around that table.

Robert Winter That is such a critical point. I would probably argue the goal of these programs should be about changing hearts and minds, not just changing numbers. Because in a sense, what is the real problem? You can't get rid of institutional sexism, institutional racism, institutional anything if the people still hold that as a value that they believe to be true. And the critical impact is: have I released my sexism, or have I simply put a woman in the role but I'm constantly looking for her to fail to prove my innate sexism right? And that, I think, is the real challenge. And when I think an organisation is genuinely open minded and would hire but just can't, it's a very, very different problem to could hire but doesn't, because of insert weasel reasons to get around what is an innate problem, where we haven't seen that true interpersonal change.

Pamela Wyatt And yet the problem is, in the annual report, the measurement is a number. It's not that change in hearts and minds. We've delved into a really controversial, complex one now.

Robert Winter We have, but they are the really consequential discussions. Until we have them more often, until we have them more publicly, we can't achieve the change. If we may move into a closing, because you've been very generous with your time this morning. Thank you so much. Lightning round — some quickfire questions, not necessarily quickfire answers. Some guests have chosen a very long-form answer to what was, I hoped, a short question.

Pamela Wyatt Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Robert Winter First up, a leadership capability that development work requires and that most corporate leadership development ignores entirely.

Pamela Wyatt I think it's that adaptability. It's easier to get away without it in an Australian environment with Australians than it is in a development environment, where there are always multiple nationalities and cultures in the room.

Robert Winter The most useful thing about being the outsider in a room.

Pamela Wyatt It almost gives you the permission to ask the dumb questions. To ask the basic questions. And sometimes a basic question is where you need to get back to, to get a different answer.

Robert Winter A piece of advice about cross-cultural leadership that sounds right but is wrong.

Pamela Wyatt I think when I've talked about leadership style before and people saying, Well, this is my style you should stick to your style. You should be true to yourself and just be you. Yes, in terms of your principles and values, but in terms of your behaviours and how you behave in a different cultural environment, I think you should adapt that. You shouldn't just be you. You should be respectful of other cultures. So just being me as an Australian — I shouldn't always be like that in somebody else's culture.

Robert Winter That's such a powerful answer. Pamela Wyatt, on the subject of leadership. Good night, and good luck.

Pamela Wyatt Thank you.

Transcript machine generated, lightly corrected.