Jordan Emery - Chief Executive, Ambulance Tasmania

In the third episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall gets to know Jordan Emery, Chief Executive Ambulance Tasmania. 

In our conversation, Jordan talks about how he has learnt to view leadership through the lens of caring. He discusses building relationships and trust so that he can care deeply and challenge directly. He also talks about how equity and inclusion must follow diversity. 

Two key texts that Jordan refers to in detail are The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson and Radical Candour by Kim Scott. 

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:    Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the Palawa People. I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. My name’s Dorian Broomhall and I'm the Manager of Culture and Wellbeing here at the Department of Health in Lutruwita, Tasmania. In this first series of the podcast, we're getting to know our executives from across the organisation. For this third episode, I spoke with Jordan Emery, the Chief Executive of Ambulance Tasmania. In our conversation, Jordan reflects upon the idea that leaders can hold competing ideas in duality. He talks about how he views leadership through the lens of caring, building relationships and trust, so that he can care deeply and challenge directly.

 We also discussed how equity and inclusion must follow diversity and Jordan also shared some great advice on delegation. There are parts of this episode that might not be for everyone. Please be aware that we briefly discuss suicide. If you'd rather not hear that, you can skip past that part of the discussion and we'll let you know just before it happens. I started my conversation with Jordan with the same question I always do. So let's get into it. The question is, what did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Jordan Emery:         I think it's a really great question, because I was one of those lucky people that always wanted to do so many different jobs. I was never really fixed on one thing. I'm not sure that I can recall right back to kindergarten, but certainly along the way, I thought about being a paramedic. I thought about being a lawyer. I thought about being a doctor. I thought about being a forensic scientist. There were lots of different roles that I was really interested in. In any event, it always seemed to land on something active and largely away from a desk, which is why it's peculiar that I find myself sitting behind a desk now.

Dorian Broomhall:    That is a very interesting place to find yourself now, given so much of your work is going to be behind a desk. Where did you grow up? You’re a New South Wales guy, right?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, I grew up in Sydney and then I started my schooling in Kent, just south of London in England, because my dad took a job over there and then came back to Australia. I was born and raised in Australia and my parents are both Australian, but predominantly grew up in Sydney and then went out to rural New South Wales at Bathurst to study paramedicine at Charles Sturt University. Then my job with New South Wales Ambulance initially has taken me to quite a few different places, and I had a couple of years off and worked over in New York as well. So I've travelled around a little bit.

Dorian Broomhall:    Worn a few different hats along the way.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    So, jumping around ever so slightly, rural New South Wales, what's that like compared to Tasmania?

Jordan Emery:         I think there's a lot of commonalities. I would caveat my rural New South Wales experience with living in a dorm at a university. Fortunately, I don't live in a dorm here in Tasmania, but there's definitely challenges around living in rural and remote areas and I think that rural way of being infused, the paramedic degree program at Charles Sturt University, it made me really think about rural health care and the role paramedics can play in that space.

Dorian Broomhall:    Because that's a role, from my understanding, that's really starting to expand, right?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, I think we're understanding paramedicine in different ways than we've ever imagined before, and for some people that's really uncomfortable. I think it's easy to think that the move into more of that primary health care space — and that's typically amplified in rural areas where other access to health care is challenged — is something to resist, and people often see it as in opposition to providing high acuity care in life threatening emergencies. The reality is society is calling on us to do both, and I think the important part for us is to say, how can we be available for those high acuity critically ill or injured patients, as our traditional role requires of us, and also be more available for the much larger portion of people we care for who present with more low acuity and social care conditions that we can support as well?

Dorian Broomhall:    There's an interesting pattern there around something that I think's really overdone, and this is the dichotomy of thinking. It's like, well, it's this or that. You can't have both, but we'll come back to that as a concept, because I think it permeates a lot of our healthcare, but also society more broadly. It's one or the other and we can't sit with having a combination of both.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. In fact, I think it's one of the most enduring survival tactics of leadership, is being able to hold two competing ideas in duality. A lot of my role is hearing very sensible, pragmatic and intellectual arguments on one side of the ledger and very sensible, pragmatic intellectual arguments on the other side of the ledger, balancing those two ideas in duality and then finding a path forward.

Dorian Broomhall:    In this next section of the conversation, Jordan briefly discusses the theme of suicide. If you'd like, please skip forward two minutes. So you've been a paramedic for what? About 15 years?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, 15 years. Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    Okay. Ups and downs of that career?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, it's been an amazing career, but it definitely has its highs and lows. I think some of the things that I've been exposed to have been an incredible privilege and very painful, but that's the nature of the work. Probably the greatest privilege is the ability to connect with people in incredibly challenging times in their lives. How that lands for them is vastly different. For some, it's after a catastrophic accident or injury, or death of a loved one. For others, they're experiencing what I might objectively consider to be a more mild or minor issue, but for them, it's seismic and to be there to support them in that, I think is a real privilege.

Dorian Broomhall:    Mm. Again, that idea of perspective, right?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    For you, it could be Monday, but for them, it could be the worst or most significant thing that's ever happened.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    Is there any particular stories or events that have really stuck with you that you'd be happy to share, that have really kept coming back to you along the way that have either been incredible learning experiences, incredible triumphs, or possibly things that have gone catastrophically wrong?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. There's definitely plenty of mistakes along the way. I've made countless mistakes, not just as a paramedic, but as a leader too. They have been powerful learning points at every stage of my professional journey, and in many respects, those learning points have infused my life. Well, there's one story that I think shaped my leadership in ways that I might never have imagined until many years later. I was at university right along actually, so I was completing my clinical placement with Charles Sturt University. I was undertaking a placement at the Sydney Ambulance Centre based in Redfern in Sydney City, and we were called to a woman in maybe her 40s or 50s, who had attempted suicide in a park in Leichhardt in Sydney's Inner West.

She'd done so by a number of self-inflicted wounds to her arms and the two paramedics I was working with were quite happy for me to sit in what we call the treating seat in the back of the ambulance and transport her to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. In the course of the trip, I held her hand and to me, candidly, it really didn't mean much. I was trying to be sensitive. She was quite teary in the car. She wasn't saying a lot. We bandaged her forearms. When we got to hospital, we went through the triage process and were about to offload her into one of the treatment areas in the emergency department at Royal Prince Alfred, and she said to me, thanks so much for holding my hand. I haven't felt human connection in such a long time. It was a really profound moment for me.

 I don't profess to have some unique insight into how humans operate, but I have tried to make connection a core value for me in my leadership ever since, whether it was in caring for patients or whether it's been in leading and caring for ambos or corporate staff, patient transport officers, communication centre personnel, doctors, nurses, anyone else. I've really tried to make connection a cornerstone of how I lead.

Dorian Broomhall:    It's really interesting to hear you link that to that experience. Something that, from the outside looking in, I've observed of you is that, yeah, you absolutely do do connection really well, whether it's around a table with executives – as I mentioned to you just the other day, I really enjoy the energy that you bring to that table that sometimes can be very serious, and rightly so, a serious place, but it's clear that you've created those relationships there. I've also noticed that, innocuously on things like LinkedIn, you're extremely well connected with people from right across the world, because you see different people that pop up and you’re mentioned on this academic’s paper here, or this practitioner in Canada or whatever it might be. It's actually easy to see that trail, if you like, that's built over time.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. Well, I think connection is pretty primal for human beings. I've always been enriched by sharing experiences and learnings with other people and I've always appreciated people who've extended that connection to me. So, I think, not just in the story of the care we provided to this patient back in 2007, but in every aspect of your life, connecting with people makes our world a richer place.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah. Absolutely agreed. In a relatively short career for someone who now sits behind the desk, if you like, that you sit behind, you've managed to fit a fair amount in. When did you go, I think that leadership is something that appeals to me? Because for many who work in clinical professions, they acknowledge that that's a pathway, but many choose not to do it, because that's not what they got into it for.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. It's a really good question. I think, along the way, I always valued my relationships with people, and as I touched on earlier, I loved connecting with people. I'm a naturally pretty extroverted guy. I grew up in a family where I'm one of five kids. It was busy and chaotic and there was a lot of life and energy around my relationships with my siblings and family, so it's not super surprising to me that those things have been nourishing for me over the course of my life.

I think, as a clinician, I felt a deep sense of purpose and value in providing that one-on-one interaction with patients as you attend an incident and provide treatment and care, and transport in some cases, but more and more I felt there was opportunities to do good and contribute positively on a broader scale by caring for my peers around me, and my connection and relationships with my peers just fuelled these opportunities to take a leadership role and care on a larger scale. I think, Dorian, to be candid, it's just been the case that the opportunity to provide more care and support to more people has just grown over time.

Dorian Broomhall:    It's a really lovely way to conceptualise it. I think that those that are interested in leadership, we talk about lots of different elements of it and go, ah, I need to learn how to do this, I need to learn how to do that, but linking it back to simply connecting and supporting others is really lovely.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, that's really how I've come to be where I am. I think it would be disingenuous to say I never wanted to pursue leadership, because that's not true either. I guess my conception of leadership has changed over time and I went through the natural process of being a paramedic and then becoming an intensive care paramedic, and there was this clinical leadership piece in that, that was important to me, but along the way, I’ve felt deeply at home in caring for others and I think that is a very natural fit with people leadership, yeah, and the calling of people leadership. Really, I might be the chief executive, but the reality is I'm a people leader first and foremost, whether that's caring for Tasmanians by ensuring we deliver a great service or caring for our people, so that they can deliver that great service.

Dorian Broomhall:    There's a lot of different areas that I want to go there, but to tie one up fairly simply, I suppose, paramedicine is a profession, I suppose, that has fairly defined hierarchy, perhaps more so than other professions.

Jordan Emery:         Mm. Mm. 

Dorian Broomhall:    If you were to give advice to yourself from 15 years ago, or possibly someone who's junior in this organisation now that has ambitions and aspirations to provide that care and support to their peers over time, what might you say about just approaching that hierarchy and how you might be able to influence it?

Jordan Emery:         It's a fascinating question. I have a strong aversion to the hierarchy that accompanies ambulance services, to be honest. The notion of marks of rank as I sit here in ranked epaulettes, I think it's very unhelpful and I think that in the totality of the organisation, we'd be better off without it. I think there's another theme that's more important when talking about what hierarchy does to organisations, and that's this common dichotomy — to go back to our earlier discussion —about whether you can be warm and caring and still be firm and effective, and in ambulance — at least as I have perceived it — there has been a strong emphasis on chain of command, taking command of an incident, being in charge, controlling the decision making.

It's much more centred around this idea of this hierarchal, rank-based leadership structure. So in some respects, this more gentle, caring, human-centred side was often described almost as a weakness or something to shy away from, or to hand out only very sparingly. What we really have learnt is that's just rubbish. In actual fact, it's not new or contemporary leadership thinking to understand that those two competing ideas, the duality of leadership, is actually what creates the best people and creates the most potential for organisations.

So if you look at some of the teachings of Valerius Maximus actually in ancient Rome, he talks about the standards devotion matrix, which is about having a deep devotion to our people, caring deeply for them, nurturing them, nourishing them and having high standards as well. We know that when we commit to high standards and practise deep devotion, that's when we achieve what Maximus called justice, and that's the idea that our people achieve their fullest potential.

Dorian Broomhall:    We don't necessarily always talk about the context that we might be in before we start talking about what we're going to do about it. In some contexts, being firm and decisive and taking control is absolutely appropriate.

Jordan Emery:         Mm.

Dorian Broomhall:    When you're attending a major incident, having a bit of a consultative discussion about what your first step’s going to be might not be enormously helpful. That doesn't mean that that's how we need to operate all of the time, and when we're considering how we're going to grow and develop our people, you're right. I think you need to have that duality of going, well, what context am I in and how is the context going to inform the choice that I might make next?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. I think the reality is that when we talk about command and control structures, or almost a way of incident management, of approaching incident management, it's okay in the small number of circumstances where there is value in having that level of structure and rigidity. A major incident might be an example of that, but the reality is, is that far more often, we're operating in a complex, interdependent healthcare system and we have all of this entrepreneurial talent in our people that is yearning to be tapped into.

So, to create a system that says, be quiet, keep your ideas to yourself, the decision making happens up here, is absurd, and I might say the reason I say, it's okay, as opposed to good, is because I'm not even sure that in the major incident setting, those values really ring true the way we imagined them to in the 50s through to the 80s. In fact, during the Trump presidency, one of his secretaries of defence was George Mattis, General George Mattis, and his nickname was Mad Dog Mattis. A revered leader, who'd had a very accomplished military career in a lot of different combat settings, and Mattis had essentially done away with the term command and control and talked about command and compassion.

So I think sometimes, even this idea that command and control is necessary ignores the value all of our people can play, even in very volatile circumstances, and perhaps more importantly, places an enormous pressure on the leader to have all the answers.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah, I think that's a wonderful point and a great way of putting it, and I do think that we're slowly getting away from that single leader mentality. It's still baked in to many of our organisations that, ah, well, the person at the top will ultimately make the decision. Well, ultimately, they hold the risk for the decision, sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to make a decision in isolation.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    That idea of having multiple people and multiple perspectives, I think is absolutely essential. Now we’re, as an organisation, going through a process of perhaps a little bit of introspection and going, are we being as compassionate and caring for our people as we possibly can be? I think it's fair to say that over the last however many years, perhaps we've not done the most for our people that we could, and I'm really glad that we're in an area that that's really starting to change and that focus is really starting to change. A piece of work that we're particularly doing around that is finally implementing some values for our organisation that we can all put up on the wall and go, yeah, that works for me.

Under that acronym of care — I think, as you've talked about care so much today, it works so well in the healthcare setting — I want to talk specifically around the duality that you've just mentioned there of compassion and excellence.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    Of course, all values will interrelate and however you want to frame it up, if you like, but I really liked that idea that you talked about. Well, striving for something to be brilliant, you can do that whilst also holding compassion.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. Maybe, if you'll indulge me, I'll talk a bit more about Valerius Maximus’s work. Essentially, on the Y-axis, you have standards and on the X-axis you have devotion. If you have low standards and low devotion in that bottom quadrant, you get neglect. You have no commitment to doing good work or maintaining high standards. You have no commitment to your people, or we have no commitment to each other, if we're talking about an organisation and everyone suffers as a consequence of that. The service we provide, our relationships with one another, the care we provide to patients.

If the emphasis is on very high standards and low devotion, Maximus described that quadrant as severity. This idea that the relationships are severe. The manager calls all the shots. People don't dare challenge the status quo. Innovation dies and people are afraid, so they don't do their best work. If you have deep devotion, but low standards, Maximus described that quadrant as fidelity. There’s close relationships where we overlook the right thing to do, we overlook standards because of our connection with one another, our personal relationship. All of us have been in this space and, in fact in reality, all of us have been in all of the four quadrants at various times, but that's a real risky space.

As I talked about earlier, if we have deep devotion and high standards, that's where justice happens. That's where people achieve their fullest potential. So the question really is, as a leader, where do you want your people to be? Because to be in the justice quadrant is not just about achieving organisational aspirations. It's not about achieving KPIs. It's not about ticking off the list off the strategic plan. It's not about just providing the best care to our patients. It is all of those things and helping our people achieve their truest potential. Achieve what they've set out to achieve, stretch, grow, learn, develop, maybe leave, maybe stay, maybe move into more senior roles, maybe move into more senior clinical roles, whatever it might be.

The quadrant of justice is where the organisation thrives as much as our people who make the organisation thrive.

Dorian Broomhall:    There's a lot in that, a lot in that. As advice to leaders and managers who are looking at ways that they can implement these values, and specifically, again, around that compassion and excellence, how do you do it? How do you hold that? Where you go, I care about you and I'm compassionate for you and I'm going to do all those things that you describe, and I've got standards that say that we need to be up here, because actually, we are going to be an excellent organisation.

Jordan Emery:         It's a learning I'm on all the time. I've not achieved that in any absolute sense. It's just incremental progress towards the quadrant of justice, right? But there are two very important learnings that I've had in this space. One is the work of Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School, who is really the world's preeminent leader on psychological safety, and just to be really clear, psychological safety is different to psychosocial safety and hazards as we might understand it through a work health and safety lens. Clearly, that latter is extremely important, but psychological safety is a team dynamic and it's the ability for members in a team to take interpersonal risks within that team without fear of essentially being shamed.

So that might be about admitting to a mistake. It might be about challenging the status quo. It might be about proposing a new idea. Our capacity within teams to do that depends on the extent to which we feel we can do that without being humiliated or shamed by our peers. So I think building a culture of psychological safety is critically important, if we really want to create a space where compassion and excellence can thrive. I should say, it's not just what I think, it's what the evidence shows time and time again, that the single biggest contributor to team effectiveness is psychological safety or the extent to which people feel psychologically safe to take an interpersonal risk without being shamed.

There are lots of different ways we can do that as leaders, but a good starting point is to model fallibility as a leader, to talk about your own mistakes, to create space for feedback, regular feedback, to balance positive feedback significantly more so than constructive or negative feedback, and to really create a space where people connect on a personal level. They are ways we can create psychological safety. The second big learning is some amazing work done by Kim Scott, who wrote the book Radical Candour, and which is sitting on my desk right here. It's not a sham prop.

Kim Scott talks about this idea of caring deeply and challenging directly, and in fact, there are a lot of analogies between the quadrants I described earlier by Maximus, who have been picked up by Francis Frei and Ann Morriss in their leadership book, Unleashed, and Kim Scott’s work on Radical Candour. If we can create a culture where we care deeply as a starting point, but challenge directly, that's how you can create a culture that balances compassion and excellence, so that people achieve their fullest potential. It's an amazing book, not just in our workplace relationships. It has a strong business or professional leadership orientation in terms of the way it's written, but I've taken learnings from Radical Candour and infused them into my relationship with my parents and siblings, my family.

There is so much to be said about starting from a place of caring deeply about someone, so much so that you're prepared to challenge directly, and that is in fact what Scott calls compassionate candour.

Dorian Broomhall:    I think one of the downsides of implementing values in an organisation is there's an implication that somehow people need to change their behaviour, and that's all of a sudden going to make everything better, because it's the people that are the problem, and once we give them different values, they'll operate differently. That's a slightly cynical and possibly slightly accurate way of thinking about it.

Jordan Emery:         Mm. Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    How can we think about implementing values — whatever they might be — but obviously, we've got the ones that we're working with, and actually use those specifically to help strive towards this output of psychological safety.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. It's a really, really great question, because I think one of the risks, that organisations create values. They go to a branding agency. They get some lovely branding done around what the values look like. They put them on posters in all the meeting rooms and offices and it's job done. We've got new values and everyone lives by these now. All the evidence shows that that's really not the case and nothing really changes. I think in all leadership roles, you're balancing this difficult reality, which is that our espoused theory, where we want to be, where we're trying to be, is — or can be — in a mismatch with our theory and practice.

So when we're talking about that espoused theory and theory in practice mismatch in the context of values, we might espouse these values deeply, we might believe at face value that they are really important things to have, but if they don't translate into our everyday actions, into our theory and practice, really, the experiences and cultures of organisations don't fundamentally change. So the million dollar question, so to speak, is how we embed those values into everyday practice, and I think there's a lot of procedural answers I could provide there.

We could say that, alongside having them prominently displayed in every organisation, they should underpin recruitment questions in every selection process. They should appear in statements of duties upfront as core tenants of every single role in every organisation, and they should inform employee reward and recognition programs, so that people understand that recognition, credit and reward is given to people who meet and live and breathe these values. They are some of the practical things, but I think at the core of it all, we, as individual members of an entire organisation, have to look deep into ourselves and ask ourselves, are these codes that we want to live by? If we live by them, what might be the opportunity for the organisation?

So that's a bit nebulous and a bit unclear, but I think what's really important is our own deep introspection about living the values of the organisations in which we work, alongside the practical application of those values in day to day activities that organisations undertake, which after all, are just collections of people in a structured system.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah. I think, again, there's a lot there and we've got accountability and respect, right? But I don't think we should spend too much time talking about those, because they should just be the done thing.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    Compassion and excellence, they might be something that we need to find ways to strive for aspirationally, like you say, and that might be okay too.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. I think that one of the risks around values is that they're often primal traits and so we just assume that by calling them out, everyone aligns with them, connects with them and executes them, because they're the organisation's values. We've said respect’s important. Who's going to question whether respects important? Let's crack on and be respectful. The reality is what that actually looks like is very different for different people and I have had an enormous amount of learning around this space.

In fact, I think one of my biggest leadership learnings has been that in order to hold people accountable, you must first build a relationship with them, that you must build trust and connection and empathy, and that those things are really important. Once you’ve built those things, you do that first and then you can start working with them on being accountable. Now that sounds all a bit algorithmic, but the reality is most of the evidence shows that that's completely wrong. In fact, the building of trust and empathy must exist alongside holding people accountable. In fact, part of holding people accountable is an embedding of trust and accountability and honesty and openness.

So it was a big learning for me, who really used to prioritise and still has a natural tendency to prioritise connection and relationship and then come to the accountability piece as a second order of business, for want of a better term, but we know, both from the leadership literature, and I know from my own leadership relationships with people, that the two of those things go together. I just share that anecdote, because I think it tells a story of where we think the idea of accountability is naturally and consistently understood across teams, and it's not. It hasn't been naturally and consistently understood by myself in my own leadership journey, so it's impossible to imagine, or largely impossible to imagine, that it could be consistently understood and applied across whole organisations of thousands of different people.

Dorian Broomhall:    If you're considering a performance management conversation, a conversation that someone might perceive to be challenging, how are you taking a curious approach to that?

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, it's good question. I come back to that idea of caring deeply, challenging directly. Part of caring deeply, I think, means creating space to listen and understand, because what we know about performance issues are that they're largely underpinned by a range of other factors. Personal factors, workplace dynamics, knowledge and understanding about roles, responsibilities, and because human beings are complex and because performance issues are underpinned by many other things, it is a foolish mistake as a leader and manager to think that you know all of those things at the outset of the discussion.

So to hold space, stay curious and lean in does not require you to trade off the high standards piece that we talked about earlier. In fact, it might not fundamentally change the need to put a structured scaffolding around how someone shows up at work. It might not change the fact that the performance doesn't meet the required standard, but if nothing else, you'll be making decisions, more informed, more holistically informed, about your person that you're leading and then can develop meaningful interventions, strategies, approaches to support improved performance, but you’ve got to start with curiosity. You've got to hold space before you make that determination.

Otherwise, you risk moving in, deciding what needs to happen to improve the performance and failing in six months’ time, which is okay too, but depends about how quickly you want to get where you're trying to go.

Dorian Broomhall:    I think something that I've certainly reflected on and we'll probably talk about forever, if we ask questions rather than providing responses as our default, we might have a very different experience, especially if you're approaching one of these situations like you're talking about, start with a question rather than a description.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah. That's such a huge part of the coaching leader, isn't it? Michael Bungay Stanier, who writes The Advice Trap, and talks about the huge challenge that leaders have, particularly in that historical context of the leader has all the answers, is that you go straight into that advice-giving. You should do this. You should do that. Instead of asking questions, holding space, staying curious, asking questions, and then helping your leaders, your people come up with a plan of action that they ultimately own and execute.

Dorian Broomhall:    Changing gears, we've been working very closely with our friends in the policy and people development team around diversity, equity and inclusion strategy framework policy. These terms are a little bit interchangeable in our department, but by and large our diversity is actually okay. We reasonably reflect the community and that’s just something that we should continue to do and that's fine, but I think that often we focus on diversity and getting diversity, because it's easy to track, and then equity, inclusion and possibly belonging fall off. What do you think about ways that we can better think about equity, inclusion and possibly belonging once you've got that starting point of diversity?

Jordan Emery:         To come back to your point about, are we sufficiently diverse to represent the people we serve, i.e. the people of Tasmania? Yeah, I think it's absolutely – as a starting point, it's critical that our health services represent the communities they serve, because people in our community need to see themselves in the people providing care, because that's about the connection and relationship that underpins healthcare that is truly people-centred or patient-centred.

Importantly, another part of that is the equity inclusion and belonging piece, because it's one thing to have diverse representation across the totality of the workforce, it's another thing all together to ensure that diverse people are equitably represented in different parts of the workforce. It's something that we have seen here at Ambulance Tasmania, is very few women in senior leadership roles as one example. We do get a bit caught up in this idea of merit, merit, merit. It ignores the structural starting point. The structural starting point is that systems awards processes have been designed predominantly with the man in mind, and that's okay, it's just it is what it is, but to ignore that and to pretend that the way forward is merit and merit alone is, I think, a little ill-considered.

There is this beautiful quote that I always share with graduates when they start and it's mostly a discussion around the equal treatment of women in ambulance services. It's a quote by Amanda Vanstone, who was a minister in the Howard Government, and she says – well, she says something along the lines of — I should be careful — we know we will have achieved gender equality when an incompetent woman can get a job the same way an incompetent man can. That's important, because we sometimes imagine that the place we're at now is all based on merit and there are no structural barriers to success in this modern age, and to prosecute that argument, I think, is almost nonsensical.

The reality is there are still a lot of things working against women achieving their fullest potential in the workplace, just as there are still a lot of things affecting First Nations Australians achieving their fullest potential in the workplace. In the same way that there are for people of older age, of people who identify as LGBTQI, of people from diverse multicultural backgrounds. It's not something we need to be ashamed of necessarily. I'm disinclined to get into the space of being critical, but I do think that we should seize the opportunity. We should be curious. What are the things holding back the equal representation and inclusion and belonging of those people and how can we break those things down, so that as much as possible that the opportunity is equal for everyone within the organisation?

I should say it clearly happens differently for different people. Here I am, 35 years old, gay, from New South Wales, come in to Tassie, been afforded this incredible, incredible privilege to lead this organisation. I couldn't, in good conscience I don't think, say that my sexuality has had any impact on my career, but that's not the same for everyone. That's not the same for everyone, whether they're gay, whether they're Aboriginal, whether they're first generation Australian, whatever it might be, the experience is not the same, and so we need to work hard and fast to understand what are the things holding people back. If one of those elements are part of the barrier, we should be relentless at breaking that down.

Dorian Broomhall:    I think it's a really nice way of putting it, again, noting that so many areas that sit under the banner of diversity, we just group them all together.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    Actually, there's probably a bit more to it.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    I know within our organisation, disability and people that live with disability is the area that we need to do much better.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    That, in the frame of ambulance, is quite difficult, because I think people think about disability as being physical first and foremost, which is nonsense and something that we need to change. But of course, it's very difficult to be a paramedic if you've got some physical disability, simply because of the nature of the work. That's okay. I think it's okay that we can sit with that.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    That's not to say that there aren't a whole range of other types of disability that people might live with that we can actually recognise a lot better and can make adjustments for.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah, absolutely. It's easy to spend a great deal of time talking about all the edge cases where, well, this person who might have a profound physical disability can't be a paramedic and that's why we can't be a more inclusive workplace. That's mostly bullshit. The reality is, yes, there are always going to be challenging carve-outs for small subsets of our people, but we should not be letting that get in the way of progress. We should not be so fixated on a perfect outcome that we're not prepared to make any progress in the direction of good or better.

Dorian Broomhall:    You were not named, but used as an example in a workshop recently about a particular thing that you do when it comes to delegating, but it's something along the idea of when you delegate a piece of work to someone in your team or wherever that might be, and you note that your ability to support that person with that specific task might be limited (a) because of your time, or (b) your expertise. 

Jordan Emery:         Mm.

Dorian Broomhall:    So through delegating, you will also connect them with someone else, who might be somewhere else in the organisation or even external, that might be able to support them with that task.

Jordan Emery:         Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    Is that something that I've entirely made up? Or does that sound familiar to you?

Jordan Emery:         It sounds broadly familiar to me. It might happen more naturally. I don't know that I have always sought to do that really consciously. I'll share with you though, it's the delegation piece more broadly and the willingness to do that, perhaps has been something that's required wrangling for me, because of ego really. All human beings have an ego, but for me as a leader, there were many times — and there probably are still times — where that ego can get in the way of making the right decision, and in the same way that I'm outwardly curious in my interactions with others, I try to be inwardly curious about my approaches to decisions and other choices and approaches I take, and I think previously I held on to tasks, I might’ve been reluctant to delegate them.

I felt if I didn't know, that I would hold on to the task and keep it for myself and it was part of that wanting to look like you had it all in hand. You didn't get anything wrong. You had all the answers as the leader, which really is this enormous ego hovering around you. In more recent years, probably in the last five or so years, I've really learned that being a great leader is about empowering other people around you, and delegating tasks to them gives them space to grow and thrive, and connecting them to other supports sets them up for success. Because a common phenomenon that I and other leaders can do is delegate a task, see it not go exactly to plan and then go, see, I should’ve just done it myself, and in future, I'll just do this myself. It's easier if I just get it done myself.

I still battle with that question at times, which is not a criticism of our team. It's just one of those natural inclinations when the ego is front and centre. So, by delegating tasks to people and then connecting them with support to succeed in that task, you challenge your own thinking about what I just described and also set the people up for success that you're leading.

Dorian Broomhall:    There was a group project from our Aspire Leadership Development Program cohort that just went through, that looked at clinical versus administrative leadership, and you're a clinician and you've got the senior leadership position in this organisation. That position isn't available, as best I understand, to anybody who isn't a paramedic.

Jordan Emery:         The really great clinician moves into the clinical leadership role. The really great clinical leader moves into the managerial role, and then higher and higher or whatever the structure of the organisation might be, and the things that really position them for success back here as the clinical leader are different to the things that position people for success here. That’s existed in a construct or context of, the leader’s got to know everything, got to have all the answers, but actually, what we know is that if we shift our thinking on that, if we consider leadership more through the eyes of a coach or an orchestral conductor, you actually have the potential to achieve more things and to harness the entrepreneurial talent of the people in your team.

I've got 1000 people in Ambulance Tasmania. Volunteers, paramedics, nurses, doctors, communication centre staff, corporate staff, patient transport officers doing really important work, and they're super talented, capable people. So to pretend that all of the decision making potential and all of the innovation exists in five or six members of an executive team is madness.

Dorian Broomhall:    It has been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Jordan Emery:         My pleasure. It's been great to chat.

Dorian Broomhall:    Thanks to Jordan Emery, the Chief Executive Of Ambulance Tasmania, for taking time to speak with us and to you for listening. I hope it has given you lots to think about and how you can apply that to your own work. Throughout our conversation, Jordan mentions quite a few resources that you might find useful if you are a leader or a manager, or aspiring to be. Two key texts that we do refer to in detail are The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson, a deep dive into psychological safety, and Radical Candour by Kim Scott. We highly recommend checking out both of these texts and we've provided links to them in the show notes.

If this episode raised issues for you, and you need support, please go to beyondblue.org, or for free 24-hour counselling in Australia, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. Join me again for our next episode, when I speak with Fiona Lieutier, the Chief Executive of Hospitals North.