Fiona Lieutier - Chief Executive, Hospitals North

In this episode, Dorian Broomhall gets to know Fiona Lieutier, Chief Executive Hospitals North in a conversation recorded when she was only a few weeks into her role.

Fiona tells us about her background with Tasmania Police, and how that difference in perspective has shaped her leadership. She also talks about how she balances the projection of calmness and vulnerability as a leader. 

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 for the Department of Health in Iutruwita, Tasmania.  In this first series of the podcast we’re getting to know executives from across our organisation.  

For this episode, I speak with Fiona Lieutier, Chief Executive of Hospitals North.  In our conversation Fiona tells us about her background with Tasmania Police and how her difference in perspective has shaped her leadership.  She discusses the importance of balancing the projection of calm and vulnerability as a leader and she suggests how we can recognise those who live our care values.  We start every chat with the same question.  So, let’s get into it.  The question is what did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Fiona Lieutier:          In kindergarten; I think I wanted to be an Amazon eagle.  

Dorian Broomhall:    That’s oddly specific.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah.  I still recall wanting to be an Amazon eagle, a big bird.  

Dorian Broomhall:    Do you think there’s some sort of metaphor in that or you just particularly enjoy the idea of freedom?

Fiona Lieutier:          No.  I remember that there was a dance we had to do in kindergarten.  It was a performance and I made these eagle wings and had feathers plastered on to it.  Our family and friends came and watched.  I can’t remember the exact music, but it was South American Amazon type music and I wanted to be an eagle in real life.

Dorian Broomhall:    That’s amazing.

Fiona Lieutier:          At four.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah, of course.  I was going to say, how’s that worked out?

Fiona Lieutier:          Not very well.  That was one ambition that went by the wayside very, very quickly.

Dorian Broomhall:    Were you in Tasmania at this time?

Fiona Lieutier:          I was.

Dorian Broomhall:    Are you a Tassie girl born and bred?

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, Sandy Bay Infants’ School.

Dorian Broomhall:    What other ambitions or dreams came up for you?

Fiona Lieutier:          There were a few on the way through school.  A lot of my classmates went off to do nursing and teaching and medicine.  I decided I wanted to be a police officer, which was quite unusual for the particular school I was at and that particular era in time.  My parents weren’t that particularly comfortable with it.  They wanted me to do law and I suppose this was my way of doing law, but a different way.

Dorian Broomhall:    Fascinating.  So straight out of school you went into policing.

Fiona Lieutier:          Straight from school I went to policing.  Then to keep parents happy I then enrolled in a law degree and never finished it, but got a couple of years through it and decided that I was doing it for the wrong reasons.

Dorian Broomhall:    So you’ve then stayed with policing for a very long time, right?

Fiona Lieutier:          I have.  I’ve had 37 years in policing; been in pretty much most areas of policing, uniform, detectives, intelligence, rural and country policing.  Then I took a leap of faith during COVID and went to the Department of Communities on secondment and then came to the Department of Health on secondment and here I am.

Dorian Broomhall:    Fascinating, and here you are as the Chief Executive of Tasmania’s second largest hospital.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, of Hospitals North, which is actually the LGH plus eight rural hospitals.  

Dorian Broomhall:    Commissioner Donna Adams is lauded, rightly so, for the career that she’s had and the way that she sort of trailblazed that pathway for females in their career, right?  I imagine you must be somewhat contemporaries with Donna?

Fiona Lieutier:          Yes.  We started around about the same time I think.  There’s about a year or two between us and so the challenges we had early in our career are very similar and we tell similar stories of having to kick our court shoes off and run through the mall in our stockinged feet because we weren’t allowed to wear lace up shoes.  We didn’t have trousers, we didn’t have shirts with pockets, so we were provided handbags and you’d have to leave your handbag – this was going back 30, close to 40 years ago, so we didn’t even have pistol holders on our uniforms, so our pistols would be in our handbags.  Sometimes you had to leave your handbag behind while you were dealing with people.  You wouldn’t dream of that happening now.

Dorian Broomhall:    No.  Fascinating.  Yeah, in that time the change has just been enormous, right?

Fiona Lieutier:          Oh, absolutely.  My son’s partner’s a police officer and her career at the moment is so different to when I started.

Dorian Broomhall:    Do you think mostly for the better?

Fiona Lieutier:          Absolutely, yes, definitely.  We had fun times but there were challenges as well.  

Dorian Broomhall:    It’s interesting because there’s so – I think there’s so much talk in this day and age around diversity, equity, inclusion, culture and the importance of the workplace culture that you might be in, and all of that was important 30, 40 years ago as well.  It’s just that we didn’t talk about it, right?

Fiona Lieutier:          No.  So about 30 years ago there would’ve been about 900 police officers.  Now there’s significantly more, but the amount of women would have been, you know, 20 or 30 of the 900 were women, whereas now it’s very close to 50 per cent.  All of a sudden, with the increasing number of women, you get much better facilities, I think the community’s treated a lot differently too, because you’re dealing with 50 per cent of the community are women. 

Dorian Broomhall:    I’m really curious now that you’ve come into health, which is a female dominated department.  We are predominantly female; mid-seventy per cent of our workforce right across the board is representative in  female and at a leadership level – I don’t know the stats off the top of my head, but I believe we’re pretty close to keeping that half half, which is a little unusual even in this day and age, to have that female representation.  Did you notice anything different coming in to health from that perspective?

Fiona Lieutier:          I did and I think it’s a very positive workplace, very supportive.  I don’t know if that’s just the change in different – working with different people in health or whether it is partly to do with the larger number of women, but certainly a very supportive workplace, especially at the senior leadership levels.  

Dorian Broomhall:    You spent some time with communities during COVID.  What sort of made you go, yeah, I’m going to jump in and lead public health for a period of time, which is just immediately post COVID, not everybody’s idea of a fun time?

Fiona Lieutier:          Yes.  In the start of 2020 I was actually leading the Tasmanian Government Radio Network project for the Department of Police and Emergency Management, so a completely different role.  I was asked to go across to communities and lead the hotel quarantine program and then from there I was asked to come to health as an incident controller, to look at standing down the operation – the emergency operation centres.  

Then an opportunity came up in public health when the substantive Chief Executive took an opportunity in another agency and I was approached to see if I was interested and I thought, well, I’m in this position of taking opportunities at the moment, so I thought, well, yes, let’s try something different and see if I can make a difference to public health, because I had actually had a fair bit to do with them during COVID, particularly at the Department of Communities and then also as incident controller.  So I knew some of the challenges that were being faced by the staff working in public health, but also the department, so I thought that I could actually make a big difference there.  So that was why I was quite excited to take that opportunity.  

Dorian Broomhall:    I think it’s great when people who have got different backgrounds come into those leadership roles, where being an expert in the content isn’t always what’s important, and having that varied and more broad perspective can be quite useful.  How’ve you found that?

Fiona Lieutier:          I have got outstanding experts around me, so I’m so fortunate in that, that I’ve got really excellent clinical leads, nursing leads, business managers that can provide the appropriate expert advice to me.  My job’s to provide the leadership across the organisation to make sure that we’re operating the best that we can, serving the community the best that we can, being efficient in delivering our services.  Patients and their families are at the centre of everything.  

My role’s to make the whole system operate for everybody and relying on the experts to give me the advice on how best to approach things, or the particular clinical advice that needs to be taken into consideration in making those decisions.  I think coming from the outside, the word that I’ve used the most since I’ve been here is why.  Why do we do things?  

Sometimes you ask why so many times that nobody can actually answer why we’re still doing something the way we do it.  So I think that’s probably been something that’s been beneficial, is to unpack things and peel away the layers as to why we actually do things the way we do and then look to see if there’s better ways of doing them.  Sometimes there’s not but you don’t know unless you actually really look through it.  

Dorian Broomhall:    That idea of taking a curious frame to try and find out a little bit more, rather than just coming in and saying, no, we’re going to do it like this, right out, it sounds like that’s kind of what you’ve done?

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, and part of that’s me trying to learn the business as well, so understanding the business so that I can make the right decisions, but it’s also a beneficial way of people to think of it differently too and think, well, is this the best way that we can operate?

Dorian Broomhall:    I think that’s such a great question to ask as our world does, move, evolve, change, the way things worked even five years ago.  We do need to think differently about it.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, and Hospitals North is going to go through significant change over the next few years.  We’ve had the Commission of Inquiry; the outcomes of that are going to come through.  What people need at the moment, I think, is strong, visible leadership and compassion, but then we’ve also got efficiencies that we’re going to need to build in in our – in the way we operate over the next few years while making sure we deliver the best services we can.  So it’s a whole complexity of things that we need to do and it’s – that’s where, I suppose, my leadership experience comes into supporting everybody to move forward.

Dorian Broomhall:    This is a fairly frank question, but I imagine that there’ll be a few people, when you came into this role, that will be going, what on earth is someone who comes with the experience in police officer turning up to run Hospitals North and the primary care that we operate for a significant part of the Tasmania community?  I can only imagine that there’d be all sorts of background conversations that might have gone on with all of that.  What was it like turning up on day one?

Fiona Lieutier:          Turning up on day one was rather daunting.  I’m not unfamiliar with hospitals.  I’ve been in hospitals, working in hospitals, obviously very short term as a police officer but very familiar with emergency departments in terms of the adrenalin and the rush and the distress of patients.  So I don’t have the clinical understanding, I don’t – I’m going to learn the administration, but the things that I do have is I have a strong willingness to learn, a desire to make things the best they can be for my staff and the community.  

I’ve worked in a number of areas of the northern regions, so I know what it’s like to live and work in the remote communities.  I know what it’s like to live and work in some of the communities that struggle.  I’ve worked in St Helens, St Mary’s, George Town, and in all those environments I’ve had involvement, at arm’s length, but with hospitals.  My children – one went to university in Launceston, the other’s a lawyer in Launceston, having just – he moved on Sunday to Katherine in the Northern Territory.  So my family’s here and I want to make sure that they’ve got the best service, and medical services, that they possibly can.  

I think the culture of policing, we’re trained from the moment we enter the police academy, in leadership.  How to lead people, how to deal with stressful situations, how to remain calm when the world around you is turning to chaos.  I think they’re the things that will bring benefit to Hospitals North in terms of the culture – or public health, wherever I happen to be in the Health Department – they’re the things – I’m a steady, calm person, supportive of my staff, want the best, want excellence, and I think they’re the things that I transition across from police.  

The other interesting part of that is people ask me why I left police and I actually don’t see that I left police.  I didn’t leave police because I was unhappy; I actually really enjoyed the job that I was doing.  It’s just I was offered another opportunity to lead in a different environment and I took that and enjoyed it and obviously got the rungs on the Board, in terms of delivering results, and that’s what motivates me.

Dorian Broomhall:    There’s something that I’ve observed in your leadership through the work that you’re doing at Public Health and through some of the things that I’ve been exposed to, watching you in action to an extent.  There’s something that a couple of our recently departed leaders talk about a little bit about as well and it is this projection of calm and steady.  I think that’s something that we don’t talk about enough as being a trait of a leader.  It’s not always easy to adopt that state of calm and steady and patience and curiosity when there’s a lot going on.  We had a number of people that we’ve spoken to actually say, yeah, that’s something that we do deliberately because it’s important.  

Is that something that you think about?  Because we do often see these leaders who just – we just look at and go, wow, you must be so stressed, and they’re projecting stress.  They’re clearly overwhelmed with how much they’ve got to do and then that filters out around them to everybody else, right?  

Fiona Lieutier:          I think as a leader it’s really important – and it doesn’t matter what level you are in an organisation – it’s really important to have safe people that you can vent to and I think that helps with maintaining calmness, so you know that it’s really important that I remain calm.  For me personally, I need to remain calm so I can think clearly.  If I don’t remain calm, then there’s a risk that I won’t make good decisions.  I think that’s probably something that I’ve learnt over a very long period of time, partly because of some of the things that I’ve had to be involved with in my career.  

You can’t let your emotions take over sometimes, but you need to have that safe space where you can.  I think that’s the key to being a good leader, is having that ability to know that the support’s around, that you can tap into those supports, whether they’re professional supports or just knowing you can hop on to the phone to a friend or a trusted colleague and say, I’ve just dealt with this.  That was a stressful thing for me.  Do you mind if I talk to you about it?  

Sometimes the person that you want to talk to might not be the right person because it might be triggering for them as well, so you need to have that consideration.  So I’m very lucky that I’ve – and that’s partly because of my background.  I know that I can ring people, pretty much anywhere in government, and outside, if I need to talk through something.  So I’ve built my own little support network, so to speak.  Having said that, I know that I could probably ring anybody in the Senior Executive of the Department of Health if I needed to vent or run something past them and I would feel quite safe in doing that.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah, that’s great.  I think that there’s a number of key learnings in that around surrounding yourself and identifying the people, no matter where they might be, that are the people that you can run things by or, as you say, occasionally vent.  We all need to do it; it’s just part of life right?

Fiona Lieutier:          It is.  

Dorian Broomhall:    Finding the safe and appropriate people to be able to have that conversation with; I think that’s a – yeah – it’s a really good way of looking at it.  

Fiona Lieutier:          You’ve got to be constructive too when you do that sort of thing.  You need to balance what your thinking is and not be overly critical of yourself or of others either in doing it.  You can be frustrated but sometimes being frustrated you just need to keep that to yourself.  

Dorian Broomhall:    As you’ve come in to the Hospitals North environment, you’ve come in at a time where some really great work has already been kicked off by the former Chief Executive, Jen Duncan, who was here for – sadly not as long as many of us would’ve liked.  Having said that, I think she’s absolutely left her mark in the work that she’s begun.

Fiona Lieutier:          Absolutely.

Dorian Broomhall:    Some of the work that we’re looking at for the entire organisation, sort of running in parallel with some of that work I think, and we – I think it’s important that we start to try and find ways that we can operate as a single entity as best we possibly can, noting that no matter where you are in Tasmania, you should expect the same level of care, and I think that’s really important to note.  

That word, care, is one that we really want to put at the forefront of all of the work that we do as we start to think about these values of compassion, accountability, respect and excellence.  Now you’ve come into an environment where those values have been adopted for around six months or so, maybe a little bit longer.  What have you noticed since you’ve come in around those values – the four care values if you like? 

Fiona Lieutier:          The four care values are – they resonate.  They resonate with the community and they resonate with the staff.  We’ve still got challenges ahead of us.  Not everybody’s adhering to the values, so we need to make sure that people are accountable to those values, but also that they live them and breath them and they value the values and the purpose that they’re there for.  We want everybody to strive for excellence.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a cleaner or you’re a neurosurgeon; you have excellence in the role that you do and that’s what we want from our people.  

We want people to have compassion, no matter who they’re dealing with, whether it’s with a member of the public that’s a patient, a family member, but just as importantly, each other.  So that’s one of the things that I think we’ve – we’ve still got a bit of work to do within Hospitals North, is our respect and compassion for each other, and holding people accountable, but more importantly, holding ourselves accountable.  

I can hold people accountable.  I need to hold myself accountable and I need to recognise when I aren’t living up to the values, but likewise, I need to hold everybody else accountable for living up to the values that we have in place.  Those values were work that Jen did through the Studer Huron Group and we’re continually working with the Studer Huron Group, even though Jen has departed, but her legacy lives on through that and obviously is being taken throughout the rest of the organisation, which is really fantastic.

Dorian Broomhall:    We’ve talked about the calling out of things when perhaps they’re not so good.  Equally or if not more important, I think, is recognising when things are great and people are living and breathing the values as they say.  What’s our approach there?  What are we doing to call that out?

Fiona Lieutier:          Well, for a start, here in Hospitals North, our Executive here have thank you cards.  So we send them – they’re designed to go out to community members but we also send them to our staff.  We’ve got our newsletter where we call out excellent behaviour, or excellent, I suppose, recognition.  We’ve also in our monthly accountability meetings – we identify three people from each area that need to be acknowledged or recognised for their good work.

That’s either done by myself or their direct managers or their clinical or nursing directors, but if you do great work Dorian, I should be – it shouldn’t matter whether it’s me or – anyone can say, that was great, what you just did Dorian; I really appreciated it.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s somebody senior to you or junior to you, I think that is really important that we all do it for each other.

Dorian Broomhall:    There’s something in that that’s really important and I think that we forget that in this discourse of leadership and the leader needs to be doing this and the leader needs to be doing that, when’s the last time you said thank you to your boss?  Or when’s the last time that you paid your manager a compliment; said, gee, that was great that you did that, or, I got this great feedback about you.  That just…

Fiona Lieutier:          No, it’s…

Dorian Broomhall:    Or when for you, as the leader of the organisation, when’s the last time perhaps someone’s given you that, that feedback?  Doesn’t tend to happen as often.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, it doesn’t happen as often does it?  It’s a good reflection isn’t it?  I work for really good people and they deserve that recognition from me and others at my level.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah.  I think it’s something I’ve noticed and tried to do differently, because certainly we – I’ve got a very good relationship with my direct manager and I like to, where I can, acknowledge and say thank you and pay that forward.  I do notice that that response is sometimes a little bit surprised.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, it’s interesting.  I remember a few years ago, quite a few years ago now, that somebody said to me, the further up - you get up, the less acknowledgement or recognition you get when you do good work.  It’s just expected that you do it.  But we do have that responsibility and it’s probably a good reminder for me to say thank you to some of the people that support me from above. 

Dorian Broomhall:    Something that often we have observed is missing from our senior leaders is that ability to role model vulnerability, or the ability to, as you’ve just described, put your hand up when you’re actually – something isn’t going very well, because we’ve got this – we need to be, as we talked about, calm and collected and all those things and very professional.  Yes, that’s important and sometimes just having that vulnerability there, I think is often the way – it’s the way in for people to go, oh, you’re actually a real person.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    You’ve got kids, as you’ve talked about.  Guess what?  You’ve got all the home things that you need to think about.  You’ve got to go to the shops, got to make dinner, normal person, right?

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah, yeah.  My kids are a bit older now but yeah, I’ve worked while my kids were growing up and put them through school like every – most people do with their families, but I think it’s important for leaders to have that edge of vulnerability and to be open and transparent, because it allows everybody else to do the same and realise that they don’t have to be stoic or – all the time.  We all need to get advice from other people, we all need to put our hand up if there’s something we can’t do, or we can do it; we just need a little bit of extra support or help, or advice to work our way through something.

Dorian Broomhall:    You’re at such a starting point of having an organisation where people are safe, whether you want to [unclear] or not, but having a leader that puts their hand up and owns their mistakes is the self‑accountability that you’re talking about.  Oh yeah, I got that wrong.  

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:    It’s a really challenging thing from my perspective, looking at culture holistically in the organisation.  I know we need more of that; how do I nudge that to happen?

Fiona Lieutier:          It’s about teamwork.  So everybody will make a mistake.  There’s no – it’s human nature.  Nobody is perfect, although some people might like to think they are.  Nobody is perfect and if you ensure that you’ve got a good team around you, no matter what your position is or where you are, if you’re a senior leader or a junior leader or not even in a leadership position, you need to make sure you’ve got a good team around you that holds similar values and you get their advice.  

If you make a mistake it’s a mistake together, but your chances of making a mistake are a lot more reduced if you actually have that team beside you and taking that advice and listening before making a decision.  The risk of getting it wrong, is reduced significantly.  Having said that, sometimes you have to make decisions quickly, you have to take a stand that is against the advice and against everything, but if you’ve listened, you understand and know the risks that you’re taking when you make that decision.

Dorian Broomhall:    Just to finish up then, you said earlier that you expect that there’s going to be a fair amount of change for Hospitals North as well as the Department of Health, I would say, more broadly over the next few years.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yes.

Dorian Broomhall:    That’s probably not only okay, it’s probably important.  Where do you think we’re going?  What’s the journey, what’s the direction, what’s the heading?

Fiona Lieutier:          If you look at the long term health plan, it’s through to 2040.  That’s our direction.  There’s so much positivity.  We’re going to go into a period where there’s going to be obviously financial efficiencies that are going to need to be made.  There’s other departments feeling that at the moment and obviously health will be impacted as well, so we have to work through that, but I think the opportunity to come together and work on a statewide basis is profound, and it’s there.  For Launceston we’ve got the infrastructure changes that are going to take place, coupled with the changes to integrated working with other areas of the state, that’s our direction.

Dorian Broomhall:    Heaps to come I think.

Fiona Lieutier:          Yeah.  We’ve got to reduce our length of stay for patients in the hospital, we’ve got to fix our access and flow.  We’ve got all those things that need to be fixed, but I think the long term strategic goals set us on a really fantastic path forward.

Dorian Broomhall:    Yeah.  Great, Fiona, thanks for chatting, thanks for the time and thanks.

Fiona Lieutier:          Lovely to chat to you any time Dorian.

Dorian Broomhall:    Appreciate it.

Thanks for listening.  I hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away and apply into your own work.  For more information about the care recognition program, visit the One Health Culture page on the Department intranet.  You can read the health workforce 2040 strategy, which Fiona mentioned, on the intranet as well.  Join me again, in our next episode, when I speak with Craig Jeffery, our Chief Financial Officer.