Paula Hyland - Chief Executive, Hospitals North West

In this episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall gets to know Paula Hyland, Chief Executive Hospitals North West. 

Paula speaks about how she learnt to exert influence as a junior speech pathologist on the North West Coast. 

She tells us how the network she has developed as she has worked in different areas of the Department supports her in solving problems. 

She talks about how she has approached managing the broad range of professions included under the banners of Allied Health and Mental Health.  

And she talks about using our CARE Values as a foundation for setting expectations and for recognising those who show exemplary behaviour.

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 is Dorian Broomhall and I'm the Manager of Culture and Wellbeing for the Department of Health here in lutruwita Tasmania. For this episode I got to know Paula Hyland, the Chief Executive of Hospitals North West.

In our conversation, Paula speaks about starting out as a junior speech pathologist on the North West coast, and learning to influence and collaborate without positional authority.

She talks about the complexity of managing the broad and diverse range of professions included under the banners of allied health and mental health.

She tells us how working in various roles across the department has given her networks that she can lean on to help solve problems, and she talks about using our CARE Values as a foundation for setting expectations as well as for recognising those who show exemplary behaviour.

We start every chat with the same question, so let's get into it. 

What did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Paula Hyland:

Oh, that's a really hard question. I don't know if it was true in kindergarten, but for a long time I did think I wanted to be a doctor. I have a family of nurses, and my mum had always convinced me not to do nursing.

There's actually literature out there that a lot of children of nurses actually do Allied Health professions or something else, so that's what guided me into Allied Health as my background. Yeah, for a while I did want to be a doctor, but I don't know if it was kindergarten.

Dorian Broomhall:

When did it change into what you ultimately chose? Did you go straight from school into training?

Paula Hyland:

Yeah, straight from school. I'm from the North West of Tassie, so there were limited options for Allied Health in the state. I had already applied to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and I'd also applied for medicine, and not a lot of people know, I actually got in on the second round offer.

I'd already flown to Sydney to sign into speech pathology, because my first round offer in UTAS was engineering, and I just couldn't see myself in the engineering space, so I had to make a decision.

One of those decisions was around the lifestyle. Was I going to be happy working Monday to Friday, or was I going to want to do all of the hours and spend what I thought was an incredible amount of time training? As it turns out, I've probably done that much training anyway, but you don't know that at the time, and that was the pathway, so I stayed with speech pathology, which I knew very little about.

Dorian Broomhall:

Well, I suspect there are many people that know very little about speech pathology. You've chosen that and then you've gone, "Okay, well let's go and learn." What kept you there after you started studying it?

Paula Hyland:

Speech pathology is really holistic and it's very communication based and it's about the whole person, and there are other Allied Health professions like that, but speech pathology was particularly appealing because of the way we interact and communications through your whole life.

It was development right through to ageing, so there was a lot to like, and there's lots of different aspects to it, and it was science-based, which I quite liked as well.

Dorian Broomhall:

You've gone on with speech pathology and you've begun that pathway of study. Where did the career go? Where did you start? What did you do?

Paula Hyland:

My very first job was in North West Tassie, in the Devenport Community Health Centre, as a new graduate speech pathologist, and I was there for about 18 months with a whole lot of other new grads, which was a fabulous time.

I learnt a lot about different professions, and then did what a lot of people do, and followed a partner to another state. I went to Melbourne and got an opportunity to work in a really big established, the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and got to work there.

I didn't have any of that pretext, so because I wasn't from Melbourne I didn't really know the gravitas of perhaps working at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, that there is, but really enjoyed my time there.

That's where my leadership part, I was only telling this story this morning. I became the work health and safety officer for the Allied Health floor and I credit that as my start into those other things, so I got to learn work health and safety.

I've always been interested in safety, quality, those types of things, and I really got to do that and got to learn about the other professions on the floor and got to meet the other managers, as a very junior person, because that's something you get to do.

I'm sure they shuddered when they saw me, because I was always about the electric cord hanging over the microwave door or whatever the work health and safety thing was, but I was regularly doing audits, following process, those types of things, and that appealed to me.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, this is an example of how you can do leadership I think at any level. That's fascinating though, seeing that the safety person was the way that you found yourself there.

Paula Hyland:

That's the way, yeah, I think speech pathology had different aspects, and you're a junior member and then you learn senior skills, and I saw it as just a slightly different way of learning different skills.

It wasn't positional authority or any of those types of things, that's probably one of the first examples of having to do something with influence and collaboration, rather than by positional authority.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, and it's interesting, those skills, they're really hard to learn.

Paula Hyland:

Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:

You came back to Tassie at some point?

Paula Hyland:

Yes, in 2004. I was away for a while. I worked in New South Wales as well, so I got some different experiences, and mum was faxing me job ads, to my workplace-

Dorian Broomhall:

Subtle.

Paula Hyland:

Yeah. The speech pathology manager job had come up in the North West and she said, "Why don't you throw your hat in?" As it turns out, they'd incorrectly advertised it as permanent when it was only a fixed term. I thought, "Oh, I'll do it anyway," so I moved back.

Dorian Broomhall:

You've been here for nearly 20 years since?

Paula Hyland:

Yeah, the Director of Health job came up not long after, as the first time ever in the North West, and I thought, "Why not put my hat in the ring?" So I did.

Dorian Broomhall:

I think that that's an interesting point, right, because Allied Health, I think the metaphor broad church gets thrown around quite a lot, but there's a lot of components to Allied Health. There's a lot of disciplines within that, that seem to have perhaps some similar ways of thinking, similar ways of approaching the work that they do, patients and care and all the rest of it, but it's far more diverse than any of the other areas.

Even medicine has all the subspecialties and nursing has all the subspecialties, but Allied Health is, how does it go being all grouped together, do you think?

Paula Hyland:

It can be really challenging, and I think it has a lot to do with the training. I talk about how nursing and medicine, you're actually a generalist first, and then you specialise. Allied Health specialise first, because we are an individual specialist, and then we come out and we're told we're Allied Health.

Even at uni we weren't talking about Allied Health necessarily, and I've realised now that that's probably because the term wasn't really being used in 1997. Then we come out and we're generally called Allied Health, and that's really hard to work out where you go with that.

Each of the professions has a really different philosophy of doing things, and cultural things that are ingrained in the training, that make things quite different and they're very, very diverse, more so I think than people think.

There's nothing more annoying for an Allied Health person, when you hear people talk about it, "Oh, you're just a physio." There's 29 professions under that banner now, mostly we've still got seven, between seven and 10 within the Health Service, but yeah, there's 29 all up.

Dorian Broomhall:

As a relatively young director then, in a new role, operating as a leader with a new term if you like, where everybody all of a sudden is starting to think about us sort of being grouped together, did those influence and collaboration skills that you learnt as a work health safety rep come into it? Or how did you go when you had that positional authority as well?

Paula Hyland:

Yeah, I had to do a lot of learning, and I had to distance myself a little bit from the profession I'd come from, because it felt like being the director you had to be from all professions, but none, so no preferencing or no seen to be favouritism.

I had a lot to learn about each of the different professions and how they operated, and not use assumptions. Because once you're in that role you need to actually find out, and I do like to know how things work and I like detail, it helps me explain things and learn as well about what they do, so yeah, there was a lot of collaboration.

Sometimes, and I've been told, perhaps you can be too collaborative, and you do need to at times make decisions, but you also had to respect the autonomy of each of the professions that had a regional manager, because the North West was a little bit different from the other areas at that time.

They were already managing across Mersey, North West region and Primary Health as a continuum of care service, and they had quite complex issues to deal with, staffing, retention. They had at least five budget lines to manage, really different.

Dorian Broomhall:

Between then, and starting that role and building that up and developing it over time, and as that service developed and changed over the last 15-odd years, more recently you moved into operating at some more senior leadership levels across the organisation more broadly, and I remember, I think the first time I came across you, you were acting Dep Sec of Community Mental Health and Wellbeing, and I know you've also been Acting Chief Executive Hospitals North, and possibly some others in there as well.

You were exposed to a few different parts of the organisation with a leadership lens that's even a broader church, right, how was that?

Paula Hyland:

Really good? I mean, it's funny, a colleague of mine once said, "If you can manage Allied Health you can manage anything," and there's a lot of components to that that's true.

I'd started out in the Executive Director Allied Health role state wide, so I had broader networks and I had no positional authority necessarily over the Allied Health space, it was much more professionally based, and that's where I learned a lot I think, around collaboration and influence and things like that.

When I was in the Deputy Secretary of Community Mental Health and Wellbeing, that was amazing. It's huge services, great teams, but incredibly diverse, and so that was a bit like learning again, all the Allied Health professions, learning again about the services and what their issues were, and the people in those teams at the top.

Yeah, you learned a lot about how they worked and operated, a lot of that. That role was very different, because there was a lot of aspects around the political side of things, and working more closely with the Minister's office, that I hadn't had that experience for, and still find a bit hard to this day. Yeah, no, it was really good experience.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, I think that, again, on the outside looking in, that portfolio looks particularly interesting to manage, where there's so many different streams of it, and the fact that it links in to our primary care. I would've thought that that would be fascinatingly challenging.

Paula Hyland:

We were still finding ways to bring everyone together, and the way we looked at doing that was through our quality framework and getting everyone on the same page around the consumer experience that we're all trying to build, and whether or not the consumer is a patient of the mental health service or of the breast screen service or a doctor or a nurse who's a consumer of the pharmacy service, we still had to talk to people and get them on, that consumer experience actually does apply to all of them.

That was the unifying approach, to work a little bit more together. Quality was my portfolio, even when I wasn't in the Dep Sec role, the Exec Director Allied Health had the portfolio of quality and supporting quality and bringing that forward in that group.

Those teams had a history behind them, they've been in, they've been out, they've been in. Yeah, and they just want stability and they wanted to be part of the whole health service and recognised for that, and I think that's something that we've really started to do.

That human nature around barriers and silos and things like that, that can go up, was something we just wanted to break down and be seen as one, which is exactly what One Health Culture is about.

Dorian Broomhall:

You've done, not quite the full circle, but kind of. This year you've taken up the position of the Chief Executive of Hospitals North West, and so you're back in your own backyard at a time where I think that it's really exciting.

There's a lot of opportunity and appetite for modernising the way that we do things, not necessarily in our normal professional sense, because I think that a lot of that continues to improve here, we continue to improve our clinical ways of working, following the latest evidence, all of that. By and large that seems to keep happening, which is fantastic.

All the other stuff, how we work with one another, how we talk with one another, the values that we bring to work, all of that, possibly needs a little bit more attention. How's that view for you now, as you sit in this position newly, because you've only been there a couple of months?

Paula Hyland:

Yeah, it's interesting, because going back into the North West, I had to be really careful not to use old knowledge of things that I'd had, and I was very clear with the team when I first, even in the acting role to say, "I don't want to use old knowledge, so I am going to be curious, I'm going to ask questions and I want to know how things work," so that I don't make a decision based on perhaps false assumptions or things that have moved on or that kind of thing.

I was really clear with the team around that, which I think has been really helpful. I also didn't want to use everything that's ever happened before. There's good reasons to have history and background, and that has actually been helpful, because there's been things where I've gone, "Hang on, that was an issue 10 years ago. Why have we not worked through that?" There's advantages and disadvantages.

Definitely, having had the statewide experience and having had the CMHW experience, coming back to the North West, it's very, I feel like it's a lot easier for me to say, "We're part of the whole system. Why aren't we having Ambulance here?"

I know who to ring, I've got the network now, which I think sometimes coming in, perhaps we don't explore those networks for even perhaps the higher level senior managers with the others, as carefully as we could, but I've developed them now because of that CMHW experience.

I can ring up the Chief Exec of AT, go, "Hey, I just got a heads up, so what are you thinking about this?" Or if I can use an example, "We're struggling at Rosebery, finding staff that can do community nursing and do emergency nursing." They're at the other end of each spectrum.

Talking to AT about community paramedics, because we're looking at innovative models. I've got networks that I can do that with, which has been really helpful. Or an issue where we have an incident where we need some support, I know who to ring in state wide Mental Health Services or that kind of thing. I don't feel like I have to do it all on my own and there's a great support base from the rest of the executive as well.

Dorian Broomhall:

How do you think those who might be aspiring to leadership positions, or certainly working in leadership positions already, in a service that at times can be tricky to navigate, how would you recommend that people go and create those connections?

Paula Hyland:

I think it's a lot about taking up opportunities, so things like what One Health is doing with the training opportunity, the networking opportunities just in that alone, so taking up those. Some areas are now wanting to look at leadership networks, or I think there are ways to do it, by just seeking it out.

People aren't going to come to you, I guess, probably is that one thing, and sometimes you might have developed that network. If you've been a clinician on the floor, you might've actually developed that network and you've got those people to go to, or, "Do you know who I should go to?"

From an Allied Health perspective, for example, our Chief Allied Health Officer, developing that kind of relationship with them, and then getting that support or asking, "How do I do this?"

Those people, they're usually very generous with their time when they can, to help people or to answer questions or to direct people to the right place.

Dorian Broomhall:

The opportunities are there if we so choose to take them, and I think that other point that you made, that you might've already made the connections, you just haven't necessarily realised that you've got them.

Something that we talk about through the work that we do, is the value of what we call non-transactional relationships. Relationships that you develop, just not because you want anything from them, just because you're curious and you're interested, and often you're actually developing those relationships through the work that you do, because we are a multidisciplinary organisation, you're creating those relationships and not even being aware that you've done it.

Remembering that, "Oh, I can call that person," or "Hey, I wonder what this person over here might think about that?" Being able to lean back into that, I think, yeah, it's important and perhaps we forget that, because waiting for the, "Oh, well, someone will just pop it on my lap and tell me exactly how to do it at one point," and I don't think that approach is quite right.

Paula Hyland:

No. I think sometimes too, we're very run by committees, but sometimes people don't get the chance to actually make themselves known to other people in the committees, and then they might find that they can develop a network out of a group they're on, or they might've joined a network like one of the clinical networks, and suddenly they've expanded their network and they've got other people they can link.

It's like, "Oh, I'm actually in the network with you. Could I come and meet you and chat about such and such, or hear from you?" I've had a staff member recently who I've known from another network, who's approached me to say, "Could we have coffee? Because I'd like to chat about how you got to where you are."

It's that opportunity, just taking them, not sure where they're going to lead. You don't have to have a plan, I think, but just going, "Oh, okay, that might get me out of my comfort zone," or "I might meet different people."

I had lots of opportunities around that. When I was in the director role in the North West, I did a project around model of care work for the whole of rehab for the state. Now, I didn't have any positional authority around that, and we built a network and consumers, and brought everyone into that.

I mean, that was way back a while ago, but that opportunity, and no one asked me to do that, I didn't actually get asked to do that necessarily. It was discussed obviously with my manager, and we agreed that we could give some time to that. Then, I ended up developing a network where I had people all around the state that I could talk to about rehab specific issues.

I'd only worked a little bit in rehab from a speech pathology perspective. I had some concept of it, but I learnt so much just from doing something different.

Dorian Broomhall:

We've got this purpose or mission statement, whichever you prefer to call it, of how we care for the health and wellbeing of all in Tasmania, and then building out those values of Care, Compassion, Accountability, Respect and Excellence.

How are you thinking about that purpose statement perhaps, but also those values and the implementation of those values, and perhaps the importance of those values to the North West?

Paula Hyland:

I think they're really important as a baseline foundation, because I think what we often don't have is something to say to people, "Well actually don't do that, do this." We haven't actually got anything to attach that to, and it looks like it's your own personal opinion sometimes, or what you might think is appropriate behaviour. What is appropriate behaviour, and what are the things that we think should happen in the workplace and shouldn't happen in the workplace?

Sometimes we don't explicitly do that, and I think the values give us that driver if you will, to actually sit down and have those conversations about what are the expectations of behaviour in the workplace for certain things, what do these things look like? What does it look like if I'm compassionate in the Cancer Care Service, or I'm compassionate in something else.

It might look a little bit different, but the value is still the same. I think having that there as the foundation to say, "Actually this is where everything's going to spring from," is really important, and I think it's something we've really needed.

Dorian Broomhall:

I think that's such a good point of going, let's stop talking about the reductive approach of you stop doing that or stop being like this or whatever, the remove, without that, well, hang on, what is it that we're role modelling? What is it that we want to be? What is it that we want to be known for, and what is it that ultimately our organisation should aspire to be? I think that's such a big point.

Paula Hyland:

Can I tell a story from a colleague of mine, and she'll know if she ever watches this? I told her only yesterday, that I tell this story. She and her husband went to a weed management session, from a land care group or something like that, so these are gardening weeds, and talking about that.

She said she had a real light bulb moment. Ever since she's told me that story, I had the same light bulb moment, and now this is why I tell it. She said, "In gardening, don't concentrate so much on getting rid of the things you don't want. You should concentrate more on the things that you do want to grow."

It was so, okay, and we often find, and when you feel like there are issues or there are people behaving not in the way that you expect, you end up spending a lot of time on that component, but we forget to do the other component of all the other people who are doing the things we really want to have.

It's the exact same thing, so I use that story, because I think that's a really powerful little short thing to go, "It's in gardening and we do it in gardening and in nature. Let's actually do it here."

Dorian Broomhall:

I agree. I think the gardening analogy is a really fast one, to get people across in this whole idea of going, "Why don't we do more of what we would like?" I think actually there's an important part of it too, in that in a garden you're never going to have no weeds.

Paula Hyland:

If you grow more of what you want, the weeds don't always get the things they need, and sometimes they decide they're going to go elsewhere. That's the same analogy. If you're moving in a direction and there's a lot of accepted things around behaviours or values that are undertaken, and that there's consequences or seem to be consequences for the things that don't happen.

People, if they don't like that way of working, they'll go and find somewhere else, potentially to work, and you'll start bringing in more people with the same ... But the diversity is important, and the hard thing is, sometimes the people who are wanting, perhaps may not behave in the way you expect. They sometimes have a point, and sometimes we listen to the noise and not actually what's underlying it, so that's also important.

Dorian Broomhall:

If we use this way of flipping some of that noise of, things need to be different, things need to be different. Okay, so what you're saying is, that you want things to be excellent. You want this place to be so good that it is just the best place you could be.

That's actually what you're saying, but the way that you're sharing that point of view, to get to excellence, it might be missing the compassion or it might be missing the respect. What you do with those people?

Paula Hyland:

It's difficult, because I think, I like to recognise good intention in most people, and their heart is big and their intention is good. Like you said, it's the method, of how they've been bringing it across. I think it's getting to know those people a little bit more and understanding where they come from.

Because, I have an example of someone I'm thinking of. When they want to have a conversation with me, and sometimes it can be a little bit difficult, they want to tell me things, so I've learned, if I ask a question, because I normally would ask a question or clarify or things like that. Not in a defensive way, but just to clarify, they get off their train of thought and then it escalates.

I've learned very quickly that they want to tell me things. Once they've told me it's like a big weight's lifted, and they're like, "Well, thanks for that." I haven't actually done anything. All I did was pick up the phone, answer it and listen.

Sometimes there's things I can take out of that and I'll follow up with them later, but I've learned that, it's one individual to another individual. I think it's learning a little bit about the person, learning about where that is all coming from, and not being reactive to every single thing.

Because we can dismiss people really easily, for the method in how they ... And this is something I've said to some of the staff, "If you agree our intentions are aligned, the method we can work on. Method and delivery and all that stuff, we can work on that, as long as the intentions are aligned and we're wanting to be in the same direction. Maybe we've got a different conversation if the intentions are different, but as long as you agree we're going in the same place, the method we can absolutely work with."

Dorian Broomhall:

There's so much in what you just said that's important for us all to know. There's two key bits that I want to pick out. One is, we often talk about curiosity, and you've referred to it a lot here, and the importance of curiosity and asking questions, especially if you're having a difficult conversation and going, "Well, don't just talk back, ask a question."

You've also noted, sometimes you don't need to ask a question, and that's all what that person needs, and so this links to the other part, and it's one of our principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, is that we make adjustments.

Adjustments can be anything, and adjustments can be simply how we interact with a person based on what we know about them and what they might need at that particular point. You can make adjustments to how you might operate, right?

Paula Hyland:

Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:

Your default could be to ask a question, but in this particular context you know that actually this person doesn't need a question, so I'm going to adjust how I operate to make sure that you're giving that person what they want, because you recognise that they are working towards excellence in some way, shape or form. Yeah, you just got a light bulb moment for me, in amongst, how do you explain that?

Paula Hyland:

Well, I'm going to credit that to Tapping into Talent. The SMHS, they had me speak to them about communicating with influence. It wasn't something I'd pre-thought before I went into it, and I did have to raise to them, that perhaps I had a little bit of an unfair advantage as a speech pathologist, because there's a lot of stuff around all the non-verbals and things, that we are a little bit more keyed into I suppose, from a speech pathology perspective, that are very helpful in that respect, but learning by doing as well.

In that particular situation with that staff member, I've learned because I did ask questions initially, where I wanted to clarify things, and then the tone escalated, and then if I was silent again, it would come back down.

I learned those things, and I've realised over ... And it's probably been a period of a couple of months, where I know now what I need to do. Like I said, I can still follow up with that person and do things outside of that, but those particular, where I get that phone call, where they just need to unload, that's the bit that you've just got to learn, I suppose.

Dorian Broomhall:

Again, that links to another one of those principles, which is how we choose to interact with one another, and that's all of those non-verbals, and actually tracking those. Because we forget to do it, we just listen to the words, or we might see the heightened, but you've also noted that, well, you've actually got choices there about how you respond to that, to help de-escalate that person.

Paula Hyland:

Yeah, well, you're already preparing your defence. I feel like a lot of people perhaps default to, and it's the same way we work with our consumers, and I've had a lot of experience and a lot of work with doing consumer, and being involved in some really horrible, terrible consumer complaints.

When you actually sit and listen, without going, "Oh, but that happened because of," which is our default, clinically. If you do all of the things around consumer complaints, those skills transfer to everyone, and if we were working better in that respect and talking to each other, listening and not actually feeling like you've got to defend everything straight up, and it's a lot about what you know would happen.

I've made complaints. I've had health experiences, I've made complaints. I haven't always felt that they've been listened to, but it taught me a lot about thinking about, "Well, if I was back in that situation and the patient's in front of me again, how would I feel and how do I want to be responded to?"

I want to be validated. People say that, well, it's true. You know that even if you have a complaint at the supermarket, you want someone to say, "Oh, look, I'm really sorry that happened." Actually, if you say that straight up, most of the time all your fire's gone. It's like, "Oh, okay, yeah. They said, sorry, it shouldn't have happened, and things happen."

Dorian Broomhall:

There's so much there, and there's two parts again I want to pick up on. The first one's a question, we're talking here about patients and patient interactions, which I think by and large, notwithstanding the occasional weed, we do that very well.

We don't do it as well with one another, how do we take that frame of how we might consider how we interact with our patients, to apply to each other better?

Paula Hyland:

Because there's a lot of skills, and I think there's still experiences that you would've had. I always think back to experiences that I didn't like. What did I learn from that? Why did I not like it?

I had a senior when I was a junior speech pathologist, in another role, who was very detail oriented and dictatorial and all those things. I actually quite like detail and process, but that real micromanagement.

Had been set up from our first day, at my very first day in this new job, I'd turned up, I'd been working at the Royal Melbourne, I've gone to work in rural New South Wales, and the senior took me, introduced me to a patient, if I just share this.

He took me and into introduce me to the patient, and then while we're at the bedside said, "Oh, well you can do the swallowing assessment, I'll just watch to check that you're going to do everything correctly."

I thought we were going in to say hello to this patient, because they were handing them over, not that I'd be expected to perform in front of someone who I didn't consider my senior. I did it, but that set the tone for the relationship, for the nine months that I stayed.

You learn from those things, and you learn about how, when you do something like that, well I learned that I need to know what we're exactly going in for, what are the expectations, I guess, what is the role delineation, between her role and my role?

How could we have perhaps, maybe we should have had a conversation outside of that, before we went in there. There's things I certainly think she should have improved, of course, but there's things I think I learned from that, about how that relationship happened.

There was lots of other stuff in that nine months, that gave me an idea of, "I don't want to be like that, so how do I not do those things?"

Everyone's had experiences where they've had difficult conversations with a staff member that haven't gone well, and then other conversations where you've planned for the worst and in actual fact, none of that happened.

I think it's about setting the scene with people, and you can never do those difficult conversations on your timeline, that's probably one of the most important things I learned. You might shoot off that email about that issue, and that suits you to do it, but that might not be when they should be receiving it or when you should have really sent it or the same with a conversation.

It's your timeline, that shouldn't be the driving factor, and you should be checking with someone, because you don't know what's happened. If I give another example, you find out there's some behavioural issues of someone in an area, and then you go to the manager to talk to them about it, and then you find out that their family, well a close family member is dying of cancer.

You don't know what goes on in people's lives, and you don't know what they're bringing with them when they come in, and you going to have a conversation on your timeline might be something that sends someone, gives them a really traumatic experience, which they didn't need.

Dorian Broomhall:

If we take the frame, that you can't control anybody's behaviour, and a behaviour is up to someone to do regardless, and you take also the frame of being the leader, how do we cultivate the environment to enable more of the interactions that perhaps we would like to see?

Paula Hyland:

If I take the example, say of what we've just been doing with the North West exec team, and I'm sure they won't mind me sharing this. We set up regular meetings, first of all from me to them, so that we get to know each other and learn about their areas and their issues and risks.

Then we've done a workshop, where we actually went off site to get to know each other, and not just about that, but we've also done our team management profile, so we've learned about where people sit, whether they're extroverted, introverted, whether they like structural, flexibility, and there was a lot of aha moments I think, for everyone in the room, about how people work and their preferred styles.

It's a lot about getting to know people, so you can do that differently. Actually making that attempt to get to know people and not diving into, "I've seen all these wrong things, meetings." Coming back out of COVID and perhaps getting back in the same room.

North West has more challenges in that, because we're split across multiple sites, and so we're going to make more of an effort to actually be in the room together, and the first time we did that there was more interaction, a lot more interest.

You get to do things like grab a coffee with someone afterwards, or we all go to the tea room and grab something to bring into the meeting, and then you're having those incidental chats, and trying to be in some of the same spaces as each other at different times, so that we can connect a bit more.

That incidental, don't devalue the incidental, walking down the corridor conversation or things like that. It's not always about getting in front of the chief executive and trying to get money, it's those other things, about learning about that person or learning about the other things that drive them, so that they feel comfortable to tell you.

Sometimes I've started a conversation with, "Look, is there anything you want to share about, I probably do have to have a difficult conversation, is there anything you wanted to share about why we might not do it today?" Or, "Is it a good time to do it today?"

Because it is, but I was thinking before when you said, the other thing that I've carried through with me for a number of years, and I can't remember where I got it from, was around the empathy bank account.

If you haven't put in the time to celebrate, congratulate and validate people's things, then you can't possibly sit down and have a conversation that's going to be really difficult, and it will only be perceived negatively if you do that. If you're only telling people negative, well then again, that's that garden growing. You're only going to get that, and it works with kids too.

Dorian Broomhall:

Absolutely. I think the key to the success for our implementation of values, right, is going to be not using it as a stick to call out behaviour that's not okay all the time, but it's using it as just that simple frame, that yeah, we celebrate the positives, but it's also a proactive approach to considering it in the way that you've described. I think it's brilliant.

Paula Hyland:

When I came to cover at the LGH for three weeks in December, so I hadn't done the Chief Exec role, so the LGH had already started on their programme and had their values already in. It was one of the easiest things to do, to actually use, even though I hadn't really done it before.

For example, daily executive huddles around operations. We'd heard a story about a staff member who'd gone above and beyond to assist someone who was in distress. On the phone, not their job, they're not a clinical person.

The first thing, I was like, "Oh, I really want to contact that person." I got her name, I sent her a little quick email saying, "That really exemplified the value of compassion. Great job. Thank you so much for doing what you did."

It was so easy, because the values were there, and I knew the behaviour was good, but perhaps I wouldn't have done that before, because I might not have had something to attach it to. Because I had the values there, it was really easy then to actually just shoot her a little email and say "Thank you for that."

Dorian Broomhall:

Paula, thank you, it's been a great conversation, and yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Paula Hyland:

No problem, thank you.

Dorian Broomhall:

Thank you to Paula Hyland, the Chief Executive of Hospitals North West, for taking time to speak with us and to you for listening.

I hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away and apply into your own work. If you're from within the Department of Health, you can learn more about our diversity, equity and inclusion principles by searching on the Department's intranet page.

Join me again for our next episode when I speak with Andrew Hargrave, the Deputy Secretary for Infrastructure.